02 January 21
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FOCUS: Charles Bethea | Can Democrats Win Georgia - and the Senate?
Charles Bethea, The New Yorker
Bethea writes: "When news networks called Georgia for Joe Biden, on November 13th, Nsé Ufot, the C.E.O. of the New Georgia Project, was atop Stone Mountain, a hunk of granite east of Atlanta that is home to the largest Confederate monument on earth."
In order to do so, the candidates will need high voter turnout in a state where it tends to drop during runoffs, especially among the Party’s own supporters.
She was with colleagues, taking a staff photo and celebrating the work they’d done to turn out voters in record numbers. As word of Biden’s victory spread, some people teared up, Ufot said, but not her. Her organization, which was founded, in 2014, by Stacey Abrams, had made three million phone calls, sent two million text messages, and carefully knocked on half a million doors. Biden won the state by around twelve thousand votes. The New Georgia Project’s efforts, and those of a handful of similar groups, put him over the top. They also insured that Georgia would have not one but two runoff elections for the U.S. Senate, on January 5th, pitting a pair of Republican incumbents against Democratic challengers. I asked Ufot whether Georgia had “turned blue,” as headlines proclaimed. “I get the desire to, like, make scorching takes,” she said. “But can we just enjoy this before we get back to work?”
The deadline to register new voters for the runoffs was a few weeks away. Early voting would begin on December 14th and end December 31st. The New Georgia Project planned to knock on roughly a million doors in metro Atlanta and another million in the state’s rural areas. The incumbents, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, “do not give a damn about the fact that Black folks are dying at an alarming clip in our state,” Ufot said. (Neither senator responded to multiple interview requests.) Health disparities are particularly stark in Georgia’s rural Black Belt, she noted, where the pandemic has taken a heavy toll. “What an incredible holiday gift it would be to send Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the United States Senate so they can go there to do the people’s work,” she added.
Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church—a position once held by Martin Luther King, Jr.—has not run for office before. Ossoff, the C.E.O. of a company that produces investigative documentaries, ran for the U.S. House of Representatives three years ago, losing but raising a lot of money and getting a lot of press in the process. “Their audiences will bleed over to one another,” Ufot said. “White suburban moms of Atlanta, who ride for Jon Ossoff, will get introduced to Warnock, this Black pastor from the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church. And Warnock lends credibility to Ossoff in the Black pockets around the state that he couldn’t buy.” Ufot believes that progressive politics can win in the South. “But it all depends on getting out the vote and making sure the votes are counted,” she said.
Bernard Fraga, a professor of political science at Emory and the author of “The Turnout Gap,” told me that turnout tends to drop by forty per cent or more for runoff elections. In Georgia, he explained, the drop-off is typically more severe among Democrats. But he didn’t expect this runoff to be typical. We might see a drop-off as small as fifteen per cent, he suggested. “But will that historically low drop-off be disproportionately Republican or Democratic?” he asked. “That’s what these groups on the ground are trying to decide.”
“Most folks have taken their foot off the gas and turned their eyes towards the holidays,” Ufot told me. But she was counting on early and mail-in voting to help close the usual gap between young and old voters and white voters and voters of color. “I’ve got to figure out how to make the ‘Twelve Days of Voting-mas’ not sound corny,” she said.
On the first day of December, I opened my laptop to watch Ossoff and Warnock speak to metro Atlanta chapters of Alpha Phi Alpha and Alpha Kappa Alpha, two venerable Greek organizations for Black students. It seemed like a chance for Ossoff to ride Warnock’s coattails a bit; among the illustrious past members of A.P.A. is Warnock’s legendary predecessor at Ebenezer. Ossoff, who’s thirty-three, grew up in the suburbs northeast of Atlanta and attended a local private school before going to Georgetown and the London School of Economics. He sat, a tad rigidly, in his home office, and spoke, as he tends to do, somewhat grandly—about joining “the political arena at this moment in history” and about the mentorship of the late congressman John Lewis, whom he first met in his teens. He described his investigative film work at a “twenty-eight-year-old company.” He also talked about housing and health care, student debt and equal justice under the law.
Warnock speaks with a rousing fluency that befits his day job. Earlier, I had asked him whether he saw Biblical precedent for the country’s predicament, and he’d told me about sermons he preached after the pandemic began, paraphrasing a passage from the Book of Joel—“Even upon the slaves, the most marginalized members of the human family, I will pour out my spirit,” the verse reads, more or less—and offering a gloss: “There is a word of hope even in the midst of this sick darkness.” He spoke to A.P.A. and A.K.A. about growing up as the eleventh of twelve children in a Savannah housing project and getting a Pell Grant, calling himself “the embodiment of what happens when personal responsibility meets good public policy.” He talked about COVID-19 and “COVID-1619,” by which he meant “the ongoing struggle with race and justice in our country.”
Warnock and Ossoff have raised more than two hundred million dollars since late October. You cannot turn on a television or radio without hearing their ads, many of which emphasize Loeffler and Perdue’s twin stock-trading scandals and the failure of the Senate, until recently, to secure additional pandemic relief. Volunteers outside the state are calling, texting, and sending postcards to Georgia residents. (I have received more handwritten postcards asking me to vote than holiday cards from friends and family.) Various show-business people—Pearl Jam, Eva Longoria, the cast of “Elf”—are touting Warnock and Ossoff on social media and hosting virtual get-out-the-vote events.
I’ve heard the occasional grumble from fellow-Georgians about the deluge, and there are those who believe that the waves of out-of-state cash in other Senate races made it easier for Republicans to portray Democratic challengers as beholden to their party’s leadership or to its left wing. Andrew Yang, who announced in November that he was temporarily moving to Georgia, told me that “some very well-known folks” had said they wanted to join him. But then, he said, there were “crosscurrents” from “various folks in the Democratic party, about not wanting to nationalize the race,” and “people who were on the fence about it just stood down.” Some Democrats feared energizing the other side, he said. “So you’re resisting trying to maximize our vote because you’re afraid it’s going to maximize their vote?” he asked.
We spoke in early December, as Yang knocked on doors in southwest Atlanta with Martin Luther King III. The pair, in suits and masks—Yang’s said MATH—passed an elderly man bathing in his yard with a bucket. They waved and continued on. Yang said that he’d sold knives door-to-door as a teen in Westchester. “I don’t know how we’d do it without you here, Martin, though,” he added, chuckling—and feeling, perhaps, like a bit of an outsider. At two of the first five homes they visited, people told King that they had been his childhood playmates. (He wasn’t sure that all of them recalled correctly.) Few recognized Yang, who participated in seven Presidential primary debates.
In between stops, Yang pulled up a CNN op-ed on his phone, which argued that Democrats should treat the races as national campaigns. “ ‘Move the Biden transition headquarters to Atlanta,’ ” he read aloud. He and King said, in near unison, “Yes!”
Yang went on, “ ‘Send in the ex-presidents.’ ”
“Yes!”
Fraga told me that nationalizing the races had been a boon for Democrats in the fall, that it spurred interest and brought in money that helped drive turnout. Ufot said that things like the postcard barrage simply work. “It’s part of our ‘ten touches,’ ” she said, explaining that receiving ten reminders about an election increases the likelihood that a registered voter will actually show up.
Yang stepped up to another porch and was soon talking with an elderly man in a mask. He introduced King—which triggered a story. “You know,” the man said, “I got registered April 4, 1969.”
“Wow,” King said, with real surprise. His father was assassinated exactly one year earlier.
“God is good,” Yang said. “Well, fantastic. Let’s win this one.”
“We gonna win it,” the man said. “This a good thing y’all doing. Hit the streets. Let the people see faces.” The man mentioned that he had a picture of Maynard Jackson, Atlanta’s first Black mayor, knocking on doors to get out the vote fifty years ago.
After they left the porch, King explained to Yang who Jackson was.
Twelve days later, Biden came to Georgia. Early voting had just begun. Around a hundred sixty eight thousand Georgians voted in person on the first day, a thirty per cent increase from the first day of the general election. I spoke to the former Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed, who lives in southwest Atlanta. “We lost fourteen out of the last fifteen runoffs,” he said, of his fellow-Democrats. “But I think that there is something in the air that’s going on.” He added, “I got up and drove my area today, and the lines for early voting are just substantial.” Warnock, in particular, he told me, had excited Black voters he’d talked to. “I spend a lot of my time in local stores, barber shops, beauty salons,” he said. “I think that Warnock is catching on at a good time. I think that his performance will impact Jon Ossoff’s performance in a positive way.”
Biden’s event, a drive-in rally, was at a former train yard in a gentrifying Atlanta neighborhood. Jeffrey Brower, the owner of a construction company, waited for the President-elect in a leather jacket and vintage Nikes, holding a plastic cup of whiskey and another of beer. “God gave me two hands for a reason,” he said. “I don’t know why I didn’t get an invite inside,” he half-joked, explaining that he’d given Warnock and Ossoff a few thousand dollars. “I’d rather make donations to cancer charities, the homeless,” he said. “But times aren’t normal.”
A retiree named Linda sat nearby on a chair and smoked. She said that she’d voted for Mitt Romney but had no trouble choosing the Democrats this time. “We need to bring back some normalcy to this country,” she said. “And health insurance, too.” As Stacey Abrams took the stage, I spoke with a man in his fifties named Darrell White, who’d grown up across the street and happened upon the event as he went for a walk. “We used to play football and fly kites right here,” he said. Warnock “has been through some of the stuff I been through,” he added. “So I know exactly what he’s talking about.”
A few protesters stood outside the event, holding signs that read “Wearing The Mask To Stop The Virus Is Like Wearing A Diaper To Stop A Fart! #science” and “Just Say No To Communism.” They chanted “China owns Joe” and “stop the steal.” One, a man named Caesar Gonzales, had a brief exchange with a Biden supporter—which ended with Gonzalez saying, “I’ll break your motherfucking nose.” Gonzalez told me that he was going to run for Congress in 2022.
A volunteer from Los Angeles named Michael watched all this unfold. “I’m trying to ignore them and not catch COVID,” he said of the protesters. He’d been in Atlanta for two weeks. “I’m mostly doing get-out-the-vote rallies and registration for the Asian community,” he explained, noting that “the A.A.P.I. community made a difference in November.” Fraga had made the same point to me. “I don’t think anyone was anticipating this level of engagement of Asian-American” turnout, he said. Michael told me, “It’s probably going to drop off, but we’re doing everything we can.”
Biden thanked Georgians for his win in the state, adding, “Guess what? Now you’re going to have to do it again.” He called Abrams a “hero” and mocked an attempt by the Texas attorney general to overturn election results in four states, including Georgia, an effort that Loeffler and Perdue supported. “Maybe your senators were just confused,” he said. “Maybe they think they represent Texas.” But Biden mostly focussed on what lay ahead, mentioning voting rights and health care in particular. “We need senators who are willing to do it, for God’s sake,” he said.
A week later, I called Ufot. “I feel really good,” she told me. She had just left an early-voting location, where she’d been giving out water and “delicious pudding.” She was headed to a suburban Atlanta county that went for Biden. “People are definitely voting,” she said, despite “how hard the G.O.P. is going after voting rights and voting locations.” She said that there were eighty counties where Republicans were challenging the voter rolls, mostly unsuccessfully. Of these efforts, she said, “We feel like they’re designed to put up hurdles that make it difficult for people to vote.” But she sounded optimistic. By the end of early voting, more than three million Georgians had cast their ballots, and the early data appeared to favor the Democrats: there were thousands of new voters, a high percentage of Black voters, and somewhat lower turnout—so far; Election Day voting may rebalance things—in conservative parts of the state. The county that had come closest to matching its November total was Randolph, a poor county in the Black Belt, which has been ravaged by the pandemic. Ufot’s hopeful tone reminded me of the biggest applause line at the Biden rally, which was delivered, not surprisingly, by Warnock. “It’s dark,” he’d said. “But morning is on the way. Hold on.”
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