# Raphael Warnock Democratic U.S. Senator from Georgia since 2021 and senior pastor of Atlanta's **Ebenezer Baptist Church**, the pulpit [[Martin Luther King Jr.]] once shared with his father. Warnock is Georgia's first Black senator, and his two runoff wins are the clearest evidence for the state's arrival as a battleground. ## Background Born in 1969 in Savannah, he grew up in public housing, one of 12 children. He graduated from Morehouse College (1991) and earned his M.Div., M.Phil. and Ph.D. at Union Theological Seminary, where he studied the Black church's role in social movements. His first book, *The Divided Mind of the Black Church* (2013), came out of that work; *A Way Out of No Way* (2022) is a memoir. Ebenezer named him senior pastor in 2005, and he has kept the pulpit while serving in the Senate. From 2017 to 2020 he chaired the New Georgia Project, the voter-registration group founded by Stacey Abrams. ## Elections | Election | Opponent | Result | |---|---|---| | 2020–21 special, runoff Jan 5, 2021 | [[Kelly Loeffler]] (R) | Won 51.0%–49.0% | | 2022 general, Nov 8 | [[Herschel Walker]] (R) | 49.4%–48.5%, no majority | | 2022 runoff, Dec 6 | Walker | Won 51.4%–48.6% | The January 2021 runoffs, his and [[Jon Ossoff]]'s, together gave Democrats the 50–50 Senate that passed the American Rescue Plan and the [[Inflation Reduction Act]]. The 2022 race against Walker, a Trump-recruited former football star, became a study in candidate quality; see [[2022 Midterm Elections]]. Warnock has now finished first in five straight statewide elections and raised more than $338 million since his first campaign. ## Record - **Drug prices.** The Inflation Reduction Act carried his $35-a-month insulin cap for Medicare and the $2,000 annual out-of-pocket cap for Medicare drug plans. His version for private insurance was struck by the Senate parliamentarian. - **Voting rights.** His first floor speech (March 2021) was for the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Both died at the filibuster. - **Housing.** He has sponsored bipartisan legislation to keep large private-equity firms and institutional investors from buying up starter homes. ## 2026 Warnock is not on the ballot; his term runs to January 2029. He has spent the cycle campaigning for other Democrats, including in Georgia, where Ossoff faces Republican [[Mike Collins]] (see [[GA-Sen-2026]]). He has declined to rule out a 2028 presidential run. Georgia Democrats increasingly treat him, not Ossoff, as the state's national prospect, while Republican strategists say a national run would revive old attacks, including scrutiny of his 2020 divorce. ## See Also - [[Jon Ossoff]] · [[GA-Sen-2026]] · [[Herschel Walker]] · [[Kelly Loeffler]] - [[Brad Raffensperger]] · [[2022 Midterm Elections]]