By BILL BARROW Associated Press
ATLANTA (AP) — When Quentin Fulks went back home to Ellaville, Georgia last year, people kept telling him how proud they were to watch a native son lead Sen. Raphael Warnock’s reelection bid. Then came the caveat: They still weren’t going to vote for his boss.
“I didn’t take it personally,” Fulks recalled with a laugh.
If anything, growing up Black in a majority white county where Donald Trump won 79% of the vote helped Fulks understand what Democrats had to do to win in a historically conservative state.
As a campaign manager, that meant framing Warnock as the deal-making, results-driven incumbent and building an operation that went beyond the Democratic strongholds of Atlanta and other cities to connect with Republican-leaning voters throughout the state — even before Republicans nominated Herschel Walker and gambled on his complicated personal history.
“In a tough environment, we chose to communicate with those voters,” Fulks told The Associated Press. “And it set us apart, quite frankly, from the Democratic slate and even from President Biden.”
The approach worked — Warnock, Georgia’s first Black senator, won reelection by nearly 3 percentage points in a state that Biden carried by a quarter percentage point about two years earlier. The victory helped Democrats win an outright majority in the Senate and established the 33-year-old Fulks as a rising star in the party.
Now he’s being considered for a top post in Biden’s 2024 campaign, which the president is expected to launch in the coming weeks.
Fulks, who has also worked for Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and is now on a politics fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School, deflected questions about a possible Biden gig. But allies tout him as more than ready for a national campaign.
Anne Caprara, Pritzker’s chief of staff and former campaign manager who hired…
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