GE’S Vincent Schellings
CEO, NEW GEORGIA PROJECT AND NEW GEORGIA PROJECT ACTION FUND
AAs the leader of the New Georgia Project, the Stacey Abrams–founded civic engagement organization, and its political action arm, the New Georgia Project Action Fund, Nsé Ufot is on a mission not just to enroll new voters in her state but to turn them into what she calls “super voters”— people who show up for each and every election. Since its founding, in 2014, the NGP has helped more than 500,000 young people and people of color register to vote across the state, which tipped Georgia blue in the 2020 presidential race and delivered Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the Senate. Ufot is now working to protect these new voters from efforts to suppress them. When Georgia’s state legislators proposed a restrictive voting law earlier this year,
Ufot used social media and a digital billboard campaign to call on Georgiabased businesses such as Coca-cola, Delta Air Lines, and Home Depot to denounce the bill.
After it passed, the NGP joined with two other groups to sue Georgia’s secretary of state for violating the 14th Amendment and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
You believe that super voters are made, not born. What does that mean for how the NGP works?
The super voters that we most frequently come into contact with are people over 65 and Black women across all ages. So we ask, What is it that Black women know, that our grandparents know, that has them showing up to vote at every election—and how are campaigns communicating with them? We wanted to take [other] voters in our state who are largely ignored— and who are the swingiest voters in our country—and turn them into super voters. So it’s not just registering people, it’s figuring out what kind of message is going to move them. What’s going to move, say, a Black Lives Matter activist who has given up on democratic institutions and says that their vote doesn’t matter? What is going to get that person to listen to us, then register to vote, and then vote in every election that they’re eligible for for the rest of their lives?
How do you identify these groups of potential voters?
At the core of [the NGP Action Fund’s] work is a robust research agenda. We developed an “Abrams score” to determine where people fall on the ideological spectrum: low means you’ll likely be a conservative Republican, higher means a progressive Democrat. In a lot of places, if you know the race and gender and maybe income of someone, you have enough to understand where that person falls on the spectrum. That’s not the case in Georgia, where there are Black male conservative Democrats who are pro-trump or whose ideology is right up to the line. In our Black electoral research, we’ve also identified woke activists and colorblind conservatives, or African Americans who say that race hasn’t hindered [them] or who don’t see race as an issue in our economy and institutions. We have [a score] for firstgeneration college grads. We’ve also built a predictive model to analyze voters of color who are not Black, because this idea that color is a political identity is not a real thing.
Why was it so important to call on Georgia-based companies to take a stand against the state’s new voting law?
I don’t think these companies appreciated that it’s more than a rhetorical device when we talk about American democracy being the foundation on which their widely successful, publicly traded corporations are allowed to flourish. We back-channeled to them and told them it was time for them to say something. Many just dismissed us as, like, annoying civil rights activists. But anyone rubberstamping the policy priorities of this version of the [Republican] party needs to be called out. I was encouraged when companies stopped campaign contributions, but our efforts are ongoing. We are using shareholder meetings to remind people that these companies, that you are part owner of, can help protect the rights of voters.