Turnout key in Georgia’s Senate runoffs
ATLANTA — In the first week of early voting for Georgia’s Senate runoff election, Casie Yoder parked at a polling location in Cobb County and loaded miniature hand sanitizer bottles, knitted hats, hand warmers and face masks into a collapsible wagon cart.
Her goal: to help voters stay in line in frigid temperatures and cast their ballots in a pair of highstakes runoff contests that will determine which political party controls the U.S. Senate next year. The runoffs will also test whether Democrats can again pull together the diverse coalition that propelled President-elect Joe Biden to victory in Georgia in November and cemented the state’s status as a political battleground.
“We’ve never had an election happen like this in December,” said Yoder, the Georgia state captain for the Frontline, a nonpartisan electoral justice project of the Movement for Black Lives and other partner organizations.
For Democrats to win control of the Senate, Georgia’s Black communities, as well as the state’s smaller Hispanic and Asian communities, likely need to vote in the Jan. 5 runoff election by history-making margins.
There is hope that the candidacy of the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the Black senior pastor of the church where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, might help spur Black votes for both him and fellow Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff over the Republican incumbents, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.
An Associated Press Votecast survey of Georgia voters in November found that 22 percent of white voters chose Warnock and 28 percent chose Ossoff, compared to the 90 percent of Black voters who chose Ossoff and 73 percent who chose Warnock. Democrats also have an opportunity to capture the 15 percent of Black voters who chose Matt Lieberman, another Democratic candidate who competed against Warnock in last month’s race.
There are signs that turnout in Georgia could indeed be high in the runoffs. Throughwednesday, early voting data released by the office of Georgia’s secretary of state show nearly 1.9 million voters have already cast in-person or mail-in ballots since voting opened last week. That’s almost half of the total early votes cast in the November general election, with less than two weeks left before the Senate runoff concludes.
Roughly 75,000 people in Georgia have also registered to
vote ahead of the runoff, with less than half of those self-identifying as white.
“The old way of just thinking that white voters will determine statewide elections in Deep South states is rapidly fading,” said Ben Jealous, president of People For the American Way, a progressive advocacy organization that encourages civic participation.
Black, Hispanic and Asian American Georgians make up increasing segments of the state’s registered voters rolls. According to a new Pew Research Center
analysis, Black registered voters here increased by about 130,000 between the 2016 presidential election and last month’s contest, which was the largest increase of all major racial and ethnic groups in the state. Although far fewer in number, Hispanic and Asian American residents have increased their registration every year for the last three presidential cycles, the Pew analysis shows.
In a statement to the AP, Abigail Sigler, spokeswoman for the Georgia Republican Party, said the party was “working tirelessly to ensure all Georgians understand they have a clear choice” in the runoff.
Republicans have focused their efforts onwhiter, more rural parts of the state and smaller, more conservative cities, including Valdosta, where Trump held a rally earlier this month. Trump succeeded in the 2020 election in ramping up turnout in similar areas across the country, though it wasn’t enough to offset Biden’s advantages with minority voters and in large urban centers.
The Working Families Party, a national progressive political movement that has endorsed Warnock, dispatched more than a dozen organizers and several more volunteers to Georgia. A group of themhas set up shop at a home garage in a subdivision in Lawrenceville.
“In less affluent neighborhoods, you can see the disparities clearly,” said Robert Campbell, a 29-year-old volunteer from the nonpartisan Chicago-based group Social Change, which is helping the Working Families Party with voter outreach.
“It makes you wonder, when’s the last time a politician came out here door knocking? Every time they look out their door, they’re reminded of their conditions. No wonder they are infrequent voters,” Campbell said.