Young Black voters helped turn GA blue. How Democrats plan to make change permanent
From Macon to Columbus, Waycross to LaGrange, Georgia’s Black political activists and organizers helped turn out thousands of new voters in 2020, contributing to Biden’s razor-thin margin of about 12,000 votes.
One lesson of Biden’s success, some say, that must carry on through the U.S. Senate runoffs is that Democrats need to campaign all over the state, and not rely on metro Atlanta and its fast-growing, diverse population to turn the state solidly blue.
Organizers registered new voters across the state, drove turnout in swing counties and connected deep discontent over the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor with political action. The results speak for themselves: the state’s 16 Electoral College votes went to Biden and Democrats took two incumbent Senate Republicans to runoff elections.
Activists drew on decades of political experience and a playbook developed by former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams to increase the Democrat electorate by building relationships with voters in all of Georgia’s 159 counties. Whether the strategies developed over the past few years can propel at least one Democrat to the U.S. Senate in January, win the 2022 gubernatorial election or reverse down ballot losses remains to be seen.
The Black Belt in Georgia
Abrams is quick to point out that Biden’s victory was delivered by a broad coalition, including white suburbanites and a significant increase in Asian-American voters, especially in metro Atlanta.
But Black voters are the Democratic Party’s most reliable constituency in Georgia, and that’s especially true outside of Atlanta. The portion of the Black Belt — a crescent of counties from Virginia to Texas where historically Black people have comprised a majority of the population— running through Georgia includes Macon, Columbus, and Augusta, and 15 majority-Black counties.
Before the election, the Washington Post predicted “a turnout difference of just 20,000 or 30,000 votes” in that region could swing the Presidential election. According to a McClatchy analysis, the region delivered 45,000 more votes to Biden than it did to Hillary Clinton in 2016, a 19% increase.
Houston County’s Fenika Miller, a Democratic elector and chair of the 8th Congressional District of the Democratic Party of Georgia, worked on canvassing and voter registration starting in January. Those efforts contributed to the 43% increase in votes for Biden in Houston County.
Miller said she saw fresh enthusiasm in her area for the 2020 election, in part because of frustration with Trump’s divisiveness and handling of the coronavirus pandemic, but also because of the inroads that had been made in 2018.
“Wherever there are people, that’s where you take your message,” she said. “We know that Democratic policies work best for people in our communities… People really began to pay attention, and middle, central, south Georgia really began to to continue to organize around that momentum.”
Now, Democratic organizers, officials, and the Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff campaigns are hoping that the networks built across the state over the last several years will translate to high turnout for the runoffs on Jan. 5, bucking their recent history of runoff losses and delivering the Senate to the Democrats.
“We’re really trying to push the counties outside of the metro to get back to the polls,” said Georgia Rep. Miriam Paris (D-Macon). “It takes more than Atlanta to win Georgia.”
Meet Dem political organizers
Democrat political defeats and frustrations paved the way for the party’s 2020 success as local organizers founded community organizations and worked together to build relationships with voters.
Macon’s Sheknita Davis, founder of the nonprofit The People’s Advocacy Group, went door-to-door with a coalition of community members and organizations to make sure Bibb County voters knew how important their votes were. That group included Andrea Glover, who during a march through downtown Macon after George Floyd’s killing in July handed out voter registration applications and urged protesters to turn their fury into action.
“I think too often, especially here in Macon-Bibb County, we feel voiceless. We feel like we don’t have a stake and a say in what goes on,” Glover said. “We are encouraging people that voting is a way of life. It is not something optional, it’s not something that you do when things are just going wrong.”
Curtis Crocker Jr., senior pastor of Metropolitan Baptist Church in Columbus, says he and other political organizers were “the mouthpieces for passion” as voters protested racial inequality and the Trump administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
He said religious leaders as well as Black fraternities and sororities, the NAACP, the Urban League, My Black Has a Purpose, Ground Game Innovations and others, were critical in delivering Muscogee County for Joe Biden.
“We all came together and we talked,” he said. “In that conversation, we all believed that there was a necessity to make sure that we got those... hard to count areas to get to those individuals and to continue to educate them on the voting process.”
Tonza Thomas, a former president of the Columbus NAACP chapter and first vice-chair of the Muscogee County Democratic party, is “Stacey Abrams trained” — she worked on the 2018 gubernatorial campaign. Thomas registered 125 Muscogee voters by herself as a deputy registrar ahead of the 2020 election, including three formerly incarcerated people.
An example of one of Thomas’ partnerships: getting permission from Carver High School officials to hold a voter registration drive during a volleyball game.
“If you do the work and you’re doing it right, people will come,” Thomas said. “It was all about relationships.”
The youth vote in Trump vs. Biden
Young voters were key to the outcome in Georgia in November: researchers at Tufts University found that voters ages 18-29 comprised 20% of the state’s electorate, the highest share in the country. They broke for Biden 58-39. Black voters in that age group backed Biden 90-8, while white voters went for Trump 34-62.
Teens like B.J. Tillman, a senior at Brookstone School, a top-rated private school in Columbus, understood the importance of the youth vote. She first got involved with politics after working on former Columbus Mayor Teresa Tomlinson’s U.S. Senate campaign as a junior.
“Once you study the youth vote, you really realize the power of it,” she said. “And when I realized the power of it, I also saw at the same time that young people weren’t showing up in the polls as we could and as we should.”
Tillman founded the nonprofit, nonpartisan organization Your Voice, Your Vote. The group — made up of student volunteers — goes into Muscogee County schools to register eligible voters. Since November 2019, the group has registered an estimated 400 voters, 300 of which were students.
“We recognize … as their peers, we’re in a unique position to sell the case to them that voting is important. So we actually go to their tables, talk about it with them, tell them how easy it is telling them, it’s never going to get easier than it is right now.”
Janiah Henry, 18, was not only voting in her first presidential election, but also working on Liz Johnson’s Congressional campaign and canvassing and text and phone banking for other Democratic candidates. Henry is a freshman political science major at Clark Atlanta University studying virtually from her home near Warner Robins.
She recalls starting to pay close attention to politics in 2012, after Trayvon Martin was killed.
“I watched his verdict and I watched George Zimmerman be found not guilty on television, and I saw my mom crying,” she said. “Constantly seeing people who looked like me and my mother and father and brother get shot in the street is what sparked it.”
Henry got involved with New Vision MSK, a Perry-based organization that works to increase civic awareness and political participation and power among Black women and girls in middle Georgia. She also canvassed for Abrams in 2018.
Johnson lost her bid to represent Georgia in the U.S. Congress, but another candidate Henry worked for earlier in 2020 won: in June, Anita Reynolds-Howard became the first woman and first Black person to win the position of district attorney for the Macon Judicial Circuit.
Jared Sawyer, Jr., Georgia coordinator for Black Youth Vote!, said the narrowness of Biden’s victory in the state, and the high stakes of the election, demonstrated the power of individual voters. That lesson might be especially clear in smaller communities that aren’t usually treated as political power centers.
“Even though I might have gone throughout my life believing that my vote doesn’t make a difference, now I see that it does in fact make a difference, because my neighborhood makes up a few thousand people, my county makes up a few tens of thousands of people,” he said.
The Senate runoffs and beyond
Approaching the runoffs, organizers said there has been little change in their work of canvassing and holding events and rallies to energize voters. Now, however, they have to get people excited to vote again.
Historically, that dynamic has not favored Democrats. In 2008, Jim Martin rode Obama’s strength in Georgia to a runoff against Saxby Chambliss for his Senate seat; Martin went from trailing Chambliss by about three points in the general to a 15-point trouncing in the runoff. In two runoffs in 2018, however, there was a smaller dropoff in Democratic voters.
Republican Sen. David Perdue gained nearly 800 more votes than Donald Trump in November, but 46,000 fewer ballots were cast in that Senate race. The results suggest some voters rebuked Trump, but not others within Republican party, and some Democrats cared only about the presidential race.
In a contest that will be decided by turnout, the entire state is in the spotlight. Columbus got a sign of its new prominence with visits from national political figures including President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
Early voting ends across the state on Thursday. More than 2.5 million people have already voted.
Georgia’s political future is not set in stone, Crocker, the Columbus pastor, said. And its path will depend on who shows up at the polls in January and beyond.
“It depends on whether or not we stay passionate about the change within the political arena,” he said. “Oftentimes, when people get something, they become complacent. ...It is my prayer that the organizations stay proactive (and) that we are a voice in it.”
Learning from the past
As a teenager, Bobby Fuse participated in voting rights marches in Americus, the tiny Sumter county seat in southwest Georgia. He was part of a network of Black activists, politicians, faith leaders and others who helped George Busbee defeat notorious segregationist Lester Maddox to become governor in 1974. The New York Times covered Busbee’s victory, thanks to Black voters, as proof that “racism is no longer the winning ticket” in the former Jim Crow South.
Fuse, one of the state’s 16 Democrat electors, sees roots in Biden’s Georgia victory not only in Abrams’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign, Jon Ossoff’s 2017 Congressional race, or other ultimately unsuccessful Democratic efforts in the 2010s, but in the political battles waged decades ago.
To Fuse, the work of organizations like the New Georgia Project, Fair Fight, Black Voters Matter, and many more in 2020 had echoes of 1974. And he saw a fresh emphasis on reaching out to voters all over the state, not only in metro Atlanta, that reminded him of his earlier experiences in politics, when he felt there were stronger connections between Black Georgians active in politics, spread across Atlanta and smaller cities, towns, and rural communities.
“At some point, over the last 20 years, we lost something in terms of the people who are in the urban area and the people in the rural areas,” he said.
Now, he sees that trend reversing, and Biden’s victory in the state — and the ongoing fight for every vote in the runoffs for Senate and public service commissioner— as evidence of the importance of paying attention to every community in Georgia.
Fuse, who watched Georgia shift from Democratic stronghold to reliably Republican, is careful not to read too much into Biden’s victory. The state has a Republican governor and secretary of state, and Republicans in control of the statehouse are getting ready to oversee redistricting in 2021.
Still, in southwest Georgia, he sees reasons for optimism.
“I think everybody wanted to vote the next day,” he said. “I mean they’re clamoring for signs, they want to see the candidates in their neighborhoods, there’s an excitement that’s still in the air two, three, four weeks after the election.”
This story was originally published December 31, 2020 at 6:00 AM.