LOUISVILLE, Kentucky Charles Booker has an announcement to make, but first, he had to tell his family.

So on Sunday morning, the former Kentucky state representative grabbed a microphone and asked the 25 members in attendance at the church where his mother serves as assistant pastor to add him to their prayer list, even though he wouldnt quite tell them why that was necessary.

Every time I step out on faith, to do what God has called me to do, I connect with you all first, he told the parishioners at the City of Refuge church as an organ hummed in the background. God has given me this as a home, to prepare me and have folks around me that will love on me. So Im here again, because this is gonna be a big week.

The actual announcement is coming Thursday: HuffPost can confirm that Booker, whose narrow primary loss last year in the Democratic primary to face Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) nevertheless made him a rising star in Kentucky politics, will formally launch his campaign to challenge Sen. Rand Paul , the states other Republican senator, in 2022.

Democrats have not won a Senate race in Kentucky in three decades, and McConnells resounding victory nine months ago will likely cause the national party to prioritize just about every other contested Senate race in Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada and Florida as they try to protect and expand their majority. Paul, meanwhile, won approval from 53% of Kentuckians in a February poll that also found that 47% of them would hand him a third term.

Booker is among a group of Black Democratic Senate candidates that is only likely to grow in the coming months, as a national campaign apparatus that once viewed such candidates as too risky to run in statewide contests becomes more open and diverse , especially after Sen. Raphael Warnocks win in Georgia earlier this year.

Booker has heard plenty about all the reasons he cant win, and all the ways he wont. In a state that ranks among the nations most downtrodden, the son of two ministers is setting out to spark a good old Bluegrass revival, one that alters the fortunes not just of a beleaguered Kentucky Democratic Party, but of a population Booker says has been ignored, stomped on, and told they werent worth fighting for for far too long.

If we can encourage the people of Kentucky to believe that things can be better, and that we can achieve them, then we will, Booker said. As soon as we believe we can win, we will.

People Are Tired Of Being Tired

That revival a term he used repeatedly in a recent interview will start in the slice of Kentucky that created Charles Booker and then turned him into a late-rising sensation in the 2020 primary.

He will launch his campaign from the Kentucky Center for African American Heritage, which sits on a boulevard named for Muhammad Ali in the heart of West Louisville, the mostly Black side of Kentuckys largest city that in Bookers eyes exemplifies the most basic theme of his campaign: that the status quo has failed Kentucky from one end to the other, and that fixing it requires dramatic changes that confront the states litany of problems head-on.

There is a real path to beating Rand Paul, Booker said, but we wont do without doing that work in addressing issues of racism, and poverty and inequity which, on the Democratic side, we havent done.