UNSPLASH
The Atlanta metro area saw a burst of organizing in 2020, which Democrats hope to capitalize on.
This article appears in the June 2022 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
With a key Senate seat and the governor’s mansion on the table this year, Georgia is again at the center of the political universe.
For governor, Republican incumbent Brian Kemp is facing Stacey Abrams in a rematch of their explosive 2018 contest. Over on the Senate line, the Rev. Raphael Warnock is defending the seat he narrowly won less than two years ago against Herschel Walker, the football icon reborn as a Trump-endorsed outsider with an extremely standard Republican worldview. It’s one of a handful of races that will determine control of the Senate, and thus any chance the Biden administration will have to accomplish anything of lasting significance.
All this makes the two contests blockbuster events, and with the ungodly spending to prove it.
For Georgia progressives, the task is mobilization. First, they must convince voters these races will have real consequences for people’s lives. More importantly, they must convince people to stick around and build popular power that will last longer than individual politicians, who come and go.
“We understand that if we don’t have a vehicle for the multiracial working class … then we won’t make the progress that we need to make even as we become a purple state and then trend blue,” Britney Whaley, the Southeast regional director for the Working Families Party (WFP), who’s based in Georgia, tells the Prospect. It’s an increasingly common progressive argument: Voting for the “right” people isn’t enough. Most Americans have seen how corporate lobbyists swarm Congress after every election to block virtually anything good. The only way to make politicians reliably do things for ordinary people is through organized public pressure, progressive ones included.
“The approach is just to, quite frankly, keep it real with people,” Whaley says. Instead of focusing solely on candidates, they’re pitching voters on “the power of us. The power that we have if we take collective action.”
IN A STORY ON GEORGIA’S POPULIST HISTORY, I boiled the remarkable 2020 and 2021 victories down to two core elements: aggressive outreach to Georgia’s younger and more diverse voters, plus plain economic populism that spoke to people’s desire for a fair and equal world.
The first half is well known. Back in 2014, Stacey Abrams began an uphill crusade to convince Democrats that they could win the state by tapping into the growing numbers of unregistered young people and people of color with a slightly more progressive message.
Few Democrats listened in the 2016 campaign. As Greg Bluestein writes in Flipped: How Georgia Turned Purple and Broke the Monopoly on Republican Power, Abrams and other local Georgia leaders practically “begged Hillary Clinton’s campaign to take the state seriously” in 2016, but their pleas fell on deaf ears.
Four years later, nothing was the same. Abrams’s strategy, plus suburban nausea with Trump, pushed Joe Biden to victory. Then in the runoff elections in January 2021, Warnock and Jon Ossoff sent Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler packing.
Importantly, in the crucial final days, their campaigns braided Abrams’s strategy together with a clear populist economic message. “If you send Jon and the Reverend to Washington,” Biden said at a Georgia rally, “those $2,000 checks will go out the door.” Around the same time, a real ad from the Warnock campaign read, “Want a $2,000 check? Vote Warnock.”
As a result, turnout nearly hit presidential levels. And Black voters came out in droves, proving that Democrats’ most reliable, neglected, and economically progressive voting bloc can flex real muscle when they’re given a compelling reason. For the first time in decades, Georgia was a solid shade of purple.
Despite enormous spending and outreach of their own, Democrats shared credit with a vast network of independent labor and racial justice groups that mobilized seas of volunteers to knock on doors, text, and call by the millions.
Among them was Black Voters Matter (BVM), a nonprofit that doesn’t campaign for candidates, but spent the campaign zigzagging through often-neglected Black corners of the state doing voter education and outreach. They’re still there today, broadcasting that winning real change requires independent mass power.
“Voting is one way to do that. It is probably one of the most powerful tools that you can use, but it’s not the only tool,” Fenika Miller, BVM’s senior state organizing manager for Georgia, tells the Prospect. For BVM, the main event is “building power at the local level through grassroots activism.” That’s how “[we] make sure our communities and our children have a good quality of life and get the justice they deserve.”
THE NATIONAL POLITICAL CLIMATE will be very important.
For the moment, Donald Trump isn’t dominating national attention, so Democrats will be less able to leverage his unpopularity. Meanwhile, most of Biden’s promised change has stalled out due to either the petty sabotage of corporate Democrats, who killed his Build Back Better agenda, or the president’s own reluctance to use his executive power. As a result, organizers must keep voters engaged without a bogeyman to motivate them, or concrete progress on Democrats’ long-standing promises to strengthen the safety net, bolster voting rights, and avert climate catastrophe.
With such a pitiful offensive record, and the president’s deepening unpopularity, it may be hard to convince voters that defending Democrats’ fragile Senate majority is worth great effort.
But despite all this, the polls have Warnock basically deadlocked with Walker, who The Atlanta Journal-Constitution writes “is on cruise control headed to the May 24 primary.”
Republican enthusiasm for Walker isn’t surprising. In Flipped, Bluestein covers Georgia Republicans’ desperation to “make a statement” with “a woman, a person of color, someone who could help broaden the party’s appeal.” As a Black man, Walker fits the bill. He’s also a beloved local icon and political outsider with ordinary conservative positions on immigration, the economy, and fossil fuels, which makes him a hit with both Trump’s base and the stuffier crowd horrified by Trump’s bad manners.
BEN GRAY/AP PHOTO
The Rev. Raphael Warnock has focused on pocketbook issues, like capping the price of insulin, to propel his re-election chances.
For his part, Warnock has focused tightly on classic pocketbook issues that got him elected last time. He’s pushing to cap the price of insulin, pass student loan debt relief, expand Medicaid, and chase after “price-gougers” in the fossil fuel and global shipping industries, with evident conviction.
Locally, Republicans have been swinging sledgehammers at voting rights, abortion rights, and health care, pitting them squarely against the majority view of Georgians in almost every case. It’s deeply unsettling, but also illuminates the possibilities that lie on the other side of ejecting Republicans from power.
Georgia hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since 1999. And with Abrams gunning for the state’s highest office again, voters have a chance to send a powerful message about the direction they’d like to see the state go. Abrams’s pitch to voters has two tracks: a frank acknowledgment that times are hard, and a package of policy ideas to repair some of the damage.
“While we have to speak about a vision for the future,” she said on a recent episode of Pod Save America, “we have to acknowledge the real pain people are feeling” as they face economic, social, and health care crises. “We’ve gotta give people permission to be worried and be unhappy, but to also know that that pain is being met with real plans for their success.”
Concretely, that means strengthening voting rights, expanding affordable housing, implementing a green-jobs program, and accepting Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid—political and moral no-brainers.
You can hear echoes of this from the Working Families Party, which endorsed Abrams, along with a road map for future change. “It feels like everyone is having a challenging time right now because we are,” Whaley says. “We’re not at doors talking to people trying to sugarcoat it. There’s no great white hope. We’re all we got. We have to organize and make demands of our government, or as we have seen, it won’t work for us.”
ALAS, THIS EXPANSIVE VIEW OF POLITICS is all that progressive activists are left with, thanks to Democrats’ poor performance at the federal level. Organizers are thus making a different pitch. Whaley and Miller both use the word “365” to describe the timescale organizers need to work on—that is, every day of the year.
Since the last round of elections, WFP has hosted a handful of state-of-the-city and—county addresses to keep the flame lit on working-class issues and give people a “political home to continue organizing and asking tough questions,” Whaley says. They’ve also hired a rural organizer, and plan to bring on more so that it “supports our ongoing effort” to “really make sure we engage folks 365.” That includes everything from their legislative agenda, which emphasizes education and criminal justice reform, to their endorsement process, to building a strong multiracial working-class majority.
These things understandably take time, and trust. Whaley goes on to stress the importance of building deep, lasting relationships and a spirit of collectivism “where we have an invitation.” “We are in metro Atlanta, Athens, Brunswick, Savannah, Albany, Columbus,” Whaley says. “The same places where we had a presence for the runoff is where we’ve continued to organize.” “The goal isn’t to double the number of places—it’s to double down in those places.”
Similarly, BVM is “engaging folks 365,” Miller says. Often led by their local partners in Black communities across the state, they’ve touched everything from voting rights, criminal justice reform, and housing rights to environmental damage, maternal health, and neighborhood recreation. “There’s so many 365 issues,” Miller adds. “The issues that affect Black voters don’t start or stop on Election Day.”
That nonstop involvement showed up in the 2021 municipal elections. Miller cites that “Black voter turnout was up about 13 percent in some of the counties across rural Georgia. And so that was a good indicator of the strength of how we’re going to lean into these 2022 midterm elections.”
The idea is that if people have a real way to participate in the decisions that shape their lives, then they’ll recognize that voting is just one tool among many. Once it’s no longer viewed as some depressing occasional obligation, and a majority is committed to organizing popular power with a vision for the future, they might also vote more consistently.
Whaley outlines some key features of the idea. The vast majority of multiracial working-class people “feel like you should be able to work 40 hours a week and take care of your family and have affordable housing and have an education that’s fully funded,” she says. “The majority of us want Medicaid expansion,” she continues. Instead of fighting the culture wars with Republicans on critical race theory and other shiny cultural objects that they’re hoping voters stay glued to, “we win by talking to people about how we make government work for them. Everyone has skin in the game. So how can you positively change the material conditions of people who are struggling?”
