In the country which displays in its motto its total confidence in God, it is logically towards one of his most faithful servants that all democratic hopes are turned. In the November 8 midterm elections, incumbent Georgia senator Baptist pastor Raphael Warnock stood up to Republican candidate Herschel Walker, backed by Donald Trump.
Neither has reached the 50% majority needed to clinch a first-round victory. Warnock got 49.4%, against 48.5% for Warner, according to still partial results. Thus, a decisive second round for the future of the Senate will be played on December 6th. Because Georgia is what is called a “swing state”, a state capable of leaning, on its own, the senate on the red side or the blue side. Beaten in the House of Representatives, Joe Biden therefore hopes for his salvation in the victory of Warnock.
It must be said that Raphael Warnock has everything from a lucky star to the current president. In January 2021, his victory had already swung the Senate to the Democratic side, and it is therefore the same task entrusted to him this year. By the way, the 53-year-old man last year became the first African-American Democrat to represent a former Confederate state in the Senate. A spiritual disciple of Martin Luther King, Warnock took the political leap to defend his progressive ideas, undermined by conservatives: right to abortion and same-sex marriage, opposition to the free circulation of firearms, hostility to punishment of death… He therefore represents a heresy for the Republicans, who nevertheless cannot, as in the past, attack him on his skin color, since his opponent Herschel Walker is also black…
In 2013, he was chosen by Obama to pronounce the public blessing
Eleventh child, out of twelve, from a family of pastors, Raphael Warnock grew up in the city of Savannah, Georgia, before going to study at Morehouse University, the one that saw Martin Luther King pass as a student. Later, he will become a pastor in the same congregation as the civil rights activist, at the Ebenezer Church in Atlanta, where he still officiates every Sunday. And if he was noticed by the press in 2011 for his opposition to the execution of the African American Troy Davis, condemned without real evidence for having killed a Savannah policeman, it was in 2013 that he was known to the general public. He is indeed chosen by Barack Obama to pronounce the public blessing during the inauguration ceremony of his second term.
A fervent supporter of the first black president of the United States, Warnock went so far as to be arrested by the police for having silently demonstrated in the Capitol of Georgia his support for the implementation of Obamacare in Georgia. It was harder for him to defend, at the end of the year, Joe Biden’s balance sheet, when inflation within the state, at 12%, exceeds that of the national level. But the convictions of the man who organized, in 2019, in his Church, an interfaith meeting on climate change still have many faithful.