Georgia activist is trying to recruit people who seldom vote
ATLANTA — Davante Jennings cast his first ballot for Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race. Republican Donald Trump's election that year, he says, turned him from an idealistic college student to a jaded cynic overnight.
Jennings walked away from a system he thought ignored people like himself, a young Black man who grew up politically conscious in Alabama but wielded no obvious power. It took nearly six years for him to see that view as selfdefeating.
Now, at 27, Jennings is not only eager to cast his second presidential vote for Democratic President Joe Biden, but he also is fully invested as an activist, top aide to a Georgia state lawmaker and regular volunteer recruiting would-be voters off the sideline as part of the not-for-profit New Georgia Project.
“I was like, I'm not voting for this if it's all rigged and doesn't even matter,” he said in an interview. “Now, I can talk to people that have been beaten down by the system and say, ‘I get it. Let's talk about why this is important.'”
Jennings' path spotlights the tens of millions of Americans whom political campaigns often refer to as “low-propensity voters,” people who never vote or only occasionally do so in a general election. About 1 in 3 eligible Americans did not vote in 2020. In 2016, it was was more like 4 out of 10.
With presidential elections often decided on close margins in a few states, those voters could determine whether Biden is reelected or Trump completes his White House comeback. Biden's campaign has had a notable
head start in trying to reach such voters, but both campaigns, along with political action groups across the spectrum, aim to build a wide organizing footprint to maximize support in the fall.
“It is so critical to have an actual campaign where people can feel like they see part of themselves,” Roohi Rustum, Biden's national organizing director, said in an interview.
Biden and Trump each owes his election to those sporadic, disaffected voters who often feel unrepresented.
Democrats' inconsistent supporters trend younger and are much more likely to be nonwhite. They helped Biden win Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in 2020, four years after Trump had flipped them in his defeat of Clinton, while adding Georgia and Arizona to his column.
To recreate that coalition, Rustum's efforts already include more than 100 field offices, 300-plus paid staffers and, through the end of March, about 385,000 recruiting calls to volunteers. The campaign is highlighting Biden's policy record and believes Biden wins a comparison with Trump as the more empathetic, stable figure. But the campaign also is prioritizing a network of volunteers to make the case within their own circles, especially in areas with lagging turnout.
“No talking point is going to be as persuasive as someone they know in their community,” Rustum said, adding that “it's actually your pastor, your cousin, your neighbor.”
Jennings does not work directly for Biden's campaign. But his role with the New Georgia Project, which was started a decade ago by Democratic power player Stacey Abrams to increase Black turnout in Georgia, reflects a similar philosophy.
Voter concerns, he argued, often cross party and demographic lines more than the national conversation reflects. “There's not as much difference as people think between poor and Black and poor and white,” he said. But the messenger still matters. “When someone looks like you and sounds like you, there's a certain baseline of trust.”