2026-10-11T10:00:44.536Z / 美国有线电视新闻网（CNN）
新罕布什尔州纳舒厄——
拉斐尔·沃诺克小时候就开始祈祷：愿上帝指引他的脚步，安排他的行程，指明他的道路。他说，这或许源自《箴言》里那些大意相同的经文。
如今，这条道路将他带到了新罕布什尔州——这个州是政客们希望民众开始考虑他们参选总统时会前往的地方。
“我没有什么玄乎、诡异的灵性之说。我的信仰扎根于现实生活，需要分析和深入思考。”这位佐治亚州联邦民主党参议员在抵达后不久对CNN表示，“它尊重数据、科学和辛勤付出，但这一切背后都有一种持久的信念：我是比自身更宏大的事物的一部分。”
“我的祈祷是，我能善用自己拥有的天赋去做最多的善事。”沃诺克说，“我希望在一天结束时，在生命的尽头，我能全力以赴，不留遗憾。”
沃诺克的好友、同为佐治亚州参议员的乔恩·奥索夫当即驳斥了所有关于他是否会参选总统的猜测。沃诺克本人则完全不谈论此事，只表示他首先要确保民主党人度过今年的中期选举。
他一边为民主党盟友进行竞选造势，一边试演2028年的竞选纲领，在信仰和品格问题上对两党都提出批评。
“民主党和大多数老牌机构一样，变革缓慢。我感受到了这种体制性的惰性，但我拒绝被其束缚，所以我会继续推动这项工作，因为我们面临的挑战远比政党本身更重要。”沃诺克说，“那些从政多年的老牌政客，有一套他们习以为常的行事方式，而这种方式无法让拉斐尔·沃诺克这样的人进入参议院。”
目前有二十多名民主党人计划参选总统，或被敦促考虑参选。但民主党中只有这样一位议员：他是佐治亚州萨凡纳市两名五旬节派牧师的12个孩子中的第11个；是在红州击败共和党人当选的黑人参议员；他的团队成员会因为长期跟在他身边而能随口背出《以赛亚书》中的段落；甚至还有同事会向他寻求精神方面的建议。
“他们请我祈祷，有些人需要的祈祷比其他人更多。”他打趣道。
在接受CNN采访时，他站在市政厅台阶对面——1960年的一个寒冷日子里，约翰·F·肯尼迪正是在这里启动了他的总统竞选活动。
这是沃诺克第一次来到新罕布什尔州。当天的行程包括在朴茨茅斯的一家咖啡馆停留、在消防站享用烧烤鸡肉三明治午餐，以及当晚在一家竞选办公室开幕活动上发表讲话——当时人们挤满了走廊，还有人从一家寄售家具店和巴西柔术馆之间的狭小空间的后门涌了进来。
现场的人群与他在亚特兰大的教会会众、或是佐治亚州的选民都不太一样，但他们都挤过来聆听他的讲话。
“他确实做到了共情连接。”新罕布什尔州民主党主席雷·巴克利事后对CNN表示，他补充道，在自己数十年观察总统候选人前来该州“朝圣”的经历中，“这种情况在新罕布什尔州并不总是能见到”。
“我认为人们对他抱有极大的兴趣。”巴克利补充道，“当然有趣的是，人们对奥索夫也同样充满兴趣。”
驱车穿行在渐变色的秋叶和湖泊之间，吃着助手为他买的龙虾卷，沃诺克正式开启了为众议院候选人斯特凡尼·沙欣和参议院候选人克里斯·帕帕斯的竞选活动。
他抨击关税是有史以来对“不自由，毋宁死”州民众征收的最重税赋，并详细阐述了“唐纳德·特朗普如何将一种邪恶与恶毒散播到了空气中”。
但他也讲述了林登·B·约翰逊签署《民权法案》后，告诉马丁·路德·金他没有权力通过投票权法案的故事：“‘如果总统没有权力，’沃诺克引用金的话说，‘那我们就得去给他争取到权力。’”
沃诺克在新罕布什尔州多次提到，他抵达华盛顿时的经历再次坚定了自己属于更宏大事物的信念：他和奥索夫在国会山1月6日骚乱的前一天赢得了决选，为民主党带来了微弱的参议院多数席位——民主党最终利用这一优势通过了扩大儿童税收抵免法案，并确认凯坦吉·布朗·杰克逊出任最高法院大法官。
作为一名政客和牧师，沃诺克用“继续前进！”的行动号召调动人群情绪。大多数周日，他都会回到亚特兰大的埃比尼泽浸信会教堂，站在金曾经用过的布道坛上传道。但他自己也经历过一段艰难时光。
他曾在参议院 floor 拿耶稣被调查身份盗窃开玩笑（“我不知道这些人在说什么”）。他也感受到了教会会众深处的痛楚——上个月，他发表了一系列关于创伤的布道，谈及过去十年里人们遭受的沉重打击，“无论我走到哪里，无论是在佐治亚州还是新罕布什尔州，哪怕是在快乐的时刻，表面之下始终萦绕着一种沉重感”。
在朴茨茅斯的早餐会上，沃诺克表示，这些年经历美国政治，他也有过自己所谓的“绝望的挣扎”。
“任何有信仰的思考者，在经历这样的时刻时，都会向上帝提出一些问题：‘我们为何在此？我不敢相信我们又在重蹈覆辙。’”沃诺克说，“但我对此感到心安，因为我阅读经文时发现，我与以赛亚、耶利米、阿摩司，还有拿撒勒的犹太少年耶稣都处在同一条阵营里。”
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 floor 上抨击他所认为的共和党人用表演式的祈祷来掩盖不道德的政策，因为“先知们对这种宗教向来言辞犀利”；还是推动民主党领导人重新调整他们支持的候选人；或是在本次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开展活动。
“上帝不是民主党人。而且与人们的普遍认知相反，上帝也不是共和党人。”沃诺克说，“上帝站在那些试图负担得起日托费用以便上班或找工作的单身母亲一边——在这个国家，我们在伊朗战争上的花费足够为全美所有4岁儿童提供学前教育。我认为上帝站在那些不得不在购买食品杂货和购买药品之间做出选择的老年人一边。”
当被问及最高法院大法官塞缪尔·阿利托在即将出版的书中写道，同性婚姻合法化是“我国转向反对宗教自由的决定性节点”时，沃诺克停下脚步，面露难以置信的神情。
“那奴隶制呢？”他说，“你知道什么是对上帝的亵渎吗？任何形式的人类对他人的支配。”
在基恩，沃诺克笑着说，他用罗伯特·弗罗斯特笔下那两条分岔的道路来形容2028年美国面临的选择，这一定能让他的高中英语老师感到骄傲。而他自己也必须做出选择。
在初选、大选和决选之间，沃诺克在2020年和2022年的两年间参加了五场艰难、耗资巨大且结果胶着的选举——先是完成剩余任期，随后竞选完整任期——这意味着他的参议员席位将在2028年迎来改选。
“那将是一个关键时刻，我确实认为2028年将是一个比选举周期本身更重大的时刻。”沃诺克对CNN表示，“这将关乎国家的品格，关乎我们想要成为什么样的国家。”
大多数考虑参选总统的民主党人都只会说他们只专注于2026年的选举。沃诺克也有自己的备选方案，部分内容围绕着重新调整民主党重视哪些候选人以及在哪些州投入资源。
数月来，他一直呼吁人们更多关注密西西比州参议院选举和民主党候选人斯科特·科洛姆——他正在挑战辛迪·海德-史密斯参议员。他指出密西西比州的黑人选民数量比佐治亚州还多，并表示他曾试图让捐助者关注这场选举。显然，他对一些决策者感到不满，这些人认为他只是个善意的领导人，有查克·舒默的手机号，但相对来说还是政坛新手。
沃诺克将于周三前往密西西比州，为科洛姆助选，同时与黑人男性举行圆桌讨论。
沃诺克走进会场时带着政客的从容和牧师的语调。在朴茨茅斯，他告诉一名患有唐氏综合征的男孩迈克尔，他们俩都是以天使的名字命名的。
在纳舒厄，他告诉一位佩戴着1988年杰西·杰克逊竞选徽章的年长白人女性——这枚徽章是她在这位民权领袖到访该州时获得的——她带来了他的一位偶像。在基恩，他谈到了著名的拉比故事：犹太教义的核心就是己所不欲勿施于人，而这也是众多信仰的共同之处。
不太擅长活跃会场气氛的帕帕斯对CNN表示，沃诺克与其他来过新罕布什尔州的潜在总统候选人的不同之处在于，这位参议员“带来了对我们当前政治而言至关重要的道德视角”。
“他在短短几年内连续两场参议院选举中取得了令人难以置信的胜利。”帕帕斯说，“新罕布什尔州的民众都知道他作为联盟建设者、作为当下重要声音的榜样。”
一些助手和顾问不希望沃诺克为了这个梦想放弃自己的席位，他们希望通过祈祷能让他最终提交连任申请。沃诺克表示，他还没有和他们，或是和家人——包括他与前妻的两个年幼孩子——展开过这些严肃的对话。
“听着，我知道再过几个月，”他说，“我就会投入一场竞选。”
Raphael Warnock has a message for Democrats — and a plan to be heard in 2028
2026-10-11T10:00:44.536Z / CNN
Nashua, New Hampshire—
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.”
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