Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock has been selected to the powerful Senate Finance Committee, an important position that can help burnish his 2028 credentials.
Warnock’s official response (news release here) to the assignment demonstrates the immediate talking points he’ll be able to deliver.
“I will be a guardian on the committee against any efforts to gut critical safety net programs like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare… against expensive tariffs…. against any massive tax cuts to the top one percent at the expense of working families.”
As befitting the committee post, he highlights economic issues.
Notice that he’s framing them in a way that might be appealing to the working class: Protecting safety nets, fighting potentially inflationary measures (i.e. tariffs), and something that never polls well — massive tax cuts for the top.
Warnock then stresses to point out that he’s a “pro-business Democrat” and that he’ll work across the aisle to “support our businesses large and small and bolster the middle class.”
2028 TAKE-AWAYS:
It’s interesting that Raphael Warnock explicitly calls himself a “pro-business Democrat” which a) implies there’s a wing of Democrats that isn’t pro-business (something that wing would dispute) and b) tries to get some distance from that faction.
That might be a function of being senator in a purple state that leans red and has economically benefited from attracting businesses fleeing higher tax states (here’s a prominent example).
It also might be a function of how he intends to cast himself as a 2028 contender – someone in the more centrist Democratic lane.
Incidentally, his Senate voting record matches that positioning, thus far. He was ranked by GovTrack in 2022 as the “most politically right compared to Senate Democrats” (98th percentile), and joined bipartisan bills the second most often compared to other Senate Democrats.
In fact, here’s a super cool little graph showing his ideology score (as reflected by Senate votes) and, yeah, he’s squarely in the middle.
Either way, there’s really only upside to Warnock’s appointment to the Senate Finance Committee. It doesn’t deal with cultural hot potato questions, and leans into things the Democratic party needs to address to help win back working class voters.