BuzzFeed has a great must-read piece about how Stacey Abrams (D. GA) and Andrew Gillum’s (D. FL) candidacies are helping Democrats motivate young black voters to get out and vote:
As much as the Democratic Party needs candidates like Gillum and Abrams to energize the younger generation that makes up the party’s base, national Democrats say they are affecting swing voters, too.
What Gillum and Abrams are proving this cycle is that Democrats don’t have to decide whether to work to turn out the party’s base or try to convince swing voters, said Democratic Governors Association spokesperson Jared Leopold. “Their campaigns are proving that a strong economic message and a compelling personal story can both increase turnout and win over swing voters," Leopold said. (As of this week, Leopold said the DGA has invested $4 million in Florida and $2 million in Georgia. The Democratic activist and donor Steve Phillips this week noted recent estimates aren’t nearly enough.)
Part of it is Trump, said Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, the chair of the DGA. “You’ve got a candidate who is focused on bread and butter issues that affect people’s lives, including expanding health care, dealing with climate change, and economic progress,” Inslee said of Gillum. “He’s really speaking to the real issues, and [Republican Ron] DeSantis wants to be a talk show host and wants to see how many grandiose things he can say about his idol Donald Trump.”
Inslee told BuzzFeed News that he’s been impressed by Gillum’s “reasoned approach” to “real people” in the Sunshine State, which he said was badly “in need of some sunshine.”
Inslee’s candidate-focused approach, however, gets at something Democratic groups have identified as a problem. Democrats, with limited investment, have typically approached black voters late in election cycles and have focused messaging specifically on candidates who aren’t necessarily familiar to them, rather than on broader societal issues, said Guy Cecil, the executive director of Priorities USA. “What it ignores is a more fundamental challenge of how you connect the power of the vote with the issues that they care about,” Cecil said. But Gillum, Abrams, and other young candidates of color change that calculation. “Having a candidate that reflects their community helps us make that connection. We’re not relying on a surrogate, we’re relying on the candidate, and there’s no doubt that’s a huge benefit to us.”
Symone D. Sanders, the young political commentator and strategist who worked on Priorities USA Action’s research last year, said Gillum’s and Abrams’ success reflects young black Americans’ desire for more opportunities to elect younger candidates who look like them. “It’s absolutely helpful when the message is powerful, but when they can see people that look like them on the ballot we know that that’s added motivation.”
Priorities USA Action has made one of the biggest research pushes. As part of the $75 million it’s poured into the 2018 midterm election, it teamed up with the online civil rights organization Color of Change to conduct a series of focus groups geared toward gauging the political attitudes of young black voters. The groups were broken into two parts. One segment was a national online survey of nearly 1,000 black Americans under 35 made up of three turnout targets: those who voted in 2016 but tend to drop off in midterm elections; voters who are registered but did not vote in the 2016 election; and those who aren't registered to vote but expressed a willingness to do so in the future. The coalition also conducted a set of focus groups broken down into two age groups in St. Louis and Philadelphia last October.
The study found that the strongest motivational messages were race-specific, especially around issues of police violence — a “ubiquitous, visceral source of fear and anxiety,” according to the memo revealing the study’s findings. Voters were also motivated by solving problems like mass incarceration and by the Trump administration’s reversal of former President Obama’s initiatives while in office. In terms of a positive agenda, the study found these voters wanted candidates speaking directly on their plan to lower the cost of health care and on expanding job growth and wage increases. “The agenda item most important to respondents was a candidate’s commitment to creating jobs and raising wages, including among minorities and young people, and in disadvantaged neighborhoods,” the memo said.
The whole piece is worth the read. Both Abrams and Gillum's campaigns have gained national exposure and caught the mainstream media's attention. Michelle Goldberg for the New York Times nails Abrams candidacy perfectly:
Last year, before Stacey Abrams captured the Democratic nomination for the Georgia governor’s race, I asked her how a forthrightly progressive African-American woman could win in a Southern state that has been governed only by white men.
Her response was twofold. First, she argued that Democrats’ old strategy for winning in the South — running socially conservative white guys to try to lure former Democrats back to the party — has repeatedly failed.
At the same time, she said, Georgia, which is less than 53 percent non-Hispanic white, is full of people who would be receptive to her message, but who don’t vote, or don’t vote regularly. “There are enough Georgians who are going to see themselves, and believe in my capacity, if I can talk to them,” she told me. Among other things, she was putting resources into connecting with, and registering, rural African-Americans in the state’s south.
“We have to intentionally center voters of color from the beginning, because they are the majority of a Democratic coalition in the South, and they are certainly the majority of a Democratic coalition in Georgia,” Abrams said. She believed that, by allying with white liberals, those voters could elect a government in the old Confederacy that is responsive to their priorities. This would be more than a partisan upset — it would be a kind of revolution.
And despite her opponent’s efforts to steal this election, Abrams continues to power through to win this thing:
Stacey Abrams is sticking to her playbook. Yes, she is continuing to call on her Republican opponent Brian Kemp — who also is Georgia’s secretary of state — to resign his post as guardian of the state electoral system.
But whether he does or not, Abrams says her goal remains unchanged: to focus on turning out the very voters Kemp is trying to scare away from the polls.
Two voting rights groups filed a lawsuit on Thursday accusing Kemp (R) of unlawfully blocking 53,000 voter registrations ahead of the November election — a revelation that prompted Abrams’ calls for Kemp to step aside.
As ThinkProgress’ Kira Lerner reported this week, Kemp’s office, using an “exact match” voter registration system, flagged voter registration forms if an individual’s information did not perfectly match the information on file in the Department of Driver Services or Social Security Administration databases.
Abrams (D) told MSNBC that with the Georgia gubernatorial race all tied up, she likes her odds against Kemp.
A recent poll by the Atlanta Journal Constitution gave Kemp 47.7 percent of the vote and Abrams 46.3 percent, a result which Abrams feels undercounts her support because it does fully take into account long-marginalized minority and impoverished voters who have been a focus of her get-out-the-vote efforts.
“To be in a dead heat is a great thing for a Democrat, a great place for a Democrat to be, because we’re not just counting on likely voters. We’re also counting on unlikely voters, those who don’t normally show up in midterm elections,” Abrams told The Rachel Maddow Show.
And Abrams was already prepared for this bull shit:
“For YEARS I’ve been trying to get people to give a shit about ‘Exact Match,’ before the day after the voter-registration deadline,” says a Georgia Democratic campaign operative, who wished to remain anonymous.
The exasperation in their voice is obvious. Exact Match is the gentrified name for Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s anti-black voting apparatus, which he’s wielded with such efficiency that Jeff Sessions is jealous.
Even though Kemp is in a close election with Democrat Stacey Abrams for the governor’s mansion in Georgia, he’s still allowed to oversee the election as secretary of state (Abrams’ camp just called for Kemp to resign as secretary of state). Exact Match allows the state to purge voter registrations if the voter registration has any differences—no matter how small—from other state documents. For example, if your gun license says “Kanye West” and your voter registration says “Kanye Omari West” and your marriage license says “Kanye O. West,” even if everything from Social Security numbers to tax forms and previous overrated albums all lineup, Brian Kemp will snatch your application.
This process was already settled by the courts in 2017, because over 63 percent of the voter registrations that were canceled were from minority applicants. Strangely, over 70 percent of those who have been removed from the rolls are African American. Yet, thanks to the Republican-dominated state legislature in Georgia, Exact Match is back, and over 53,000 voter registrations are on hold just under 30 days before the election.
Calling this labyrinth of voter blockages the new Jim Crow doesn’t do it justice. It takes a special kind of white man to basically admit that he can’t win an election in a Republican state against a black woman without cheating. You could call it Brian Crow but I don’t think Kemp would want to be that close to anything so black.
As secretary of state, Kemp has waged war against nonpartisan voting rights organizations like the New Georgia Project, purging over 600,000 voters from the rolls since 2017 (without informing anyone) and routinely shutting down or changing the voting locations in Georgia’s rural black counties. Now, this is usually the point in the story where readers get mad, then despondent and frustrated. Here we go again, black voters are about to get screwed over and the Republicans will be victorious again. Why, oh, why don’t the Democrats ever learn??? Why are Democrats still playing Uno while Republicans are stacking books in Spades?
This time, it’s different.
Maybe it’s because there are more African Americans and people of color working on the ground in Georgia than in the past; maybe it’s the existential threat of Donald Trump; maybe people have just learned their lessons. Whatever the reason, this time, black folks in Georgia are prepared.
“Our path to victory isn’t contingent on the registration of new voters,” said the Democratic operative I spoke to. “Victory is on low propensity-existing voters. People who maybe voted for Obama or the mayor but not anybody else. They’re there, you just have to activate them. I say this all the time—people have always made the erroneous assumption that to win, you have to register all these new thousands of people. That is important, but a lot of it is just getting out the people who are already registered.”
In other words, the Abrams campaign and African-American activists on the ground knew that Kemp’s voter suppression tricks were coming and were prepared. Their election success map assumes a certain percentage of votes being lost to suppression tactics. On top of that, there are teams of election lawyers in every single competitive county in Georgia ready to strike on behalf of voting rights. Over a million absentee-ballot applications were sent out weeks ago with the idea being that they can be sent in and counted before someone would know they’ve been purged and to avoid any Election Day shenanigans that Kemp is likely to pull.
Meanwhile, in Florida, Ron DeSantis (R. FL) has chosen to run a disgusting, Trump-style campaign:
Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis is now referring to reporters as his opponent's "Fake News allies," because, well, they're doing what they're supposed to do.
In a Friday fundraising email sent to supporters, the Florida Republican stated that Democrat Andrew Gillum and his "Fake News allies" are "pouring over our end-of-quarter report for the last 12 days looking for any weakness they can exploit in the final days of the election." (Ed. note: that's spelled "poring," Ron.)
Well, yeah. Poring over how a candidate spends money and who gives them money is a big part of the job description of a politics reporter.
Last week DeSantis posted his biggest fundraising haul yet, with more than $8 million in total donations, which is obviously something worth looking into. He also spent a considerable amount of cash on attack ads, and is the first Florida gubernatorial candidate to run such ads in the strike zone of a hurricane while the storm is happening. This is also worth looking into.
Yeah, about that:
DeSantis raised nearly $1.2 million in hard money, including 125 contributions for the maximum campaign donation of $3,000. In all, his report showed more than 7,500 contributions with two-thirds of those donors chipping in $50 or less — before the new report, DeSantis had considerably lagged behind Democratic opponent Andrew Gillum when it came to “small dollar” donors.
The rest of the monster haul came in through DeSantis’ affiliated PAC, Friends of Ron DeSantis, which posted more than $7 million in receipts during the reporting period covering Sept. 29 through Oct. 5.
The weekly donor list was around 150 names long, but the name at the top, Kenneth C. Griffin, was responsible for the vast majority of that haul. Griffin is a Chicago-based investor, hedge fund manager and philanthropist who is also serving as the national finance chair for New Republican PAC, the political committee fueling Gov. Rick Scott‘s campaign to unseat U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson.
Griffin cut DeSantis a check for $5 million on Oct. 3. The next-largest was a quartet of $100,000 contributions — one apiece from Joe Anderson III of Old Town, Thomas Peterffy of Palm Beach, David McNeil of Hinsdale, Illinois, and The Middlesex Corporation.
The reports also showed a massive amount of spending, with nearly $7 million exiting DeSantis’ war chest. The bulk of that cash, $6.5 million, went to the Republican Party of Florida. RPOF provided the DeSantis campaign with $723,000 worth of “in-kind” support during the week.
Though DeSantis scored a fundraising coup, Gillum didn’t flame out.
The Tallahassee Mayor has so far reported $3.3 million in committee fundraising during the same stretch via Forward Florida. Team Gillum has yet to upload their new campaign finance report, but their last report showed $1.7 million in hard money, with nearly 12,500 donations, 219 max checks and a whopping 9,800 contributions of $50 or less.
Democratic Governors Association topped the committee ledger with a $1 million check. Florida-based philanthropist Marsha Laufer, the wife of Henry Laufer, chipped in another $500,000, bringing her overall contributions to Team Gillum up to $780,000. Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, a possible 2020 presidential candidate, sent over $250,000, while the Barbara Stiefel Trust and Miami law firm Podhurst Orseck PA each wrote $100,000 checks.
Committee spending came in at $4.2 million for the week, nearly all of that cash heading to the Florida Democratic Party.
As of Oct. 5, Gillum had a combined $7.6 million on hand while DeSantis had $6.6 million in the bank between his two accounts.
Also, DeSantis really doesn’t want to talk about the issue voters really care about:
There are big differences between Andrew Gillum's and Ron DeSantis' proposals to improve Floridians' access to health coverage and control health costs, and it is extends well beyond DeSantis opposing and Gillum supporting Medicaid expansion in the Sunshine State.
For starters, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Gillum has a healthcare plan.
Republican gubernatorial nominee DeSantis does not. At least none he is ready to talk much about three weeks before Election Day with tens of thousands of votes already cast.
This is striking for several reasons.
One, DeSantis and his running mate Jeanette Nunez have been saying for more than a month they were just about to release their health care plan.
Two, Gillum is making healthcare a central part of his agenda, even if his expanding Medicaid and "Medicare for all" proposals have a snowball's chance in Boca of getting through Florida's Republican-dominated legislature. Democrats are attacking DeSantis as a threat to voters' access to healthcare, and the Republican nominee is barely pushing back.
Three, health care is about the most important policy issue on the minds of Floridians. Look at Google's analysis of the most searched political topics in Florida over the past week. In more than 60 of 67 counties, health care was number one.
Similarly, an NBC News/Marist Florida poll in late September found health care to be the top issue among both registered Florida voters and likely Florida voters, just ahead of jobs and the economy.
Democrats see a clear advantage over Republicans on healthcare, after years of being pummeled over the Affordable Care Act. In state after state, Democratic candidates for governor and U.S. Senate are airing TV ads accusing Republican opponents of wanting to roll back popular provisions of Obamacare, especially the requirement that insurance companies cover people with pre-existing conditions such as cancer or diabetes.
Rarely, if ever, do the Democrats mention the words "Affordable Care Act" or "Obamacare" in their commercials. Expanding Medicaid polls much better than the Affordable Care Act that made it possible for most states to do it.
"I believe that healthcare should be a right, not a privilege," Gillum says in one of multiple campaign ads that mention health care. "In the state of Florida everyday working people, middle-class people, should not be one illness away from bankruptcy."
Another recent TV ad from the Florida Democratic Party: "They're called pre-existing conditions and everybody knows somebody who has one. But in Congress, Ron DeSantis demanded that any new health law eliminate protections for people with pre-existing conditions. He'd let insurance companies deny them coverage. And when he was asked what cancer patients should do without health insurance, DeSantis said, 'show up to the emergency room.'"
That emergency room comment came in a 2017 CNN interview, where DeSantis said, "If people really need it, if they show up at the emergency room, they do get care."
Also, Gillum has also been acting like a real Governor:
Tallahassee, Florida Mayor Andrew Gillum was busy cleaning up debris left from Hurricane Michael on Thursday. Video showed Gillum and a city worker going at some downed vegetation with a chainsaw.
Gillum is in a tight gubernatorial race with his Republican opponent Ron DeSantis. If Gillum wins in November, he would be Florida's first black governor and the first Democrat to hold the office in the state in almost 20 years.
A campaign spokesperson told Business Insider that Gillum was working in his official capacity as mayor during the cleanup activity.
Hurricane Michael hit Florida as a Category 4 storm on Wednesday, causing damage and destruction throughout the state and several towns along the Gulf of Mexico. The storm is being blamed for more than a dozen fatalities in Florida and nearby regions.
Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum (D) announced Saturday that he will miss the first of three scheduled debates against Rep. Ron DeSantis (R) as he directs storm cleanup efforts in Tallahassee.
Gillum, who is the mayor of Tallahassee, told the Tampa Bay Times in a statement that he would miss Tuesday's planned debate in Orlando, Fla., and would return to the campaign trail on Thursday.
"In times like these, campaigning has to take a backseat to governing. My job is to keep our community safe and ensure Tallahassee recovers as quickly and fully as possible," he told the Times.
"Over the past several days I have been unable to participate in dozens of campaign events, and this week that will include our participation in the debate sponsored by Telemundo 31 Orlando. I deeply appreciate the organizers' understanding of the situation in Tallahassee. We will work diligently to ensure Telemundo and its audience are represented in the two scheduled debates and other possible forums," he added.
Let’s make history in both Georgia and Florida and help both Abrams and Gillum ride the Blue Wave to victory. Click below to donate and get involved with Abrams and Gillum’s campaigns:
Stacey Abrams
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