When Democrat Raphael Warnock won his election last year, he celebrated his success as a reflection of America’s promise.

Only in this country could the son of a Black woman who once spent her summers picking cotton experience such a dramatic rise, becoming the first African American to represent Georgia in the US Senate, Warnock told his supporters. He implored his new constituents,in the wake of a historically divisive campaign season, to embrace the values that made his win possible.

“Will we continue to divide, distract and dishonor one another? Or will we love our neighbors as we love ourselves?” Warnock said in his victory speech.

Just hours later, a group of Donald Trump’s supporters breached the Capitol in an attempt to disrupt the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election. Since then, the country has endured record-high inflation, marked 1 million lives lost to coronavirus and witnessed the end of federal protections for abortion access.

In the face of that national upheaval, Warnock now faces a familiar challenge. Once again, the battle for the Senate runs through Georgia, and Democrats’ hopes for controlling the upper chamber of Congress rest on Warnock’s shoulders. Republicans only need to flip one seat to regain their Senate majority – and given that Joe Biden carried Georgia by just 0.2 points in 2020, all eyes are on Warnock.

Or at least most eyes, because Warnock’s opponent is Herschel Walker – a sports celebrity with a history of scandals that reached new heights this week with the accusation that the staunch anti-abortion conservative paid a girlfriend to terminate her pregnancy – reports he has denied but that only grew more grave after his own son appeared to back them.

Warnock and his supporters, meanwhile, are hoping that his compelling personal story, combined with his accomplishments in Congress so far, can again carry him to victory. The 11th of 12 children, Warnock grew up in the Kayton Homes public housing complex in Savannah, Georgia. After getting his undergraduate degree from the historically Black Morehouse College, Warnock earned his PhD from the Union Theological Seminary and became an ordained minister. In 2005, he was appointed senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist church, where Dr Martin Luther King Jr once preached to the congregation.

“I think the historical significance of Ebenezer church instantly put Raphael Warnock into the spotlight,” said Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University.

“Any pastor of Ebenezer Baptist church [who] is standing in the pulpit of Martin Luther King, Jr and Sr, is going to be noticed, and so Reverend Warnock certainly had that cachet.”

Even after his win last year – he was elected in a runoff vote to finish out the term of the late senator Johnny Isakson, and is now running for his first full six-year term – Warnock has continued to preach at Ebenezer, and can occasionally be seen taking selfies with congregants after services on Sundays. His activism work at Ebenezer appears to have informed his work in Congress, where he has championed voting rights and successfully lobbied to cap insulin costs for Medicare recipients. Warnock has also made a point to work across the aisle, teaming up with Republican Ted Cruz on a highway funding proposal.

“I’ve been very impressed at what he’s done in Congress, what he’s managed to get through in the short time that he’s been there,” David Walker, a 39-year-old voter from Marietta, said at a Cobb County Democrats rally last month. “It’s going to help a lot down here.”

Bonnie Watson, a 71-year-old voter from Marietta, said she would even consider supporting Warnock for president. “I like his ethics,” Watson said at the rally. “I like the fact that he’s a communicator, that he is a community builder, that he is a leader. But he also is someone I think that can look at both sides and understand what needs to be done.”

Even with his time in the Senate, however, Warnock does not have name recognition over his Republican opponent. A former professional football player, Herschel Walker is best known for the Heisman Trophy he won in 1982 while playing for the University of Georgia Bulldogs. Walker helped the Bulldogs win a national championship in 1980; when he left the school, the team retired his jersey number, 34.

That fame, combined with Trump’s early endorsement, allowed Walker to easily secure the Republican nomination in May. His team leans hard into his celebrated football record, offering hats to supporters that say “#34 for ‘22”. At a rally last month in Rome, Georgia, attendees waited in a long line to take photos with him.

“I’ve watched him since I was six years old with the Georgia Bulldogs play football, and he’s really a great guy,” said Stephanie Nichols, a 48-year-old voter from Rome who carried a football she wanted Walker to sign.

That storied history seems to be enough for many Georgia voters to overlook his controversial, and often nonsensical, comments on everything from the pandemic to abortion access, which Warnock has seized on in his campaign ads. One features a clip of Walker claiming to know a miracle cure for Covid, which he does not specifically name. “I have something that can bring you into a building that would clean you from Covid as you walk through this dry mist. As you walk through the door it will kill any Covid on your body,” Walker says in the clip.

“You hear [Walker] talk sometimes, and it’s just word salad,” said Jacquelyn Bettadapur, chair of the Cobb County Democratic Committee. “He doesn’t have the oratory skills. He doesn’t have the positions. He can’t even express himself coherently.”

Walker’s controversies and gaffes have also offered Democrats plenty of fodder. His ex-wife, Cindy Grossman, has claimed he threatened to kill her. (Walker has said he was dealing with mental health issues at the time, but he has not denied the allegation.) Walker has three children from non-marital relationships, and he did not publicly acknowledge them until reports about them emerged. (Walker has said he supports all his children and “chose not to use them as props to win a political campaign”.) He claimed to have previously worked in law enforcement. (He did not, although his campaign asserted he was an honorary deputy in Cobb county.) Walker once boasted that he graduated in the top 1% of his class from the University of Georgia. (He never got his degree.) A New York Times investigation raised questions about whether Walker’s food-distribution company had spread false information about donating some of its profits to charity.

Most recently, and perhaps most damning of all for a candidate who has campaigned strongly against abortion, Walker now stands accused by a former girlfriend of paying for her to get an abortion in 2009. He has denied the reports. His son, also a vocal conservative, blasted his father on social media, calling him a hypocrite and a liar.

And yet, despite Walker’s vulnerabilities, most recent polls indicate that he and Warnock are running neck and neck. The race could prove even more difficult than Warnock’s last contest, given the national headwinds facing all Democratic candidates: in addition to widespread complaints about rising prices, Biden’s approval rating has been underwater for more than a year.

“At the end of the day, a lot of this is a nationalized election, and it’s much more about what the Democrats have done over these last two years when they’ve been in control versus what Herschel Walker may have done in the past,” said Jay Williams, a longtime Republican strategist based in the Atlanta area. “You could put a potted plant against Warnock, or you could put a potted plant against Walker, and all the Democrats would vote for the potted plant or all the Republicans would vote for the potted plant. It’s really that kind of election.”

Walker’s supporters have echoed that stance, saying party identity is enough to guarantee their vote. “I like him because he’s a Republican. That’s all I need to know,” Bill McCain, a 78-year-old voter from Lindale, said at the Rome rally after grabbing one of Walker’s lawn signs.

Warnock is clearly aware that he has a real race on his hands, and he has been fundraising aggressively. In the second quarter of 2022 Warnock raised $17m, bringing his campaign’s total haul to more than $70m. In comparison, Walker raised just $6.2m over the same three months, and Warnock’s cash advantage has allowed him to dominate the Georgia airwaves.

The forthcoming debate, scheduled for 14 October in Savannah, could provide Warnock with another opportunity to draw a clear contrast between him and Walker. The two candidates jostled for months over the debate schedule, and Warnock accused Walker of being “scared for voters to hear what he has to say”. Even Walker’s allies acknowledge he will be at a disadvantage on stage.

“Clearly Warnock is a much more seasoned speaker, much more eloquent,” Williams said. “If I were [Walker], I’d just stay on message, stay focused on what is his campaign plan and what is the difference between him and Warnock.”

One of Warnock’s tasks in the debate will be to motivate Democratic base voters, including African Americans, to turn out in November, and Gillespie argued that questions about race-related issues could help him in that regard. Warnock and Walker are both Black men but their approaches to discussing race are notably distinct.

While Warnock has directly confronted the ways in which African Americans are uniquely impacted by federal policy decisions, Walker has instead attacked his opponent for raising the issue at all. “Senator Warnock believes America is a bad country full of racist people,” Walker said in an ad released last month. “I believe we’re a great country full of generous people.”

Walker may have appealed to Republican leaders in part because they hoped he could neutralize potential allegations of racism against Warnock, Gillespie said. But Walker’s approach to the topic of race may not sit well with other African Americans, who make up about a third of Georgia’s population.

“Walker has a history of avoiding and deflecting on topics related to race. I think that’s going to be off-putting to African American voters,” Gillespie said. “The question is whether or not Warnock can use that to mobilize Black voters to make sure that they turn out at the highest rate possible.”

Gillespie conceded that the debate is unlikely to sway many voters, but said it could make a critical difference for the small swath of Georgians still trying to make up their minds. In the rapidly shifting political landscape of Georgia, once a reliably Republican state and now a hotly contested battleground, Warnock’s fate will probably be decided by a handful of points.

“We just have to accept that Georgia is going to be an electorally competitive state,” Gillespie said. “What that means, regardless of who wins, is that we’re in the era of narrow margins.”