Ari Berman credits organizing by Stacy Abrams and other activists for overcoming one legacy of Georgia’s segregationist past:
Berman cites Nsé Ufot, executive director of Abrams’s New Georgia Project. Democrats are energized and organized:
This organizing work seems to be paying off. A million mail-in ballots have been requested for the runoff, an impressive number considering that 1.3 million people voted by mail in November. “I don’t think we’ll approach the numbers for the general, but I do think we’ll exceed turnout rates for any runoff we’ve seen in recent Georgia history,” Ufot says.
On-the-ground, year-round organizing, I’d argue, had more to do with turning Georgia blue than Democratic opposition to Donald Trump, or the candidacies of Joe Biden or U.S. Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. Good candidates are important, but they go nowhere without good local support and organizing, especially if they run in red districts. Even a candidate with Barack Obama’s natural talents might have remained in obscurity had he run for state senate in southern Illinois instead of along Chicago’s lakeshore.
The problem is that in rural areas new candidates are often on their own. Democrats’ organizing there is thin or nonexistent. No one teaches local county committees the rudiments of countywide get-out-the-vote organizing. Almost no one.