Raphael Warnock has a message for Democrats — and a plan to be heard in 2028

As a boy, Raphael Warnock started offering a prayer: that God would guide his feet, order his steps and direct his path. Maybe, he says, it grew out of the verses in Proverbs that say pretty much the same.

Now that path had taken him to New Hampshire, the state politicians go to when they want people to start thinking of them running for president.

“I don’t have any kind of hocus-pocus, spooky spirituality. It’s a faith that’s grounded in real life. It requires analysis, deep thought,” the Georgia Democratic senator told CNN shortly after arriving. “It respects data and science and hard work, but beneath all of that is an abiding sense that I’m a part of something that’s bigger than me.”

“My prayer is that I can be used to do the most good with the gifts that I have,” Warnock said. “And I hope that at the end of the day, at the end of my life, I want to leave it all on the field.”

Warnock’s friend and fellow Georgia senator, Jon Ossoff, immediately shuts down all speculation about whether he’ll run for president. Warnock very much does not, other than to say that he wants to make sure Democrats get through this year’s midterms first.

He is making campaign stops to boost Democratic allies while test-driving a 2028 message that critiques both parties on faith and character.

“The Democratic Party’s like most old institutions. It’s slow to change. I feel that institutional inertia and I refuse to be bound by it, so I’m going to keep pushing this because what we’re faced with is so much bigger than party,” Warnock said. “Old-school politicians who’ve been at this for a while, they have a certain way that they’re accustomed to doing this. And that way doesn’t lead to a Raphael Warnock in the Senate.”

There are two dozen or more Democrats planning a presidential run or being pushed to consider one. But there’s only one member of the party who is the 11th of 12 children of two Pentecostal ministers in Savannah, a Black senator who unseated a Republican in a red state, who has staff who can rattle off passages from Isaiah from spending time around him, and who has colleagues asking him for spiritual advice.

“They ask me to pray, and some need more prayer than others,” he jokes.

As he spoke to CNN, he stood across the street from the City Hall steps where John F. Kennedy kicked off his presidential campaign on a cold day in 1960.

It was Warnock’s first time in New Hampshire. His day included a coffeehouse stop in Portsmouth, a lunch of barbecue chicken tenders at a firehouse, and an evening opening of a campaign office with people pouring into the hallway and out the backdoor of a space wedged between a consignment furniture store and a Brazilian jiu-jitsu parlor.

Crowds that didn’t look like his congregation back in Atlanta or sound like Georgia voters pressed in to hear.

“He was definitely connecting,” New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Ray Buckley told CNN afterward, noting that in his decades of watching presidential hopefuls make their pilgrimages to the state, “that’s not always a given in New Hampshire.”

“I think that there’s great interest in him,” Buckley added, “and the interesting thing, of course, is that there’s also great interest in Ossoff.”

Driving along the changing leaves and lakes, snacking on the lobster roll that aides picked up for him, Warnock was officially on the ground to campaign for House candidate Stefany Shaheen and Senate candidate Chris Pappas.

He ripped into tariffs as the biggest tax any person had ever put on the “Live Free or Die” state and spoke at length on how “Donald Trump has unleashed a kind of evil and wickedness into the ether.”

But he also told a story of Lyndon B. Johnson passing the Civil Rights Act and then telling Martin Luther King Jr. he didn’t have the power to pass a voting rights bill: “If the president doesn’t have the power,” Warnock says King said, “we’re going to have to go get him some.”

Warnock’s sense of fitting into something bigger, he said several times in New Hampshire, was reaffirmed by how he arrived in Washington: He and Ossoff winning runoffs the day before the January 6 riots at the Capitol, giving Democrats a slim Senate majority that they eventually used to pass an expanded child tax credit and to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court.

As a politician and a pastor, Warnock revs up crowds with his call to action, “Keep marching!” Most Sundays, he is back delivering his sermon at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in King’s old pulpit. But he’s had his own difficult time.

He has a biting joke about investigating Jesus for identity theft on the Senate floor (“I don’t know who these people are talking about”). He also senses such a deep ache in his congregation that last month he delivered a series of sermons on trauma, of people hit so hard over the last 10 years that “wherever I go, whether I’m in Georgia or New Hampshire, there’s always just beneath the surface, even in happier moments, this heaviness.”

Over breakfast in Portsmouth, Warnock said he’s had what he calls his own labors of despair living through these years of American politics.

“Any thinking person of faith living through a moment like this has some questions for God: ‘Why are we here? I can’t believe we’re doing this again,’” Warnock said. “And I’m comfortable there because as I read the scripture that actually puts me in good company with Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, a Jewish kid from Nazareth named Jesus.”

Warnock sees himself on a mission to redeem the soul of America — whether that’s on the Senate floor, blasting what he sees as Republicans using performative moments of prayer to cover for what he sees as immoral policy since “the prophets had harsh words for that kind of religion”; pushing Democratic leaders to reorient which candidates they invest in; or traveling over the final weeks of this election cycle to at least three of his party’s early presidential primary states.

“God is not a Democrat. And contrary to what people seem to think, God is not a Republican,” Warnock said. “God is on the side of that single mother who’s trying to figure out how she can afford daycare so she can go to work or get a job so she can afford a daycare in a country where we just spend enough money in the war in Iran to provide pre-K for every 4-year-old in America. I think God’s on the side of seniors who are having to decide whether they’re going to buy groceries or buy medicine.”

Told that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito writes in his upcoming book that the decision to legalize gay marriage was “perhaps the decisive point in our nation’s turn against religious liberty,” Warnock stopped and stared in apparent disbelief.

“What about slavery?” he said. “You know what I think is an insult to God? Any form of human domination over others.”

In Keene, Warnock smiled as he said he was making his high school English teacher proud by referencing Robert Frost’s two diverging roads to describe the choice he sees for the country in 2028. He’ll have to make his own choice, too.

Between a primary, general elections and runoffs, Warnock ran five tough, expensive, down-to-the-wire elections over two years in 2020 and 2022—first for the remainder of a term and then for a full one — which means his seat is up in 2028.

“That’s a moment, and I do think that ’28 will be a moment that’s even bigger than the election cycle itself,” Warnock told CNN. “I think it will be about the character of the nation, like what kind of country do we want to be.”

Most of the Democrats looking at running for president have standard lines about how they’re only focused on 2026. Warnock has his fallbacks too, in part around trying to reorient which candidates his party takes seriously, and where.

For months, he’s been pushing for more attention to the Mississippi Senate race and Democratic nominee Scott Colom, who is running against Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. He cites how there are more Black voters in Mississippi than in Georgia and said he tried to get donors to look at the race. He’s clearly frustrated that some of those making decisions write him off as a well-meaning leader with Sen. Chuck Schumer’s cellphone number but still a relative political newbie.

Warnock will go to Mississippi on Wednesday to campaign for Colom, but also to hold roundtable discussions with Black men.

Warnock walks into rooms with a politician’s ease and a pastor’s cadence. In Portsmouth, he told a boy with Down syndrome named Michael that they were both named after angels.

In Nashua, he told an older White woman wearing a Jesse Jackson ’88 button, which she got on the civil rights leader’s tour of the state, that she was coming to him with one of his idols. In Keene, he talked about the famous story of the rabbi who said that Jewish teaching boils down to treating others the way you’d want to be treated, and how that is what so many faiths have in common.

Pappas, who doesn’t tend to dominate rooms the same way, told CNN that what sets Warnock apart from the other potential presidential candidates who have come through New Hampshire is that the senator “provides a moral perspective that’s really important for our politics right now.”

“He achieved unbelievable victory in his two Senate races that he ran within just a few years of each other,” Pappas said. “People in New Hampshire know that example of being a coalition builder, of being a voice that matters right now.”

Some aides and advisers don’t want Warnock to give up his seat to chase this dream, hoping the analysis will lead to prayers that lead to him filing for reelection. Warnock said he hasn’t started having those real conversations with them, or with his family, including his two young children with his ex-wife.

“Look, I know that in a matter of months,” he said, “I’ll be in a race.”

拉斐尔·沃诺克从小就开始祈祷：祈求上帝指引他的脚步，规范他的行进，指引他的道路。他说，这或许源于《箴言》中那些表达类似意思的经文。

现在，这条路把他带到了新罕布什尔州，政客们通常会去这个州，让他们有机会让人们开始考虑自己竞选总统。

“我没有任何故弄玄虚、故弄玄虚的灵性追求。我的信仰植根于现实生活，需要分析和深入思考，”这位佐治亚州民主党参议员抵达后不久告诉CNN。“它尊重数据、科学和辛勤工作，但在这一切之下，是一种根深蒂固的信念：我是某种超越自身的存在的一部分。”

沃诺克说：“我祈祷自己能运用天赋发挥最大的作用，造福他人。我希望在生命的尽头，我能把一切都留在球场上。”

沃诺克的朋友兼佐治亚州参议员同事乔恩·奥索夫立即否认了所有关于他是否会竞选总统的猜测。沃诺克本人则明确表示，他首先要确保民主党人顺利通过今年的中期选举。

他正在四处奔走，为民主党盟友加油鼓劲，同时也在试探2028年的竞选信息，该信息对两党的信仰和品格都提出了批评。

“民主党就像大多数老牌机构一样，变革缓慢。我能感受到这种体制惯性，但我拒绝被它束缚，所以我将继续努力，因为我们面临的问题远比党派之争重要得多，”沃诺克说道。“那些老派政客，他们早已习惯了某种行事方式。而这种方式无法造就像拉斐尔·沃诺克这样的参议员。”

至少有二十几位民主党人正在计划竞选总统，或者被敦促考虑参选。但该党只有一位成员是萨凡纳两位五旬节派牧师的十二个孩子中的第十一个，一位黑人参议员，他在一个共和党占绝对优势的州击败了一位共和党人，他的幕僚们因为与他相处的时间长，能够背诵《以赛亚书》中的段落，他的同事们也经常向他寻求精神上的建议。

“他们让我为他们祈祷，有些人比其他人更需要祈祷，”他开玩笑说。

在接受 CNN 采访时，他站在市政厅台阶对面，1960 年一个寒冷的日子里，约翰·F·肯尼迪正是在这里开始了总统竞选活动。

这是沃诺克第一次来到新罕布什尔州。他的一天行程包括在朴茨茅斯的一家咖啡馆停留，在消防站享用烤鸡柳午餐，以及晚上参加竞选办公室的开幕式，人们涌入走廊，从夹在寄售家具店和巴西柔术馆之间的一个空间的后门涌出。

人群看起来不像他在亚特兰大的信众，听起来也不像挤进来听他讲话的佐治亚州选民。

新罕布什尔州民主党主席雷·巴克利事后告诉 CNN：“他确实与选民建立了联系。”他指出，在他几十年来观察总统候选人到访该州的经历中，“这在新罕布什尔州并不总是理所当然的。”

“我认为大家对他很感兴趣，”巴克利补充道，“当然，有趣的是，大家对奥索夫也很感兴趣。”

沃诺克驾车沿着变色的树叶和湖泊行驶，一边吃着助手们为他买的龙虾卷，正式踏上了为众议院候选人斯蒂芬妮·沙欣和参议院候选人克里斯·帕帕斯助选的征程。

他猛烈抨击关税，称这是任何人对“不自由，毋宁死”的州征收的最大税，并详细阐述了“唐纳德·特朗普如何将某种邪恶和罪恶释放到空气中”。

但他还讲述了林登·约翰逊通过《民权法案》后告诉马丁·路德·金，他没有权力通过一项投票权法案的故事：“如果总统没有权力，”沃诺克说金当时说，“我们就得去给他争取一些权力。”

沃诺克在新罕布什尔州多次表示，他觉得自己融入了更大的事业，而他来到华盛顿的方式也印证了这一点：他和奥索夫在 1 月 6 日国会大厦骚乱的前一天赢得了决选，使民主党在参议院获得了微弱多数，他们最终利用这一优势通过了扩大儿童税收抵免的法案，并确认了凯坦吉·布朗·杰克逊进入最高法院。

作为一名政治家和牧师，沃诺克经常用他那句振奋人心的口号“继续前进！”来鼓舞民众。大多数星期天，他都会回到亚特兰大的埃比尼泽浸信会教堂，在马丁·路德·金曾经的讲坛上布道。但他自己也经历过一段艰难时期。

他曾就耶稣在参议院涉嫌身份盗窃一事开过一个尖刻的玩笑（“我不知道这些人到底在说谁”）。他还感受到会众内心深处的痛苦，以至于上个月他发表了一系列关于创伤的布道，讲述过去十年中遭受重创的人们，“无论我走到哪里，无论是在佐治亚州还是新罕布什尔州，即使在比较快乐的时刻，表面之下也总是笼罩着一层沉重的阴影。”

在朴茨茅斯吃早餐时，沃诺克说，经历了这些年美国政治的种种磨难，他称之为自己的“绝望之举”。

沃诺克说：“任何一个有思想、有信仰的人，在经历这样的时刻时，都会向上帝提出一些问题：‘我们为什么会在这里？我简直不敢相信我们又要经历这一切。’” “而我对此感到释然，因为当我阅读圣经时，我发现自己与以赛亚、耶利米、阿摩司，以及一个名叫耶稣的拿撒勒犹太孩子，都站在同一阵线上。”

沃诺克认为自己肩负着拯救美国灵魂的使命——无论是在参议院抨击他眼中的共和党人利用作秀般的祈祷来掩盖他眼中的不道德政策，因为“先知们对这种宗教有严厉的批评”；推动民主党领导人重新调整他们投资的候选人；还是在本届选举周期的最后几周前往至少三个民主党早期总统初选州进行竞选活动。

“上帝不是民主党人。而且，与人们的普遍看法相反，上帝也不是共和党人，”沃诺克说道。“上帝站在那些努力想办法支付托儿费用以便上班的单身母亲一边，或者说，上帝站在那些努力找工作以便负担得起托儿费用的单身母亲一边。在这个国家，我们花在伊朗战争上的钱，足以让美国所有四岁儿童都接受学前教育。我认为上帝也站在那些不得不在买菜和买药之间做出抉择的老年人一边。”

当沃诺克得知最高法院大法官塞缪尔·阿利托在即将出版的书中写道，同性婚姻合法化的决定“或许是我们国家转向反对宗教自由的决定性时刻”时，他停下脚步，目瞪口呆，显然难以置信。

“那奴隶制呢？”他问道，“你知道我认为什么才是对上帝的侮辱吗？任何形式的人类对其他生物的统治。”

在基恩，沃诺克笑着说，他引用罗伯特·弗罗斯特的两条岔路来描述他认为美国在2028年将面临的选择，这让他的高中英语老师感到骄傲。他自己也必须做出选择。

在初选、大选和决选中，沃诺克在 2020 年和 2022 年的两年间经历了五次艰难、昂贵且竞争激烈的选举——第一次是为了争取剩余任期，第二次是为了争取完整任期——这意味着他的席位将在 2028 年到期。

“那是一个重要的时刻，而且我认为2028年将会是一个比选举周期本身更重要的时刻，”沃诺克告诉CNN。“我认为这将关乎国家的品格，关乎我们想成为什么样的国家。”

大多数有意竞选总统的民主党人都有一套标准说辞，声称他们只专注于2026年大选。沃诺克也有自己的应对之策，部分原因在于他试图重新调整民主党认真对待哪些候选人以及在哪些地区认真对待这些候选人。

几个月来，他一直努力争取更多人关注密西西比州参议员竞选和民主党候选人斯科特·科洛姆（Scott Colom），科洛姆正在挑战现任参议员辛迪·海德-史密斯（Cindy Hyde-Smith）。他指出密西西比州的黑人选民比佐治亚州还多，并表示他曾试图让捐款人关注这场竞选。显然，他感到沮丧的是，一些决策者认为他虽然是一位善意的领导人，拥有参议员查克·舒默（Chuck Schumer）的手机号码，但仍然是个相对的政治新手。

沃诺克将于周三前往密西西比州，为科洛姆助选，同时还将与黑人男性举行圆桌讨论。

沃诺克走进房间时，既有政治家的从容，又有牧师般的语调。在朴茨茅斯，他告诉一个名叫迈克尔的唐氏综合征男孩，他们俩的名字都来源于天使。

在纳舒厄，他告诉一位佩戴着杰西·杰克逊“88”纪念徽章的年长白人妇女——这枚徽章是她在民权领袖杰克逊州巡回演讲时获得的——说她带着他的一位偶像来见他。在基恩，他讲述了一个著名的故事：一位拉比说，犹太教义的精髓在于己所不欲，勿施于人，而这正是许多宗教的共同之处。

帕帕斯并不像沃诺克那样喜欢主导场合，他告诉 CNN，沃诺克与其他来过新罕布什尔州的潜在总统候选人不同之处在于，这位参议员“提供了一种对我们目前的政治来说非常重要的道德视角”。

帕帕斯说：“他在短短几年内两次竞选参议员，都取得了令人难以置信的胜利。新罕布什尔州的人们都知道他是如何建立联盟的，他的声音在当下是多么重要。”

一些助手和顾问不希望沃诺克为了追逐这个梦想而放弃议席，他们希望分析结果能促使他们祈祷，最终促使他竞选连任。沃诺克表示，他还没有和他们，以及他的家人，包括他和前妻所生的两个年幼的孩子，进行过这些真正的对话。

“我知道，几个月后，”他说，“我就会参加比赛。”