Like much of the nation, Julian Alexander Arriola-Hemmings had spent the past few months closely monitoring the two U.S. Senate races in Georgia.
A 2020 graduate of Morehouse College, Arriola-Hemmings, 22, remained hopeful that Jon Ossoff and the Reverend Dr. Raphael Warnock would ultimately be declared winners in Tuesday’s special runoff election and flip the U.S. Senate, placing control of the legislative body squarely in the hands of Democrats.
If that happened he said, progressive policies like criminal justice reform and Medicare for all, would take center stage in the national agenda.
As of Wednesday morning, news outlets had called at least one of the elections, declaring Warnock the winner over incumbent Kelly Loeffler. Ossoff has maintained a small lead over Republican David Perdue.
Like Arriola-Hemmings, the 51-year-old Warnock is an alumnus of Morehouse and the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, the venerable religious institution that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—also a Morehouse alum—co-pastored alongside his father from 1960 until his assassination in 1968.
“Reverend Warnock is grounded in a tradition that has helped to develop the greatest leaders in our culture,” said Arriola-Hemmings, adding that as a southern preacher and a graduate of a historically Black college, Warnock personifies the social justice ministry and ideological teachings that shaped and galvanized the modern civil rights movement of the 1960s.
With millions of outside advertising dollars being poured into Georgia in the days leading up to Tuesday’s election, and an aggressive campaign to encourage early voting, Democrats had expressed earned optimism about the possibility of Ossoff and Warnock winning all the way up to the waning hours of the campaign.
