Outside voices inside Georgia
Californians try to aid Democrats in Senate runoffs
Joseph Killian and his friends donated a collective $ 50,000 to a dozen Democratic Senate candidates this fall, and most of them lost. Now, with the Senate and Joe Biden’s agenda on the line, the San Francisco resident wants to move to Georgia to volunteer for the two Democrats running to unseat a pair of Republicans in January.
“I can’t just sit home and raise money,” said Killian, 38, a project manager for a tech company. “When you look at some of those races where ( we donated and) we didn’t win, this is our chance to hopefully go there and fix that. We want to be there and help.”
Killian is not alone. CaliforOutside
nia Democrats are peppering political organizers with questions about how to travel to Georgia to volunteer for Democrat Jon Ossoff in his race against Republican Sen. David Perdue and for the Rev. Raphael Warnock in his contest against GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler. Both seats went to a Jan. 5 runoff when no candidate won a majority in this month’s elections.
“My phone has been blowing up every 20 minutes,” said Manny Yekutiel, owner of Manny’s, a civic engagement space in San Francisco’s Mission District. He volunteered in Georgia this fall and is ready to return. “People are asking me, ‘ When do I move to Georgia? Where can I stay? Should I get a block of hotel rooms?’ ”
Many, like Killian, want to be a part of the grassroots network of organizations created by former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. It registered more than 800,000 Georgians to vote this year.
“I’m most in awe of Stacey Abrams,” Killian said. “I have been paying attention to what she committed to do in Georgia and what it has become.”
Several media organizations called the presidential race in Georgia for Biden on Friday. He’s the first Democrat to win the state since Bill Clinton in 1992.
Winning a Senate seat in the state would also be a major accomplishment for Democrats — they haven’t done that since 2000. Turnout typically drops off precipitously in runoff elections, and Democrats tend to shed more voters than Republicans.
Plus, analysts say, it may be harder for Democrats to rally their voters when President Trump won’t be on the ballot.
“This is going to be a turnout election,” said Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta. “There is a small sliver of the electorate who might be persuadable. But this is mostly about whoever gets the most people to the polls wins.”
Insiders expect $ 150 million to $ 200 million to be spent on the runoffs. And if the race follows the path of what happened in the general election, much of that money will come from outside Georgia.
Nearly 80% of the money raised in the fall campaign for Warnock, the Democrat running against Loeffler, came from outside Georgia. More than 83% of Ossoff’s funding for his race against GOP Sen. Perdue came from outside the state. San Francisco was the No. 3 metro area in the county for donations for both Democrats.
Last week, Yekutiel held a fundraiser for Ossoff and Warnock that attracted 3,000 people to hear him talk with the candidates. On Tuesday, Yekutiel will host another fundraiser featuring the candidates and Abrams where the top ticket costs $ 15,600.
Republicans are using the outside support against the two challengers. In an online fundraising pitch, Perdue called Ossoff “a puppet of the left,” and Loeffler released an ad calling Warnock “a radical’s radical.”
In 2017, Ossoff lost a special congressional race in Georgia when his GOP opponent tied him to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. An ad campaign by the GOP’s Congressional Leadership Fund labeled the documentary filmmaker as “San Francisco’s congressman.”
“I’ll point to the last time that Jon Ossoff was running for office and received a lot of organizing help from California — it didn’t end well for him,” said Jesse Hunt, a spokesperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “These progressive activists who want to come to Georgia, their values are very different from the people in Georgia who will be voting.”
Loeffler, the former CEO of a financial services company, accounted for 83% of the $ 28 million she raised for her race this fall. Perdue raised 42% of his money outside his home state. Both will be wellfunded in the runoffs — over the past week, the two candidates and other GOP-controlled funds raised $ 32 million.
Gillespie said Democrats could benefit from the blast of outside energy and funding. But there are obstacles in the path of political travelers to Georgia.
A new California Department of Public Health warning against nonessential outofstate trips as coronavirus cases spike will make traveling to and from Georgia more problematic. Gov. Gavin Newsom urged people who do travel out of state or return home from interstate trips to voluntarily selfquarantine for 14 days.
A spokesperson for Abrams, Seth Bringman, also cited the pandemic when he told the Huffington Post last week that “we are overwhelmed by the outpouring of support, but please do not — I repeat, do not — book plane tickets or gas up your car and make plans to travel to Georgia.”
But those warnings are not stopping Californians from focusing their energy from a distance, at least on the Democratic side. Democrats traditionally do more political traveling and campaigning via texting, phone banking and letterwriting than Republicans. California Republican Party spokesperson Hector Barajas said the state GOP is focusing on tightly contested races for the state Legislature and House in California that have yet to be called.
Democrats, meanwhile, are worried about how the races could affect the incoming Biden administration. Democrats have to win both Georgia seats to reach a 5050 split in the Senate and give Vice Presidentelect Kamala Harris a tiebreaking vote. If they fall short, they’ll have to hope they can peel off a Republican or two to pass Biden’s proposals on climate change, immigration and taxes.
Volunteers in California are swarming to opportunities to turn out the vote in Georgia for Ossoff and Warnock, pastor at the Rev. Martin Luther King’s former church in Atlanta.
At Flip the West, which works to unseat Republicans, more than 7,500 phone bank shifts for making calls to Georgia have already been filled. More than 16,000 volunteers have signed up to send postcards to Georgia voters reminding them to request an absentee ballot and send it in.
“That is unprecedented for us,” said Flip the West’s Berkeleybased executive director, Ronnie Cohen. “Often you have to nudge people to phone bank. It just shows the passion people have for this.”
Swing Left, another organization focused on flipping Republican seats, is also being flooded with requests to work on the Georgia races, said Colleen McCarthy, who coordinates actions in three dozen states for the group. She said some of its 25,000 volunteers in Northern California want their work to support grassroots organizations, not pay for TV commercials.
“They’re very introspective and understanding of how they should engage,” McCarthy said.
Swing Left is directing its donations to groups including Asian Americans Advancing Justice; Rise, a studentled advocacy group; the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights/ Mijente; and the New Georgia Project Action Fund and Fair Fight Action, two organizations founded by Abrams.
Fima Zaltsman, a 31yearold postdoctoral neuroscience student at UCSF, just wants to help in whatever way he can. He phone banked at least two hours a week during the general election and is ready to do that again or travel to Georgia.
“I don’t want to look back if it doesn’t go our way and think, ‘ Oh, if we had only done more,’ ” Zaltsman said.