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As goes Georgia, goes the nation. That’s the lesson from the 2020 election, when the Peach State flipped blue and sent Joe Biden to the White House with the narrowest of margins of control over the Senate.
Since that contest, the state’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp and the GOP-controlled state legislature have worked to make it harder for Georgia residents to vote and to ensure that the Democrats don’t make a solid showing in the 2022 midterms.
But there’s a growing and powerful grassroots movement in Georgia that aims to disrupt those right-wing plans and make it easier for the state’s communities of color to vote, essential work in the fight for democracy. No group is more essential to this movement right now than the New Georgia Project, which works to register voters across the state.
Years of Organizing Yields Results
The group’s CEO, Nsé Ufot, told Blue Tent before the special election that won Democrats the Senate that the 2020 turnaround was the result of hard work — with an eye to the long game.
“We have an election protection apparatus we have been building for years,” Ufot said. “It includes litigation, it includes communications, it includes voter education.”
New Georgia Project’s impact on the 2020 race was measured in real terms by the group Way to Win in their election postmortem. Way to Win found that of the approximately 150,000 voters New Georgia Project reached, 66% of them ended up voting that November — in an election that Biden won by just 11,779 votes. Around 28,000 of that number were first-time voters. New Georgia Project’s intense canvassing approach helped the group make 734,000 total attempts at canvassing. The group’s canvassers ended up having 176,000 total conversations for a contact rate of 24%.
Paul Glaze, New Georgia Project’s strategic communications manager, told Blue Tent that the organization didn’t take its foot off the gas in the interim between elections.
“We worked throughout 2021 to prepare Georgia voters to turn out for more than 1,600 local and municipal elections,” Glaze said. “We helped register 26,623 Georgians to vote, knocked on more than 480,000 doors, and made nearly 93,000 calls to Georgia voters.”
As a non-partisan organization, New Georgia Project can’t endorse candidates. But the group’s priority, “to keep building power with and for the New Georgia Majority—Black folks, young people, Latinx and AAPI Georgians—communities who have been historically excluded from the political process,” as Glaze put it, translates into more voters for Democrats.
Mobilizing for a High-Stakes Election
New Georgia Project has lofty goals for the midterms. By the end of the year, the group intends to register 55,000 Georgians to vote, open 13 new field offices, knock on 700,000 doors four or more times, make 700,000 calls, and get 150,000 to the polls.
With an operating budget of $15.6 million for 2022, New Georgia Project hopes to hit that number in fundraising. It’s a high number, but the group has allies with deep pockets like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which gave $600,000 in 2020, and the Ford Foundation, which gave $1,262,500 last year.
A lot is at stake in Georgia for 2022, with NGP’s founder, Stacey Abrams, running for governor and Sen. Raphael Warnock fighting to hold onto his seat. The key offices of secretary of state and attorney general are also up for grabs. The balance of the Senate could be decided, and who gets to vote in 2024 depends on who’s in office statewide after this year’s contest. New Georgia Project’s reach and commitment to the voters of the Peach State means it’s going to play an important role in the midterms and beyond.
“If we helped a voter register in 2020, then we knocked on their door to turn them out in 2021, that’s a voter who is primed and ready to take action when we call them in 2022,” Glaze said. “When you multiply that by the number of voters we plan on reaching this year, that impact grows exponentially.”