Georgia welcomes Biden back after midterms
President will speak at Warnock’s church after senator created distance for campaign.
ATLANTA — During the midterm campaign, President Biden steered clear of Georgia as Sen. Raphael Warnock, like many other battleground-state Democrats, tried to distance himself from the White House amid inflation and Biden’s lagging approval ratings.
Now, with Warnock having secured his first full term and Biden buoyed by Democrats’ better-than-expected election results, the senator is welcoming him back to Georgia and to America’s most famous Black church.
Biden is to speak Sunday at Ebenezer Baptist Church as part of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend after being invited by the senator, who for 17-plus years has led King’s former church. The White House noted that Biden will be the first sitting U.S. president to speak during the church’s Sunday morning services.
Senior White House advisor and former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said Biden will speak on “Dr. King’s life and legacy and ways we can go forward together.” She said he will emphasize voting rights and related legislation that has languished on Capitol Hill.
King, the civil rights leader assassinated in 1968, would have turned 94 on Sunday.
Biden also plans to attend the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network conference on voting rights in Washington on Monday.
The president’s stop at Ebenezer comes as he is trying to steady his footing after Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland announced the appointment of a special counsel Thursday to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents.
The venue is also notable ahead of his expected 2024 reelection campaign. He won Georgia in 2020 by fewer than 12,000 votes, and the state is expected to be pivotal again in the 2024 general election, along with the crucial battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona.
“Georgia is a good first stop for the president,” said Quentin Fulks, who managed Warnock’s reelection bid and is among the names being mentioned for a top post in Biden’s potential campaign.
Biden scored his narrow Georgia victory over Trump in 2020 by pairing strong Black turnout with a solid performance among moderate white voters who lean Republican but were disenchanted with Trump.
Georgia’s large Black electorate also makes the state crucial in Democratic primaries; Biden has recommended that Georgia be included as an early-voting state on the party’s presidential nominating calendar. Atlanta, meanwhile, is a finalist for the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
“We’ve shown that this will remain a winnable state for Democrats,” Fulks said. “It’s been done in a presidential, and now it’s been done in a midterm.”
Bottoms, acknowledging the importance of in-person connections with Black leaders and activists, said Biden planned to speak with civil rights leaders at the church. “There’s no better place to do that than at Ebenezer,” she said.
Derrick Johnson, head of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, said Biden had done a “good job” on civil and voting rights given the evenly divided Senate.
Democrats now hold a 51-49 majority, but it takes 60 votes to move major legislation such as the voting rights law named for the late Rep. John Lewis, who was a civil rights leader and Ebenezer parishioner — and Republicans aren’t on board.
“The Black community isn’t giving up,” said the NAACP’s Johnson, crediting Biden with using executive orders to increase federal authority over local jurisdictions to ensure they protect voting access for minorities. “But we need policy change that only comes through Congress.”
During Warnock’s recent campaign, he would barely utter Biden’s name, even when celebrating Democratic achievements such as the confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court. When he finally enlisted Biden’s help during the runoff campaign, it was to headline a fundraiser in Massachusetts without Warnock in attendance.
Fulks said the president understood.
“For us, it wasn’t so much, ‘Is President Biden popular?’ or ‘Is he not popular?’” Fulks continued. “It was keeping this race about Georgia and Sen. Warnock.”