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BILL BARROW

The 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 Republican 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. He was named on Tuesday as the principal deputy campaign manager for Biden’s reelection bid and will work alongside campaign chair Julie Chavez Rodriguez.

Allies of Fulks, who also has worked for Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, tout him as more than ready for a national campaign.  

Anne Caprara, Pritzker’s chief of staff and former campaign manager, who hired Fulks as her 2018 deputy, described him as a “soft-spoken” but skilled operative who understands Democrats’ uneasy coalitions, which span from progressive activists and labor unions to establishment billionaires like Pritzker.

“He’s a Black man from rural Georgia who’s also helped run J.B.’s politics in a place like Chicago,” she said. “At this point, there are no uncomfortable spaces for Quentin.”

In an interview earlier this year before Biden formally announced his 2024 campaign, Fulks said he learned to be unapologetic and thick-skinned about forging narrow majorities.

“You don’t compromise what it means to be a Democrat, but there’s a way you do it,” he said.

He pointed to Warnock’s support for abortion rights without emphasizing the issue himself, except to call attention to Walker’s statements of support for an outright national ban. Warnock, in turn, avoided questions about any restrictions Democrats might consider.

“When you have an opponent like Walker, there are plenty of people who’d look at all his liabilities and go as far left as possible,” Fulks said. “We never did that.”Warnock, who doubles as senior pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, didn’t know Fulks before interviewing and hiring him. But, Warnock told the AP, his campaign manager proved to be a “serious” and “brilliant” person who had no problem challenging those around him, including the senator.

“There’s no point in having people around you who are afraid to tell you the truth,” Warnock said.

Fulks decided in high school he wanted to work in politics. He had no obvious path but saw a model from nearby Plains: former President Jimmy Carter. Encouragement from a high school teacher who is Carter’s niece helped, too