ALBANY, Ga. — On Sunday afternoon, Congressman Sanford Bishop was at Evangelical Faith Ministries in Albany, his final stop on an election-season tour of more than 30 mostly black churches in the final weeks of a bitterly fought contest to keep his seat in the U.S. House.
Bishop had been to the church before — many times.
He asked Apostle Felix Revills to anoint him with oil.
Revills obliged, as his father Apostle Isaiah Revills did 18 years earlier when Bishop first won a seat in congress.
The oil ran down Bishop’s back and onto his suit as Revills and the deacons laid their hands on the congressman’s head.
“I believed my faith would be granted,” Bishop said early Wednesday morning as he told the story to his weary supporters celebrating an unlikely victory over Republican challenger Mike Keown, a Southern Baptist minister from Thomas County.
As Tuesday night turned into Wednesday morning, it was all about faith.
Bishop has been on the ballot — either for a seat in the Georgia General Assembly or Congress — every two years since 1976.
He has never lost.
And he didn’t this time. Of the nearly 168,000 votes cast, the final tally showed Bishop had 4,776 more votes than Keown.
Numbers alone don’t tell the story.
The wrong call
At 10:55 on election night, with Democratic congressman falling from coast to coast in a Republican onslaught, the Associated Press gave the race to Keown, a conservative with strong tea party support.
That appeared to make Bishop another Democratic casualty, just like Macon’s Jim Marshall, his congressional next door neighbor.
At the time AP made the call, Keown was running almost 6 percentage points ahead of Bishop, and leading in more than half of the district’s 32 counties.
Inside the Albany Civic Center, the Bishop camp was watching an Albany television station. The AP report of Bishop’s demise led the 11 o’clock news.
Bishop was preparing for an interview with a reporter from that station when the room went silent.
He knew something was wrong.
“I am a student of political science,” Bishop said. “I understood the numbers coming in and the call by AP was not consistent with logic.”
Meanwhile, the Keown camp, assembled just 200 yards away in a hotel conference room, wasn’t about to make a victory speech.
“I was on the phone with AP when they made the call,” Keown campaign manager Andrew O’Shea said Wednesday. “I knew that Dougherty and Muscogee had not come through and that was a big part of Sanford Bishop’s base.”
Less than 15 minutes after AP called the race, Bishop’s political obituary was on websites from Los Angeles to New York. Still, the congressman was convinced he hadn’t lost.
Like the Keown camp, Bishop knew that his two strongholds — Columbus and Albany — had not reported in full and could easily erase Keown’s roughly 6,500-vote lead.
“It was an uncomfortable feeling, but I knew I was right,” Bishop said.
He never thought about making a concession speech, though his staff had sketched one out. “As a child, my father brought me up to be strong on my convictions even though I was standing alone,” he said.
He wasn’t alone for long.
About 11:30, word started to circulate in the room that the AP call was premature — if not flat wrong.
Just before midnight, the Secretary of State had Bishop holding a narrow lead and the Columbus votes were still pending.
His supporters broke into a gospel song.
“I don’t believe he brought me this far to leave me,” they sang as the room took on the feeling of tent revival.
Bishop, a beaten man 45 minutes earlier, was growing more confident.
“We expect to win this race,” he said.
Still, he was waiting for the results from Muscogee County, where Keown’s camp expected to lose by 3,000 votes.
Finally, after 1 a.m., the numbers hit the Secretary of State’s website. Bishop had taken Muscogee County by almost 15,000 votes.
It was over.
At 1:14 a.m., Bishop stepped to the front of the room and asked everyone to gather around him. About 35 people were left of the more than 100 who showed up for the party six hours earlier.
“I have learned all things are possible in politics,” Bishop told them.
Bishop credited his wife, Muscogee County Municipal Court Clerk Vivian Creighton Bishop, with an assist on the win.
“The truth of the matter is, while I was riding around all of the other counties, she delivered Muscogee County,” Bishop said.
Much of the last month, Bishop had been explaining ethical issues involving federal grants and scholarships, problems with his wife’s fingerprints all over them.
But that wasn’t how he saw it in the first moments of victory.
“She made sure Muscogee was there,” Bishop said. “She has been my right hand, my left hand. She has kept me straight.”
The television cameras were long gone, and only two reporters were left in the room.
The rest of the state, and even the nation, had gone to bed believing Bishop was a defeated man.
AP did not correct its mistake until 1:54 a.m.
Thanking the Lord
Ekiel M. Holley, pastor of Zion Hope Baptist Church in DeSoto, Ga., closed the night with a five-minute prayer that felt like a sermon.
“When it looked doubtful, you intervened,” Holley prayed as the congressman and his wife stood hand in hand at his side. “You turned our sadness into joy.”
Someone exclaimed, “Amen.”
Bishop called it a once-in-a-lifetime political experience.
“And I maintained my belief that all things are possible in politics if you persevere,” he said. “I just remained committed to my faith and believed, like these folks were singing earlier, that God didn’t put me here to leave me.”
The party broke up just before 2 a.m.
Bishop got into bed at his Albany home around 4 and rose two hours later to a chorus of congratulatory calls, e-mails and text messages.
At the same time, Keown’s camp was studying the numbers. But later in the morning it became obvious that Bishop’s margin of victory was too great to warrant a recount.
Keown conceded about 9 a.m.
AP declared Bishop the winner at 10:38 a.m.
Around noon, Keown called Bishop. “He indicated he tried to call earlier,” Bishop said.
Keown, the same man who told Bishop five days earlier that his eviction notice was in the mail, offered congratulations.
“He said we ran a good race,” Bishop said. “I extended the same to him.”
Bishop then asked Keown to send regards to Keown’s family.
“Then I told him,” Bishop said, “to God be the glory.”
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