Local Races

The eleventh of 12 children, he grew up in Kayton Homes public housing in an apartment with four bedrooms, a single bathroom and a set of World Book encyclopedias. His parents were Pentecostal pastors, his father straining to make ends meet by selling to a steelyard old, abandoned cars — but, “thanks to the assistance of the federal government,” Warnock recalls, “my family never lived outdoors, we never went hungry, and I never missed out on an opportunity to learn.”…

… [F]rom what is one of the country’s most important pulpits, Warnock has spoken out against voter suppression, the war in Iraq, the overincarceration of Americans but especially Black Americans, and the death penalty — “state-sanctioned murder,” in his words, and “the final fail-safe of white supremacy.” He wore a hoodie in the pulpit after the killing of Trayvon Martin. He was arrested at the state Capitol and again at the U.S. Capitol protesting for access to affordable health care. He hosted an interfaith meeting on climate change with former Vice President Al Gore. He was the spokesman and then the chair of Stacey Abrams’ New Georgia Project…

Warnock formally introduced himself to his new colleagues in his maiden speech in March of last year. The eleventh Black United States senator ever, he told them he has a seat that was held when he was born by a staunch segregationist. He told them his mother who “used to pick somebody else’s cotton went to the polls in January and picked her youngest son to be a United States senator.”

The speech is worth reading or watching or listening to in full, but Warnock landed hardest on the right to vote. “The right to vote is preservative of all other rights. It is not just another issue alongside other issues,” he said. “This issue — access to voting and preempting politicians’ efforts to restrict voting — is so fundamental to our democracy that it is too important to be held hostage by a Senate rule, especially one historically used to restrict the expansion of voting rights” — the filibuster. He called democracy “the political enactment of a spiritual idea: the sacred worth of all human beings, the notion that we all have within us a spark of the divine and a right to participate in the shaping of our destiny,” he said. He conjured the image of John Lewis on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the Bloody Sunday beatings. “And we in this body would be stopped and stymied by partisan politics? Short-term political gain? Senate procedure?”…

What Warnock’s done, though, is what he can, and also what is pretty much politically necessary in a hard cycle in a purple state. He’s focused most on nuts-and-bolts problems like supply chain issues and shortages of semiconductor chips and other “kitchen-table” concerns. As a member of the Agriculture Committee, the Commerce Committee, the Banking Committee, the Joint Economic Committee, and the Special Committee on Aging, he’s zeroed in on gas prices and the cost of prescription drugs and has positioned himself as a champion of the recently passed CHIPS and jobs and competition bills. At times bucking the Biden administration, he’s pushed for more student debt relief and teamed with Republican congressman Buddy Carter of Georgia to prevent the closure of a military facility in Savannah, with Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama to try to help the peanut farmers of Georgia and with Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida to earn increased funding to try to reduce maternal mortality. He has been measurably one of the more bipartisan members of the Senate.

“He is clearly trying to play this moderate role,” said Lawson, the head of a pro-Walker Super PAC. “But he’s still sort of lockstep with Biden and is seen that way. I mean, I think his voting record with Biden is over 95 percent.” It’s 96.2…

And then, of course, there’s his opponent… a former football star / ‘troubled individual’ imported from Texas by the GOP in hopes of exceeding the Crazification Factor:

Herschel tonight: “It’s time that we had leaders in Washington that gonna make the right leader for you. Because we brought people to the table, but all they’ve done at the table is just sit there. They haven’t moved the stick at all.” pic.twitter.com/ndm3siNdq2

— Ron Filipkowski ???? (@RonFilipkowski) August 18, 2022

This is really disgusting. On so many levels. Herschel is a terrible candidate, appears to be a bad guy too, but this blatant exploitation reeks to high heaven, as well. Painful to watch.

— Don Lewis (@DonLew87) August 17, 2022

Nothing much to see here

Just two good buddies, Rudy Giuliani and Herschel Walker, hanging out in September 2020 chatting about insurrections a few months before an insurrection ?? pic.twitter.com/Ze9KyQLCsc

— Qondi (@QondiNtini) August 18, 2022

No one is better at raising money for Raphael Warnock than Herschel Walker.

— BluePartyGuy???? (@IsMyHandleOk) August 18, 2022