The Center for Popular Democracy—an umbrella organization of progressive organizing groups—focused its efforts on seven states in 2020: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona and Georgia. President-elect Joe Biden won all but Florida.
CPD president and co-Executive Director Jennifer Epps-Addison talked to Blue Tent about what went right in Georgia and what we can take away from the results of the general election as a whole as the national electoral focus turns to the midterms.
What can people learn strategically and tactically from the effort to flip Georgia blue?
The most important thing to understand about Georgia—and really not just Georgia, but what we saw in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania and Arizona, as well—was the strategy of community organizations, the grassroots organizations, to focus their efforts on deeply engaging Black and white, Mexican, indigenous and other communities of color for this election and having really deep conversations with them in order to motivate them to vote and to mobilize.
It was absolutely the sort of political strategy and the key to President-elect Biden’s win. When we look at the amount of sort of money and attention that President-elect Biden’s campaign gave to what has been called Obama-to-Trump voters or swing white voters, white voters in rural and suburban communities, it’s quite clear that those populations didn’t come through for the vote for the President-elect.
In actuality, Biden did worse in those communities than Clinton did in 2016.
Our first key to success in Georgia, as it was in the other seven states that we prioritized and built this program in, was to follow the leadership on the ground. In Georgia, that was particularly the New Georgia Project, Southerners on New Ground, for example, and local leaders. I think that is really critical. And it will continue to be our strategy through the special election.
We already see national Democrats giving their opinions about what needs to happen to win Georgia. And none of them are giving the correct one, which is just to reinforce the groups on the ground and then to get out of their way and not to disrupt the great work in the building that they’ve been doing over the last decade. That’s a really key strategy for the general election.
What lessons did you pick up from the New Georgia Project specifically?
We understood from the New Georgia Project two really clear things.
The first was that the rising American electorate in Georgia was incredibly powerful and very open to participation—if we could connect to that. We watched as the New Georgia Project did things that targeted nontraditional voters, like partnering with the adult entertainment industry in Atlanta.
We really watched them say that every voter is worth courting and watched them really build the program with labor tactics that went after communities that had been ceded to Donald Trump or left behind by the Biden campaign.
The second thing was, we really understood that even if we could get the number of people we needed to cast their vote, we really needed to make sure that we were prepared to come forward and protect every single one of those votes that were counted. We knew that just mobilization would not be enough.
CPD Action helped build with our partners, in the seven states we were targeting, including Georgia, a volunteer program of voter guardians. Over 3,000 voter guardians supported groups like the New Georgia Project and Black Youth Organizing Communities. They supported those organizations and building and training folks, building a deep curriculum that could support and use policing strategies for poll monitors and could be prepared to deal with escalation and violence at the polls—and could really help bring joy to the poll so that people could enjoy their voting experience and feel confident that their votes would be counted.
A big piece of the work in Georgia was really about voter protection, guarding people’s votes at the polls, and then being prepared to help people cast their ballots when necessary so that everyone who wanted to participate in the election was able to. And we’re just so grateful for having a partner like the new Georgia Project on the ground who was really able to build an infrastructure.
How did you develop your 2020 seven-state strategy?
Over two years ago, we looked at the numbers. We understood that 2020 was going to come down to the Electoral College, similar to 2016. We knew that Biden or the eventual Democratic candidate could get up to 5 million more votes and still potentially not win the Electoral College.
So we built the strategy that said, what is our best chance of actually getting the Electoral College? And it was to focus on the registered and eligible Black and brown voters in these seven states.
Plus, we realized we could actually change the outcome of the election without getting a single white voter to change their vote from 2016 to 2014.
When it’s all said and done, the fact that we were able to either, you know, maintain stable voter participation in these counties, the hardest-hit by COVID communities that have been targeted, the worst by the fight for racial justice. The fact that we were able to get stable and/or increased participation, that was the determining factor in the outcome of this election. Folks feel vindicated and quite proud of that work and honesty, you know, and will use what we learned in our engagement.
The reality is we know we knew Donald Trump was never going to get a majority of the vote in Detroit and of people of color. We felt like that’s something we were very clear of going in. We also knew that if he were able to get above 20%, somewhere between the 20% to 28% range, a little better than a third in these communities, it could spell disaster in terms of being able to flip the states needed for the Electoral College.
In Wisconsin, Biden won by less than 21,000 votes. We were able to increase the voter participation by 6,000 votes in Milwaukee. And that 6,000 votes, that’s more than a quarter of the 20,000-plus votes. So these were the types of things that we really needed to analyze.
Can you talk a little about what surprised you, how things shook out with Trump’s increase in the vote from people of color?
You know, we don’t have all of the data back in terms of why people voted the way they voted. We understand that Donald Trump did better across nearly all racial demographics in 2020 than he did in 2016.
There were two things that really came across, particularly for Black voters who are not evangelical Black voters and not ideologically aligned with the president. First and foremost was criminal justice. We heard a number of young Black men, particularly in Milwaukee—the most incarcerated zip code in the country—say that either they or a family member of theirs went to jail because of the Joe Biden crime bill and that they or their family member were getting out because of the First Step Act. The Biden campaign early on ceded the criminal justice issue to Donald Trump. Donald Trump’s campaign spent about $6 million on digital and focused specifically on criminal justice. There was a shift that had an impact that we really want to analyze and understand.
The other issue was the economy. If Trump wasn’t so irresponsible and harmful with COVID 19, we could have been in a lot more trouble with Black and Latino voters about the economy.
And we certainly have not closed the gap for working-class white folks who continue to struggle and feel left behind. I think those are big considerations for Americans.
