As Georgia heads to a special election for the state’s two Senate seats on January 5, the entire country is watching. The success of both Democrats would put the party in control of the Senate, enabling a much more expansive legislative agenda.
In order to achieve that goal, groups on the ground are strategizing on getting out the vote for the second time in just over two months.
One of those groups, the New Georgia Project, is focusing its efforts on turning out the same coalition of rising Americans—the multiracial, multigenerational collective that flipped Georgia blue last month—to deliver both seats to the Democrats and give incoming President Joe Biden’s party control of both chambers of Congress.
Blue Tent talked to the group’s CEO, Nse Ufot, about how the New Georgia Project is making change happen on the ground.
(Interview has been edited for clarity.)
Can you give us an idea of the kind of strategy that worked during the general election and what you all are expecting to do for the special election?
I think there’s a couple of things. The demographic shifts that we’re seeing in the state are well-documented in Georgia—having the first state in the Deep South with a white minority. So there will be this plurality, and as Georgia heads into its multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual future, I think that there are real conversations that are being had right now about how policy gets made. That is playing out in state and local races and in our federal races.
I don’t think that anti-Trump sentiment alone accounts for it, and I don’t think that suburban white moms alone account for it. When we look at the historic nature of turnout, it was really Black, Latinx and AAPI Georgians. And again, this multiracial progressive coalition is a multiracial majority that added to our ability to neutralize the impact of a whole campaign of voter suppression.
We’re talking about everything from 100 polling locations in metro Atlanta changing in the two or three days before the November general—I know because I have been voting in this place for 20 years, and my polling location was changed the weekend before the election—targeted misinformation and disinformation targeting Black and brown voters, overcoming all of that. People need to understand that a margin of 14,000 votes or 13,000 is .25%, that in another year, would have meant a victory for President Trump.
We have an election protection apparatus we have been building for years. It includes litigation, that includes communications, that includes voter education, that includes a network of almost 4,000 volunteers who have eyes on every part of the process, from voter registration to monitoring these voter purges to managing these extraordinarily long lines at the polls, [in order] to have an eye on the counting and the tally and process that in any other presidential year would have meant a win for the Republican incumbent. But because of what organizing has built, we were able to make sure that the will of Georgia voters was reflected in the results of our election.
And we’re going to do it again.
Looking forward to the special election on January 5th, what aspects of that approach will be different, and what would be the same?
I think the thing that’s going to be different about how we approach this special is that we are going to be hyper-focused on culture. Not only are we trying to knock on doors in the Deep South, but we’re trying to knock on doors after a pretty brutal general election cycle. We’re going to try to knock on doors while people are trying to, you know, enjoy their family over Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa.
We’re going to be mindful of that. Direct voter contact is our core tactic, right? We don’t think that there’s anything that can substitute or take the place of high-quality conversation with Georgians about things that matter. But again, because we need to try to cut through the noise, I think we’re absolutely going to lean into a sort of digital strategy that adds some muscle to the one-and-a-half-million doors that we’re going to knock.
So there’s going to be a lot of focus on turnout, then.
Absolutely. What else would there possibly be with such a short runway? You know, this election, like all elections, is going to be determined by who shows up to vote and whose votes get counted.
The moment that we’re in right now is 100% about who shows up to vote.
One thing that’s important is making sure that every vote that was cast is protected. Can you talk a little bit about how you’re going to be vigilant about making sure that people aren’t disenfranchised or that their vote doesn’t get lost?
It won’t get lost, it will get thrown away. It’s important to know that this is not out of passive action, that there are enemies of progress who have straight-up attacked our election system. Context is important because that’s the context in which this was.
There’s stuff that people see, like the 11-hour lines, the drone footage, because they have close polling locations, because they merge polling locations, because they switch polling locations at the last minute within 48 hours, like they did mine, [creating] this kind of voter confusion. People start seeing and posting it on social media. The press covers it. So people see that and understand that.
But what they don’t see is some of these other tactics that we’ve also had to work to combat, like signature matches for absentee ballots. There are shady, underhanded, not-quite-visible ways that we need to fight against to make sure that every vote is counted. That work doesn’t start, you know, in October before an election. You have to build the infrastructure. So, for example, in New Georgia Project, we identified for the November general 200 polling places … we need to have for robust election protection apparatus, because we are concerned about the history of voting starts with service members here. We try not to give more than four to six hours. So that’s about three people, three volunteers or two for every poll, about 600 volunteers just to ... have eyes on the voting process to make sure that voters are taking care of that. They’re aware that they have water, they have food, that there isn’t any funny business.
So 600 election protection volunteers, boots on the ground, about 60 to 70 regional managers who could have, you know, the polling locations and the city and respond to any request, escalate anything that needs to be taken to the police.
That’s just the New Georgia Project. That’s not including groups like Fair Fight or the Working Families Party—or the Georgia Democratic Party themselves, or the candidates in their campaign.
How do you feel about how the national Democratic Party is treating the race?
We won Georgia without the national party’s intervention, but it’s very much an all-hands-on-deck moment.
I’ll be honest, it has so little to do with our community operation. We are literally going to make 5 million phone calls over five weeks and raise over $1 million. We have about 2,000 churches and synagogues, and our network and training that need to sort of get information; we have to rebuild our election protection apparatus.
