What you need to know about Raphael Warnock

Here’s more about the man, whose election, along with that of Democrat Jon Ossoff, who leads Republican David Perdue with 99 percent of the Georgia votes counted, would tilt the balance of power in the U.S. Senate toward Democrats. Warnock’s win alone narrows the Republican majority to just one vote.

Warnock, a 51-year-old native of Savannah, Ga., was raised in public housing as one of 11 siblings before earning graduate degrees. The connection between his work in ministry and policymaking was a clear one, he said in his campaign announcement video.

“Some might ask why a pastor thinks he should serve in the Senate,” he said. “Well, I’ve committed my whole life to service and helping people realize their highest potential. I’ve always thought that my impact doesn’t stop at the church door. That’s actually where it starts.”

At 35, Warnock became the youngest pastor of Ebenezer after holding leadership positions at churches in Birmingham, Ala., Baltimore and New York.

Warnock has always held fellow Georgia native King in high regard. One of his mentors at St. John Baptist Church was quoted as recalling that the civil rights icon was Warnock’s “ideal” — which is in part why he went on to attend Morehouse College, the historically Black men’s college that King also attended.

“Raphael has always been beyond his time,” the Rev. Matthew Southall Brown previously told the Savannah Morning News. “What I remember most about him was that Martin Luther King was his ideal. When he told me he got the position as pastor at King’s church, I said ‘Raphael, that is just the place for you.’ ”

In Birmingham, Warnock was ordained by the Rev. John T. Porter, a pulpit assistant of King’s at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. And in Harlem, Warnock was assistant pastor at Abyssinian Baptist Church, where King once spoke to an interracial group of clergy.

Political activism and ministry are intertwined in the Black church, and that was the case throughout Warnock’s career. That has meant over the years that Warnock has advocated for expanding Medicaid, the federal and state program that helps cover medical costs for those with limited incomes; expanding the Affordable Care Act; protecting the voting rights of marginalized Americans; opposing the death penalty; supporting abortion rights; and same-sex marriage.

He idolized King, sometimes mimicking the cadence and timbre of the civil rights leader’s voice, said people who knew Warnock as a child. Like King, he attended Morehouse College, a historically Black school in Atlanta. In 2005, at age 35, Warnock became the youngest senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, the spiritual home of King, which has for decades been at the symbolic center of activism in Atlanta.

Under Warnock, the church has continued to exist at the intersection of piety and racial justice. Lewis’s funeral was held there in July. And from the same pulpit, Warnock eulogized Rayshard Brooks — a Black man shot by police who encountered him sleeping in the drive-through lane of an Atlanta Wendy’s. Atlanta’s police chief resigned the next day as protests engulfed the city.

The biggest attacks on Warnock’s candidacy from his opponent and national Republicans were also tied to his activism and rhetoric as a pastor. An attack ad focused on a clip of Warnock preaching that it is not possible to serve God and the military at the same time. That’s a popular passage among liberal Christians who find many conservatives’ fervent support for the military to be in conflict with some Christian teaching.

Loeffler also accused Warnock of inviting Communist leader Fidel Castro to a church where he served in the 1990s, an allegation fact-checkers dismissed. Loeffler’s campaign also sought to tie Warnock to Jeremiah Wright through attack ads, in ways that PolitiFact described as “mostly false.” Such attacks prompted backlash from other Black church leaders.

Warnock’s candidacy flew somewhat under the radar in the lead-up to the 2020 election, and his political profile was lower going into that race than that of Ossoff, who had competed in big races before this one.

Warnock received less than 33 percent of the vote in the November special election featuring 20 candidates. The two leading GOP candidates — Loeffler and Rep. Douglas A. Collins (R.-Ga.) — earned nearly 46 percent of the vote combined. No one reaching 50 percent meant that, under Georgia law, that race and the race between Ossoff and Perdue would go to runoffs.

But Warnock’s race began to attract far more headlines given how contentious it became and how much was at stake. Democrats failed to overtake Republicans for the majority in the Senate despite high expectations in the November elections, and a majority-GOP Senate stood to block a significant amount of President-elect Joe Biden’s agenda.

That a Black Democrat will represent Georgia is proof of changing demographics and intense organizing in that state, said Keneshia Grant, a political-science professor at Howard University, speaking on the day of the runoff.

“What this should be understood as is a signal of what is coming — that the Georgia of my mother’s youth is not the Georgia of today,” she said.

The Warnock/Loeffler race also appeared to be a microcosm of many of the larger culture and political wars being fought in politics across the country. Warnock sought to replace a lawmaker who has closely aligned herself to President Trump. Trump lost the state.

Trump’s unpopularity with many Georgia voters — many of whom remain upset about the 2018 defeat of Stacey Abrams, who hoped to become America’s first Black female governor — helped drive support to Warnock, who was endorsed by Abrams.

Warnock ran on a progressive platform, especially supporting criminal justice reform, expanding health-care access and improving the economy and job market for groups that are often left out of economic booms. And the minister’s views on these issues are deeply shaped by his religious faith, he has said.

Historically, when many people think of religious voters, they think about the religious right, a group of mostly White evangelicals who back Republican candidates. But Warnock has consistently argued that his Christian faith moves him to support liberal causes like expanding health care, increasing the minimum wage, slowing down climate change and expanding voting rights.