In 2020 and (in the run-off that extended into the first week of) 2021, Warnock won with the mantra to “remain the reverend” — a campaign that combined a faith-based social-justice heart with a careful prebutting of Republicans’ race-laced attempts to cast Warnock as radical by calibrating a benign look and vibe. He wore a puffer vest. He was in ads showing him walking a dog (that wasn’t his) on the sidewalks of identifiably suburban streets. He presented the even keel that’s been a Warnock hallmark from the time he was a teen.

This time, though, according to more than 50 interviews with officials, insiders and operatives from both parties and campaigns, Warnock is doing all that and then some — running in a way that’s every bit as disciplined but in a year that’s considerably more difficult. After earning by two points the last two years of the late Republican Johnny Isakson’s term, Warnock is a low-ranking member of an often stalemated, 50-50 Senate from a mostly riven, more-or-less 50-50 state. While continuing to push for voting rights even as Democrats’ signature bills have been stopped and stalled — the franchise has been the most elementally important issue for Warnock forever — his legislative efforts and accomplishments have focused on lowering the cost of insulin and other prescription drugs, investing in infrastructure, agriculture and manufacturing, and prioritizing seniors, farmers, servicemembers and veterans and the lower- and middle-class Georgians he most conspicuously aims to serve. He talks about Covid relief in terms of “tax cuts.” He talks about other spending bills in terms of “jobs, jobs and jobs.” And he seldom so much as says the name Joe Biden — frustrating foes trying to tie him in ads to the deeply unpopular president. “He is a very gifted politician,” Stephen Lawson, the head of a pro-Walker Super PAC, told me — a compliment not necessarily meant to be. “We fully understand,” Lawson said, “that he’s going to be very difficult to unseat.”

More broadly, though, the way Warnock has operated in the last year and a half in the Senate as well as the way he’s vying now for a full six-year term are natural extensions of the tensions that have animated his life and his work — the “double-consciousness” of the Black church, as he describes it in the 2014 book drawn from his doctoral dissertation, the “complementary yet competing sensibilities” of “revivalistic piety and radical protest,” the saving of souls and the salvation of society, what King called “long white robes over yonder” and “a suit and some shoes to wear down here.” In strictly political terms, this tension and connection might be expressed as purity versus pragmatism. And for Warnock, ever the reverend, the balancing act between the high and the low, the eternal and the utterly quotidian, sometimes means taking a run-of-the-mill legislative compromise — one that doesn’t even allocate any actual money for the asphalt — and attempting to frame it as the apotheosis of our ongoing experiment of representative self-government.