Georgia is ground zero for control of the Senate. 538 reports that Senator Warnock is the most endangered Democratic incumbent. As crazy as it seems, the latest Atlanta Journal poll shows Herschel Walker ahead of Senator Warnock 46 to 44 (within the margin of error) with 3% of the vote going to the Libertarian candidate.https://www.ajc.com/politics/ajc-poll-gives-republicans-the-edge-in-most-races/CPN7VPBV5VAADJZ77I7VBPPRGY/ And in Georgia, if a candidate gets less than 50% of the vote, there is a run-off. Prior to 2021 Democrats lost run-off elections by large margins in 1992 and 2008. Unfortunately, most Republican voters would rather vote for a Republican shyster or incompetent than a smart and honest progressive Democrat. Florida elected Rick Scott whose company paid Medicare a 5 billion dollar fine for defrauding Medicare. In New Orleans, a large number of White Republican voters preferred the crooked Mayor Nagin (currently serving time) who was AWOL during Katrina eating sushi at the Hyatt Regency, to progressive and competent Mitch Landrieu and voted for the corrupt, corporatecrat Congressman “Dollar-Bill” Jefferson (who was found with $90,000 in cash in his freezer) instead of a progressive Black candidate. There may be “shy” Republican votes for Warnock, but I would not count on many.
Georgia is a complicated state which has been slowly been trending Democratic after the Republicans captured almost total control in the early 2000’s. Georgia lays claim to three of America’s moral giants — Martin Luther King, Jimmy Carter, and John Lewis. Atlanta was famously dubbed the “City too busy to hate;” Charles Weltner, the White Congressman representing Atlanta, was the only Representative from the Deep South to vote for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. After a long drought (1992) Georgia voted Democratic for President in 2020 by an average of 5 votes per precinct despite Republican efforts to suppress African American and younger voters. A large African-American turnout, progressive White voters in Atlanta, and growing numbers of Asian-American and Latino voters explain Biden’s victory. The most recent round of voter suppression by the Republican legislature include laws criminalizing giving water to voters standing in long lines, reducing the number of drop boxes in 4 Atlanta counties by 75%, limiting the availability of the drop boxes to 9 to 5, and setting up “gotcha” requirements for absentee votes. www.npr.org/...
The prerequisite for any Democratic victory in Georgia are big leads in the two core Atlanta Metro counties, Fulton and DeKalb. Biden won both in 2020 by margins of about 250,000 votes. Although the city of Atlanta is in Fulton county and the City of South Fulton has been called “the Blackest city in America,” Biden performed better in DeKalb than Fulton with 83% of the vote compared to 73% in Fulton. DeKalb is 55% Black, 29% non-Latino White, 6% Asian-American, and 9% Latino. It includes traditional suburbs, gentrified and green near suburbs, and poorer urban areas. It is a favored area for the Black Middle Class who can afford to live closer to downtown Atlanta.
Since I live in a state which is hopelessly Republican, I have knocked on doors in 6 previous elections in driving distance states with close races. I am motivated by guilt for waiting until election day to work in the 2000 election. www.dailykos.com/.... https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2012/10/31/1152818/-Ohio-in-the-Trenches This year I chose Georgia and decided to start early.
What I have learned as an out of state volunteer is that the most important mission is to pursue multiple options to find the setting where you will be most productive. Your job as a volunteer in a campaign or working with a non-profit is to find the person(s) who will do what they can to utilize your talents. If you try to be “considerate” and only pursue one channel at a time, you are likely to be forgotten. I was disappointed and a little naive about the level of organization of the Georgia Democratic Party and the Fulton County Democratic party because I expected more from the state which produced the miracle result of the Warnock/Ossoff victories. Online, DeKalb county is far more organized and user friendly than Fulton county with multiple canvassing events and locations listed. https://www.mobilize.us/dekalbcountydemocrats/ I spoke to someone at an Abrams spearheaded DeKalb County staging location on SnapdragonRoad who told me that they had no walk lists for Friday but would start on Saturday. The turnout was about 40 to 50 volunteers, pretty good for 50 days before an election. They were most helpful in downloading the Minivanvoter app, but unfortunately, 80% of my list were in huge, inaccessible apartment houses. If this were my first time canvassing, I am not sure that I would have canvassed again.
The next day was more productive. I went to a staging area organized by Saira Draper, Democratic Party nominee for Georgia House District 90, civil rights attorney, and former voter protection director for the Ossoff and Warnock campaigns. With a little effort I was able to enter a large gated complex with a pedestrian gate. In general, the mostly African American voters I met were enthusiastic for Tracey Abrams and Senator Warnock. I did not meet a single African American voter who thought that Herschel Walker was a reasonable choice. It was a small sample, but I met no Black male who was skeptical of Tracey Abrams as reported in the media. One demographic gap is that I met almost no young voters under 30; they are a hard to reach demographic going door to door. However, one positive test of the climate was that no young Black male felt that he could tell me the election didn’t matter, etc. A University of Georgia grad told me that she went to UGA when Walker did and said that he took remedial classes. Another woman said she woke up thinking that she wants a smart Senator, unlike Walker, who said that he is “not smart like Warnock.” www.nytimes.com/...
I also called the Fulton County Democratic Party on Friday and left a message that I was from out of town and only available to canvass Friday afternoon, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. They did not respond by phone, text, or email. I know that they are busy, but screening and prioritizing calls is part of many jobs.
The Georgia Democratic Party did a little better. I left the same message on Friday and they returned my call on Monday. I was not pleasant when I told them that they were a day late and a dollar short, although in the world of political campaigns, this was a better than average performance because they did call back within 3 days. I was not reassured when the Party worker proceeded to tell me what my priorities as a Volunteer should be. In my experience a somewhat dismissive attitude towards volunteers is common among campaign officials who frequently view volunteers as interchangeable. After she said “ I don't work on weekends” I asked to speak to her supervisor because I wanted to ask someone in charge “Why doesn't the Democratic Party of Georgia work on weekends 4 weeks before early voting starts?” Weekends are the golden times for door to door. To paraphrase Talleyrand, wasting a weekend is worse than a crime, it is blunder. Despite the initial negative encounter, she advised me that she would pass the message to her supervisor and connected me to the supervisor. I left a message and I explained that I needed a list for Monday afternoon, but the response came about a week later.
As Monday afternoon, prime canvassing time approached, I had no walk list. I was saved by the organizational skills of candidate Saira Draper, who left brochures and information needed to download a walk list on her front porch. Not surprisingly, her campaign reported that her district contacted more voters than any other house district in Georgia last weekend.
I do not want to suggest that the Georgia Democratic Party effort in Atlanta is worse than that of other campaigns or that my efforts were in vain. They are better than average. Better to identify an apartment complex as inaccessible 7 weeks before an election than the week before. The DeKalb County Party reported that 404 voters were contacted at their homes and 1,502 doors knocked on this past weekend. I probably talked to as many voters on the street as were on the list and almost all were positive so 404 is certainly an undercount of contacts in DeKalb that weekend.
This is a good start, but it will take bigger effort than this to win. I hope that the frustrations which I encountered were atypical and that other volunteers had little or no difficulty becoming active in the campaign. Talk is cheap, many volunteers never show up so it is understandable that staff are skeptical about offers to volunteer, but I hope those organizations tighten their game to leave no volunteer and no voter behind. If you can make phone calls or are in driving distance of Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus, or Savannah - you can make a difference. www.georgiademocrat.org/... It hurts to lose, but it hurts more to lose a winnable election. Whenever anyone says my vote doesn’t matter or the two parties are the same, I remind them that if 500 more votes had been counted for Al Gore, hundreds of thousands of people would still be alive today and the US would not have wasted a trillion dollars on the Iraq war.
