WASHINGTON — Newly reelected Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia is promising to use his first full term to cut deals where possible with Republicans and deliver for his home state. But he’s adding a new role: unapologetic supporter of President Joe Biden.
Warnock, who tried to avoid mention of Biden during his hard-fought campaign last year against Republican Herschel Walker, said he looks forward to supporting Biden if the president runs, as he has indicated he will, for a second term in 2024.
Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., after an interview with The Associated Press on Capitol Hill on Feb. 1 in Washington.
“I’m not going to get ahead of the president,” Warnock told The Associated Press in a wide-ranging interview. “I think he will announce that he’s going to run and … I intend to support him.”
Warnock, 53, sidestepped questions about his political ambitions but indicated he was warming to his status as a leading figure among Georgia Democrats. He said he is lobbying Biden and national Democrats to choose Atlanta for the party’s 2024 national convention. And he supports a plan by the Democratic National Committee, championed by Biden, to make Georgia an early nominating state in the presidential primary process.
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Warnock has faced voters five times over the past three years in an unusual combination of primaries, special elections, traditional elections and runoffs. Now he can settle into a six-year term.
As he did during his last campaign, Warnock plays up the substance of his elected job — pushing Republicans in Georgia to expand Medicaid, capping insulin costs for diabetics on Medicare, working with Republicans on Capitol Hill to keep Georgia-based military operations open. That's in addition to his service as senior pastor at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church.
“I don’t want to give them too much credit, but it’s just obvious that they ran a very good campaign,” said Chip Lake, a top adviser to Walker’s campaign.
Warnock lamented some of the most searing attacks against him, especially tied to his position at Ebenezer, where Martin Luther King Jr. preached. Republicans hammered him for getting a $7,000-plus monthly housing allowance from the church. It was considerably higher than during his pre-Senate tenure and was a way for Warnock to continue to draw money from his pastor’s role while avoiding exceeding the Senate’s cap on members’ outside wage income.
“We followed all of the requirements, and we disclosed everything,” he said.
Lake said it’s a mistake to dismiss Warnock’s abilities simply because of how much Walker, a former football star and first-time candidate, struggled to navigate his troubled past.
Warnock’s winning runoff margin — just shy of 3 percentage points — was less than Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s nearly 8-point victory in November over Democrat Stacey Abrams. But the bottom line, Lake said, is that Warnock did the same thing Kemp did: “He figured out how to win his base and the middle.”
The senator insists that he always will “work with anybody,” even the most conservative, Trump-allied Republicans. He declined to offer details about his relationships with Republican senators, saying he does not want to hurt them politically.
“When we’re working together to get things done, sometimes that’s not all that sexy to people and all that interesting,” he said.
Warnock cited his collaboration with Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga., and the congressional delegation’s work on infrastructure, agriculture and in-state defense facilities. Warnock said there’s a group of senators from both parties who are willing to build on his measure that caps Medicare recipients’ monthly insulin costs at $35.
Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock defeated Republican challenger Herschel Walker in a Georgia runoff election Tuesday (December 6), ensuring Democrats an outright majority in the Senate for the rest of President Joe Biden’s term.
“We ought to be able to get that done for people on private insurance as well,” Warnock said, though he would not identify GOP senators who might help the effort in a chamber where it takes 60 votes to move most legislation.
Yet alongside his talk of bipartisanship, Warnock leveled a withering critique at Kemp and Georgia Republicans who have declined to expand Medicaid under the 2010 Affordable Care Act. The decision means hundreds of thousands of Georgians are not considered poor enough to qualify for existing Medicaid but also are not wealthy enough to use the health law's marketplace.
“It’s obvious that Georgia ought to expand Medicaid. I mean, it’s really obvious. And the only thing that gets in the way of that is politics,” Warnock said, noting that many Republican-run states are among the 38 that have expanded Medicaid.
Warnock said he has talked with Kemp since their respective victories but would not detail their conversations.
Warnock said he does “pinch himself” because of his role and status as Georgia's first Black senator. He noted that his office is located in an imposing Washington edifice named for the late Georgia Sen. Richard Russell, who was serving when Warnock was born in 1969.
“He got a lot of things done for Georgia. He did. But he was also a segregationist,” Warnock said. “I am inspired when I think about the arc of American history and what’s possible. We still have a long ways to go, but we’ve gotten a lot done.”
A brief visual history of how midterm elections changed Congressional control since FDR
A brief visual history of how midterm elections changed Congressional control since FDR
Since Franklin Delano Roosevelt's sweeping four-term presidency, every president has fallen victim to the "midterm curse."
The "curse" is considered political shorthand at this point—the opposition party to the incumbent leader will wrest control of the House of Representatives or the Senate from the leadership. In fact, the sitting presidential party has lost seats in the House in every single midterm election since FDR's first term, save for three: FDR himself in 1934, Bill Clinton in 1998 during his second term in office, and George W. Bush in 2002 fresh off a hotly contested victory in the 2000 general election. In each of these instances, the presidents had remarkably high approval ratings—around 70%—often due to historic moments that offered an opportunity for landmark leadership, such as FDR's New Deal, Clinton's federal budget surplus, and Bush's handling of the aftermath of 9/11.
There are a variety of explanations as to why parties often face defeat in the midterms after sweeping the floor in the presidential election. Voter apathy and presidential approval ratings play a large part, but voters are not the only ones who sway the outcome of elections. Midterm elections are susceptible to impacts from the re-drawing of districts and gerrymandering that may occur after a presidential election and can work to disenfranchise a party's voting block. This is not a phenomenon isolated to the U.S., either: The parties of political leaders across the globe tend to strengthen early in a presidential term before diminishing later.
With the 2022 midterm elections fast approaching, it can be helpful to look back at the past century of midterms and gauge what patterns may suggest an outcome to this year's election. Stacker used data compiled by The American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the U.S. House of Representatives to visualize outcomes of midterm elections on the president's political party in Congress.
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The President's party has only gained seats in the House three times since 1934
The incumbent party lost control of either the House or the House and Senate six times since 1934. Only three presidents—FDR, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush—gained seats in the House of Representatives for their parties at midterms.
In FDR's case, this was thanks to his swift decisions steering the country out of the Great Depression, including the New Deal and various economic relief measures. Clinton's second term in office marked the first Democratic president to gain a second term since FDR. Though his popularity was beginning to falter due to emerging personal scandals—including the Monica Lewinsky situation, which saw Clinton face impeachment for lying to Congress—it hadn't yet hit the low that would follow. Bush's midterms were a narrow race to win an easily swayed power balance, marked by gerrymandering and expensive campaigns that ultimately favored the incumbent party.
The Senate has faired similarly
Statewide Senate races are not impacted by redistricting but still often suffer the same outcome for the president's party. For most of the 20th century, Senate races were often won by the opposite party than the state in question had gone for in the presidential race. In 1986, for instance, the "mismatch rate" of U.S. Senate races was around 59%, meaning over half of states voted into office senators of the opposite party than they had voted for president most recently. This has waned in intensity recently—particularly during Obama's presidency—but still generally held. However, the 2022 election cycle may mark a departure from this tradition, with only 4% of registered voters claiming they planned to vote for a senator from a different party than they had endorsed for president.
Presidential approval rating is often the clearest predictor of seat changes
Midterm elections tend to be considered referenda on the party in power. As a result, the electability of Congressional members is increasingly tied to the public's attitude toward the president. Swing seats have consistently gone to the nonincumbent party when public approval of the current president is low, and the inverse when the public believes their administration is doing well.
Since FDR's presidency, presidents with a low public approval rating have lost an average of 37 congressional seats during midterms. Only two presidents—Bill Clinton and George W. Bush—have had a public approval rating above 60% during midterm elections; consequently, they have been the only two presidents in recent history to avoid the "midterm curse."
Voters may be motivated more to turnout when their party is not in power
Voters generally turn out in lower numbers for midterms than for presidential elections. In the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections, respectively, only 4 in 10 eligible voters turned up to the polls, whereas 6 in 10 voted in the 2016 general election. However, the drive to overturn the actions of an unfavorable president can be a powerful antidote to voting apathy. A good example of this was the 2018 midterms, in which, according to an analysis by Catalist, "young voters and voters of color, particularly Latinx voters, were a substantially larger share of the electorate than in past midterms." These voters were majority Democrats, voting in opposition to the Republican incumbent, Donald Trump. That year, midterm surge voting leaped up, and it was "clear that both mobilization and persuasion were critically important in producing this scale of victory for Democrats."
What does this mean for 2022?
In sum, the 2022 midterms will likely follow the patterns laid out here. All seats in the House of Representatives are up for the taking and a third of those in the Senate. President Joe Biden's approval rating—40% as of Oct. 20—is on the lower end of historical midterm rates for an incumbent president, suggesting that, if historic precedent holds, Republicans will gain seats on Nov. 8. However, some factors may exert outside influence on the midterm results.
The Democratic Party has been experiencing the same mobilization that spurred a midterm surge during Trump's presidency, this time regarding issues such as abortion rights and inflation. Voters in Kansas recently turned up in record numbers to vote down measures that would restrict abortion access; elsewhere in the country, local and state legislatures have taken up steps and earmarked funds protecting the right to choose in repudiation of the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade.
On the other hand, Republican-sponsored extremists are doing what they can to stem this tide, threatening election workers so convincingly that there is a feared shortage of people to work the midterms. Moreover, one recent poll suggests that Democrats' momentum may have begun to stall, particularly among women, who in 2018 turned out to vote in greater numbers than men
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