Over the next few days and weeks, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, will decide whether or not to make a 2016 run against U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson.
Ranking Democrats in Georgia and Washington hope he’ll say yes.
If he does, his candidacy will usher in an exceedingly delicate time for Democrats in Georgia. Should Warnock run, I will be tempted several times a week to pick up a phone and hunt down Cabral Franklin.
That won’t happen, of course. The 41-year-old political strategist, a non-smoker, died this week of lung cancer. He was the son of former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin and the late David Franklin, one of the founding architects of black politics in Atlanta.
In all likelihood, you have never heard of Cabral Franklin. A speech impediment pushed him into the back rooms of Georgia politics, where he became a most respected man of data bases and spreadsheets, of strategy and polling and well-targeted radio spots.
But more importantly, Cabral Franklin was a firm believer in coalition politics as the only way back for Democrats in Georgia. “He saw all the sides, and saw the need for all the boats to rise,” said Chris Carpenter, a Democrat who worked with Franklin on the 2012 TSPLOST campaign and several other efforts.
Counterintuitively, Franklin worked to turn out African-American votes in favor of Gov. Nathan Deal’s charter school initiative in 2014 – not just in south DeKalb County, but throughout rural Georgia. Black people aren’t any happier with public education than whites, he noted.
This summer, former Atlanta city council president Cathy Woolard, who is both white and openly gay, put Candice Franklin, Cabral’s wife, in charge of fundraising for her 2017 mayoral race. It was an “Aha!” moment that ricocheted across Atlanta. Many thought they saw Cabral Franklin’s fingerprints. They were right.
The last time I quoted Cabral in print was in the aftermath of last year’s Democratic debacle. White voters numbered some 91,000 fewer in 2014 than in 2010, while black voters remained steady. And still Michelle Nunn and Jason Carter, who bore two of the most famous names in modern Georgia history, lost badly.
The defeats were hard evidence that the state’s politics remained racially polarized. A furious argument ensued among Democrats.
Millions of TV dollars wasted in an attempt to lure unwinnable white voters would have been better spent registering and pushing to the polls tens of thousands of African-Americans who don’t participate in the process, many argued. Tharon Johnson, who has served as an advisor to Mayor Kasim Reed and U.S. Rep. John Lewis, was among them.
“The Republicans did a better job of turning out their base in 2014 than Democrats did,” Johnson said this week – just as he had last November.
During last year’s argument, Cabral Franklin was more cautious. Democrats can’t be seen abandoning white voters, he said.
“You can’t elect anybody to any statewide office in this country when you only get one in four whites. Maybe New Mexico,” he said at the time. “Democrats have to figure out a way to get more than one in four whites.”
Which brings us back to the Rev. Raphael Warnock. Ten months after Nunn and Carter failed to draw white voters back to the cause, Georgia Democrats appear ready to experiment with the other side of the equation – by supercharging the African-American vote in Georgia.
The demographic weight of politics has already shifted greatly in Georgia. In 2000, there were three white voters for every registered black voter. Now there are only two.
As a candidate, Warnock’s task would be to energize African-American voters in the first general election since 2008 that won’t have Barack Obama at the top of the ticket.
“If Reverend Warnock decides to run for U.S. Senate, I think he would be a refreshing voice — able to motivate an ignored constituency,” Tharon Johnson said. “He’s a great orator who will be able to speak to the issues.”
“If you look at what Donald Trump is doing – this whole outsider message that [Georgia Sen.] David Perdue takes credit for – it’s working. What he’s done is he’s tapped into a pulse of the American people that are fed up with politics,” Johnson said. “I’m thinking that Warnock, being a person who has never been in office before, is an outsider — fresh and new.”
The question is whether Warnock can attract new African-American voters without losing white voters – especially white female voters. It’s a tightrope walk made even more difficult by the fact that Johnny Isakson has a decent history with black voters.
“I would have called Cabral today to ask whether Johnny Isakson has gotten more black votes than any Republican in Georgia history. I think the answer would have been yes,” Johnson said.
In the end, it is not a black-or-white question for Democrats. It is black and white.
“If I could talk to Cabral Franklin today, I would totally merge the two pathways that we both envisioned at the end of 2014,” Johnson said. “I would say to him that you were right, and he would probably say to me that I was right. And we’ve got to figure out how do we do both. That’s the challenge.”
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