I spent two weeks visiting and talking to organizers and volunteers in the states where Hope Springs from Field PAC volunteers canvassed last year. The first week, my Western States swing, took place in December and were diaried here (Arizona, Nevada, Montana, Wisconsin and Michigan). Earlier this month, i hit Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia and Northern Florida. This diary summarizes what our Georgia volunteers decided we would focus on in that state in 2024. Like North Carolina, Georgia has no Senate election, nor does it have a Reproductive Freedom amendment to vote on this year. But 28 organizers from Georgia had participated in GOTV in Ohio, both in August and November, and they have been feeling mighty proud about their help in Ohio. Georgia organizers also have worked in the GOTV efforts in North Carolina during their primaries last year. Georgia is the state where the “new” Hope Springs vision was born, in their determination to re-elect Rev. Warnock in 2022. And they seem equally determined to deliver Georgia to the president in 2024.
I’d argue that our effort in 2024 is a pure Electoral College play but some of the the volunteers i talked to in Georgia argued that 2024 is a rebuttal to Trump’s argument that Georgia was stolen from him in 2020. “I don’t know anyone here that believes that,” a volunteer in the Atlanta metro area said. Which is interesting because i know he comes from one of the Kemp-Warnock precincts.
We had a lot to talk about in Georgia. Court-ordered redistricting, volunteer participation in other states, President Biden, Free Voter Photo IDs, Voter Registration and follow-up on our distribution of Constituent Service Requests. In most states, not that many organizers showed up (most, if not all, of us have pretty demanding jobs), but our Georgia organizers tend to be younger, African-American and fairly new to politics. Many of these volunteers never had a chance to see the Obama campaign in action and i’d bet a lot of them would have wanted to.
I met with volunteers and organizers in 4 different areas in the Atlanta metro region. Much of our strategy from last year in this area has been undermined by the new congressional map. The Georgia state legislators did us no favors, which doesn’t mean we are curtailing our efforts, just that we understand Power and Determination.
Like North Carolina, our volunteers and organizers in Georgia weren’t happy that the new maps were not released until the last minute. This seems to have been a concerted effort to prevent more “interference” in the process. Or, like one volunteer said, “It was a Big F U to Democrats.”
The redrawing of the state’s congressional districts followed years of litigation in state and federal courts and has sparked a new round of litigation. But, as our volunteers pointed out, Republicans struck too late to change the law before the 2024 election. Like Florida before the 2022 elections, Republicans packed Democrats into Blue Districts. It was especially a big fu aimed at Lucy McBath. “The latest map adds a new Black majority district west of Atlanta, but state Democrats said it violates the VRA in a new way because it changed the district currently held by Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath.” McBath’s current seat was a “coalition” district with a minority of white voters and a majority of Black, Asian and Hispanic or Latino voters. But the judge disagreed with that argument and McBath choose to run in the new majority African-American district (GA-06) rather than contest her current district that now has a majority of Republicans in it.
I went down to Southern Georgia and met with volunteers and organizers in 5 different areas there. Our volunteers there were much more interested in our Voter Registration efforts, especially in those counties with historically high precedents of lynching in the past. But they were also really interested in the numbers we produced last year. I’ve said before that there are some volunteers who have gotten really competitive about this.
And here’s why. Hope Springs from Field volunteers knocked on 775,952 doors in Georgia last year. That’s almost two million doors (1,904,379) over the last three years — more than 50% of the households in the state (although we have definitely hit the same doors in Georgia). We registered 370 New Voters in the state, and re-registered 1,409 (for a total of 1,779 voters registered at their doors). We collected 1,148 Constituent Service Requests here, and we found the CSRs to be extremely popular in the minority communities where we knocked (African-American and Asian-Americans more than Hispanics). These latter numbers do not include those from our partners in the Black Churches; these are the results from volunteers who knocked on doors.
Hope Springs from Field PAC has been knocking on doors since 2021 in a grassroots-led effort to prepare the Electoral Battlegrounds in what has been called the First and Second Rounds of a traditional Five Round Canvass. We are taking those efforts to the doors of Democrats and unaffiliated voters with a systematic approach that reminds them not only that Democrats care, but Democrats are determined to deliver the best government possible to all Americans.
Obviously, we rely on grassroots support, so if you support field/grassroots organizing, voter registration (and follow-up) and our efforts to protect our voters, we would certainly appreciate your support:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/fistfulofsteel
Hope Springs from Field PAC understands that volunteer to voter personal interactions are critical. We believe that in-person voter contact that is interactive and volunteer-driven is key to success in 2024. But we need your help.
We raise money before we start knocking on doors in order to pay for literature (we leave a piece of lit at every house we target) and for access to the voter file (VAN). We dropped more than 2,066,424 pieces of lit in Ohio last year, and we are still trying to pay off the debt to the printer for our GOTV literature we dropped in October and November. We’ll need to do that before we can start printing up 2024 lit!
Hope Springs will be working to Expand the Electorate as well as expanding our Early Organizing with our Issues Questionnaire into Congressional District 6 this year where Cong. McBath will be running. But there was this feeling on retaining the momentum to surprise Republicans again in 2024.
We talked quite a bit about continuing our special projects from last year. These two special projects were an intensive Voter Registration effort in the counties that Jhacova Williams found had lower voter registration rates among African-Americans than the norm. “Black Americans who reside in counties in the South where there was a higher number of lynchings from 1882 to 1930 have lower voter registration today.” Hope Springs has been using this data to target Voter Registration efforts in those counties, especially in our recruiting and prepping Divine 9 chapters to canvass in counties like Decatur (among others) in the Black Belt. Georgia is not the only state, North Carolina and Northern Florida are also part of this program.
Volunteers seem especially interested in expanding this in the GA-01 and GA-12 Congressional Districts this year.
The other special program is organizing Voter Photo ID Days for primarily African-American voters who do not possess the required identification to vote now. Voters can obtain a free Photo ID at their local Registrar’s Office and voters seem to find this option less embarrassing and time consuming than trying to get one at their local DMV. We have helped 22,946 Georgia voters get their Free Voter Photo IDs since we started canvassing in Georgia. 94.3% of these voters were African-American and 68.8% were older than 60 years old. 61.6% of them were female. There were many stories of voters who had never had a photo ID in the past and more than you would expect of people who said they had been unable to obtain a birth certificate on their own (this is something that the AME Churches are especially helpful in resolving).
If you are able to contribute to our efforts to protect Democratic voters, especially in minority communities, expand the electorate, and believe in grassroots efforts to increase voter participation and election protection, please do. We need your help:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/fistfulofsteel
You can follow that link for our mailing address, as well (for those who would rather send us a check). Thank you for your support! This work depends on you!