Successfully convincing black voters to turn out “could overwhelm the political system if Democratic candidates persuade them that voting will get them power” for advancing their interests, writes Nsé Ufot, executive director of the New Georgia Project Action Fund. Despite project founder Stacey Abram’s monumental 2016 efforts to reach them, roughly 900,000 eligible black people stayed home, she writes in the New York Times. A majority of those were in Atlanta.
Exacerbating the problem in 2020 is the pandemic and Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s decision to reopen the state for business too early even for the acting president. A model from Georgia Tech predicts COVID-19 deaths in the state could more than quadruple by August.
Voter suppression efforts remain a serious issue in a state where Kemp “served as umpire, player and scorekeeper” in the 2016 election he won over Abrams by 54,700 votes. Efforts to close polling locations and purge voter rolls produced the longest lines in the country that year, Ufot explains.
Ufot expects the pandemic and Republican efforts to ramp up voter suppression and intimidation will make it even harder to motivate black voters this fall. The refrain she hears repeated is, “Will our votes even be counted?”
What to do? Ufot writes:
If Democrats invest in an enormous marketing and organizing campaign that persuades black people and young people to participate in our democracy, we will win. That campaign should answer uncomfortable questions about what happened in Georgia in 2018 and explain how this year will be different. Through millions of personal conversations, organizers can connect the dots between who makes decisions that puts their lives at risk and who can make things better. That’s how we can show young people grieving the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in South Georgia that voting is a way to create real change by electing new sheriffs and prosecutors.
Campaigns never balk at investing significant resources to court moderate white men. But when all the data is laid out about black people, why does the political industry hesitate? Black people have long been the most loyal supporters of the Democratic Party — indeed, no other major voting bloc is as loyal to a political party as black people.
Every 10 new black voters nets eight Democratic votes, but the party gets only two net votes for every 10 new white, college-educated female voters. Democrats have to stop treating black people as deserving of only mailers after Labor Day and instead see them as the core of the multiracial coalition.
“If Democrats invest” is the problem, as I see it. Who Democrats? The Democrats? There is no The Democrats.
One of the leaders of North Carolina’s Bernie Sanders delegation to the 2016 national convention in Philadelphia called to say he’d just come out of his first caucus meeting with the convention’s 57 delegations.
Fifty-seven? Right. Fifty states, the territories, the District of Columbia, and Democrats Abroad. As often as critics condemn the Democratic Party, the call brought home that there is no The Democrats. There are 57 party organizations that trickled into the union over nearly two centuries, each with its own charter and bylaws, local history, and local languages and customs (not all of them European). The Democratic National Committee may organize the quadrennial convention and administer the national voter file, but it is not the One Ring that rules them all. Chairman Tom Perez runs the DNC. He does not run the party.
Therein lies the problem of addressing Ufot’s desire for Democrats to invest more in turning out the black vote. Democrats are no more a coherent group than black voters. There is no central authority charged with treating black voters as deserving more than mailers after Labor Day. There are only candidates, their campaigns, under-resourced state party organizations, and assorted Democrat-curious, nonprofit advocacy groups. There is no The Democrats.
What makes it appear Republicans are better organized is the network of millionaire/billionaire-funded foundations and nonprofits supporting right-wing agendas. Their donors might belong to the Republican Party but they are not the party. The Democratic Party has no such support network as Martin Longman wrote of the “wingnut welfare” system in 2017.
Ufot acknowledges that obliquely:
We need foundations, state and federal governments and the Democrats to prevent and neutralize disinformation campaigns. They ought to invest in trusted messengers to spread competing messages with good information, in addition to inspirational candidates who can alleviate voters’ concerns.
But again, there is no they organized around doing it. And black voters are themselves factionalized, at least in a couple of North Carolina cities with which I am familiar.
Overall voter turnout in Charlotte is consistently two percent below the state average. Charlotte/Mecklenburg is the largest county in the state, with nearly 2:1 Democrat-to-Republican registration, and with the highest black registration. Plus, nearly 50 percent more Unaffiliated voters than Republicans (2018).
A 2016 coordinated campaign organizer explained to me that Mecklenburg is so Democratic that whenever a vacancy occurs on city council or county commission everybody and their brother runs for the seat. Factions line up behind their favorites, primaries get nasty, and losers go home holding grudges. At election time, Democrats don’t come together to work together on turnout.
Is Atlanta like that? I wouldn’t be surprised.
2020 is a tough nut. The pandemic has neutered many of the standard campaign tactics. Organizers on a call I attended said they plan to go heavy on digital. Well, I didn’t need a consultant from D.C. to know that. But what about the rest? What about rural areas with lousy Internet where Democrats need to win to reclaim state legislatures? We’re still figuring that out as we go. And we is every candidate, campaign, and under-resourced state party, pretty much on their own. No one is in charge because no one is in charge.
If it’s any consolation, Republicans as a party are no better off, just more inclined to fall in line. And better-supported by the millionaire/billionaire class.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.