A pastor, a football star, and the battle for a key Senate seat
When Raphael Warnock was six years old, his mother discovered him preaching his heart out in his room, huffing and puffing as he tried to imitate the soaring cadences of revival preachers he’d heard at church in Savannah, Georgia.
Some 115 miles inland, a young Herschel Walker was also gasping for breath, sprinting down the railroad tracks near his house as he embarked on a rigorous solo training regime that would transform him and his life.
Raised in modest, Christian homes, both men harnessed an unusual drive and talent to achieve pinnacles of success – encountering hardship, losses, and racism along the way. Now, they’re facing off in one of the most important Senate races in the country.
That’s about where the similarities end.
Senator Warnock, whose narrow 2021 win unexpectedly flipped control of the Senate to the Democrats, is hoping to once again assemble a winning coalition of Black voters and white progressives who have dramatically shifted Georgia’s politics in recent years. As the senior pastor of the influential Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where he returns every weekend, he casts politics in moral terms, as the proving ground for his work in the pulpit.
Mr. Walker, a former University of Georgia football star endorsed by Donald Trump, has pulled with Mr. Warnock, despite facing a series of damaging personal allegations in the campaign. Most prominently, two women have accused Mr. Walker, who opposes abortion rights, of encouraging them to terminate pregnancies and paying for the procedure
