Another secret to the success of Georgia’s Democrats is patience. A core network of organizers has existed for years, building relationships across the state and emphasizing local roots. After the 2021 Senate election, the state’s Democratic Party immediately hired several of the brightest minds behind Mr Warnock’s and Senator Jon Ossoff’s field teams, then asked them to write detailed accounts of what they learned.
“There are organizing talks in Georgia all year round,” said Nse Ufot, former executive director of the New Georgia Project, a nonprofit that has become an organizing hub for activists across the state. “It’s not transactional.”
The Democrats have overcome a restrictive new election law.
If Georgia Republicans had hoped a tougher vote would help them win back the Senate seat they lost in 2021, they were wrong. And there are signs that the changes they made may have backfired in some ways.
The suffrage battle kept Mr Warnock’s base busy between elections. When Republicans passed a major new election law in 2021 that Democrats and civil rights groups denounced as an attempt to suppress black votes, the machine went to work. Mr Warnock’s strategists adjusted their outreach plans accordingly, while outside activists held protests, organized petition campaigns and basically kept their network going all year round.
“We won’t let it rest,” said Ms. Wartel.
For Gerald Griggs, president of the NAACP’s Georgia section, the lesson is not that the outcry over the law was a false alarm, as Republicans have pointed out.
In anticipation of long lines at the election, civil rights groups across the state planned “election parties” with water and live entertainment, just beyond the minimum distance from polling stations required by the new rules. And the NAACP threatened to sue counties that allow frivolous lawsuits under electoral law provisions that allow unlimited challenges to individual ballots.
“African Americans in this state know how to mobilize,” Griggs said. “But you shouldn’t have to over-organize voter suppression.”
Ruth Igielnik contributed reporting.
