Crowley campaigns with Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock

“In the history of our country, this is a defining moral moment,” U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia) told a crowd outside Cargo Coffee in downtown Madison Friday, as he stood on stage with Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, the Democratic candidate for governor of Wisconsin. 

Warnock has been traveling across the country to support Democratic candidates as his party tries to flip control of the U.S. House of Representative and Senate. He made a detour to Wisconsin, he told the Examiner, because he believes Crowley is a “good man” and because the stakes are high in Wisconsin, like they are in Georgia, due to both states’ history of Republican gerrymandering. “The next governor will preside over the next reapportionment,” he said, “and I think it’s important to have somebody like David Crowley in office.”

“We are seeing gerrymandering supercharged in the South and all across our country with this latest Callais decision,” he said, referring to a Supreme Court ruling  legal experts have called a severe blow to the Voting Rights Act. 

“Politicians are turning elections on their head, so that rather than the people picking their representatives, the politicians are cherry-picking their voters. It’s clear to me that Tom Tiffany will represent that same kind of approach,” Warnock said. 

Warnock, in addition to serving in the U.S. Senate, is the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia – the same pulpit once occupied by Martin Luther King, Jr. On the stage set up outside Cargo Coffee, he praised Crowley as a “man of faith” and a proven leader who has united voters across Milwaukee County. He recounted asking Crowley about his margin of victory in his last election as county executive. “And he answered, with a lot of humility, 85%” 

“Think about how divided our country really is,” Warnock said. “And this man won by 85% because he knows how to bring people together, how to get us to work together, because he understands that at the end of it all, the only way to rise is to rise together.”

He contrasted Crowley’s unifying vision with the divisiveness of the “people at the highest levels of our government.” 

After the event, Warnock told the Examiner he believes that when the midterms are over, after what he expects will be big midterm losses for Republicans, President Donald Trump “will feel the bruises and the humiliation of that,” making him dangerous.  “We need strong governors who will hold the line to protect their people.”