Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams delivers a concession speech on November 8, 2022 in Atlanta, Georgia.
Photo: Jessica McGowan/Getty Images
I met Nsé Ufot this weekend at a low-key campaign rally at the Georgia Beer Garden in downtown Atlanta and spent a while with her in the courtyard while she pondered her fate. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., was chilling nearby with Charlie Bailey – the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor – and the people of town from The Daily Show.
Ufot is almost as famous in Georgia for leading the New Georgia Project, the voter engagement organization founded by Stacey Abrams. But she had been fired as NGP chief executive six weeks earlier for reasons that are still unclear, and she declined to elaborate. A handful of other employees have also since been laid off.
Breakups are always hard, but when things don’t work out, something has to give way. Ufot and groups like NGP would be the first to see if something about Abrams’ voting logic wasn’t working. When that happens, relationships can become strained.
The new head of the New Georgia Project hasn’t contacted me. The New Georgia Project is nominally non-partisan, but any group focused on winning over historically marginalized communities will have a greater impact on Georgia Democrat outcomes. The margin of Tuesday’s loss to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp by Abrams — by 7.6 percentage points, or 300,000 votes — could be measured by what the New Georgia Project and similar groups across the state could and couldn’t accomplish by Election Day.
This year’s election in Georgia should be an election campaign like 2018 and 2020. It no longer makes sense to change anyone’s mind. There are no swing voters. It’s all about getting the right people to the polls, as many as possible, by any means possible. At least that’s what we hear.
Maybe that’s still true. But you wouldn’t know from last night’s results.
In 2018, 3.94 million people took part in the gubernatorial elections in Georgia. As of last night, almost exactly the same number of people have voted – 3.95 million – despite a population growth of about 300,000 residents and a 500,000 increase in registered voters. Voter turnout even fell by around 4.5 percent.
I could tell two stories about these numbers. The first is that Senate Law 202, Georgia’s “reforms” to electoral laws passed here after the historic 2020 election, depressed turnout more than the democratic turnout machine could counteract. Second, Frankly, Democratic voters have been a little burnt out from the constant pounding of political noise, and Republicans have learned turnout in 2020. There is evidence for both cases.
Politicians cheered about early voting numbers. Over the course of three weeks, 2.5 million voters in Georgia cast their ballots in person, about the same number as in 2020. There were largely no queues. But that masked another problem; Postal ballots had declined significantly since 2020.
About 5 million people voted in Georgia in 2020, and 1.3 million voted by post. Georgia’s turnout in 2020 was the highest in Georgia’s modern history, spurred by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s decision to mail a voting application form to every voter during the pandemic.
This year, the number of in-person early voters remained about the same as in 2020. However, mail-in voting fell back to the mid-term base of 2018 after legislation barred the Secretary of State from sending voters an unsolicited application form. At the same time, the rejection rate for mail-in ballot applications has declined since 2018, meaning far fewer people had applied for a polling card.
Ufot has been screaming about it for weeks. The new rules make absentee voting drop boxes much less useful for second- and third-shift workers because the number of boxes in large counties in the greater Atlanta area will be reduced and the boxes will be indoors and only required to be open during business hours. “All of this set up hurdles for attendance in Atlanta that resulted in a 1 million drop,” she said.
Of the approximately 300,000 new voters who have moved to Georgia since 2018, about half are non-white and most have settled in the greater Atlanta area. A strong early in-person vote was in response to the mail-in voting changes, but it didn’t reflect an actual increase in turnout, she added.
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Organizations like the New Georgia Project and others have been operating with half — or less than half — of what they had in 2020. The individual campaigns were able to attract massive donations from donors across America, but the grassroots organizations that reflect local turnout saw comparatively little of it. The donations instead went to non-stop, useless political ads on TV and social media, fattening powerful DC advisors and starving local organizations.
Consider that northeast Georgia counties — Marjorie Taylor Greene Country — surpassed their 2018 turnout by about 5 to 6 percent. Greene beat her Democratic challenger Marcus Flowers 66-34 in the most expensive home race in America this cycle. Greene’s idiocy over the past two years is like a tank figure in an online war game, taunting opponents into wasting their attacks on them. (Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., may demonstrate the limitations of this strategy.)
Note that I haven’t mentioned anything about policies yet. That’s because I don’t think it really mattered much.
Georgia’s politics has become entirely tribal. Almost no one voted for Herschel Walker in the Senate race because of a firm belief in his leadership or political acumen, or even simply because of his political arguments as they were. You voted for a Republican, the more Republican the better. For all Sen. Raphael Warnock’s relative appeal as a moral and civic leader, Democrats, by and large, would have voted for anyone running on the Democratic line of the ballot, so long as they were confident that person would remain loyal to the cause.
For practical reasons, Georgia’s abortion policy was on the ballot last night. Certainly, had she been elected governor, Abrams would have vetoed additional restrictions on access to abortions — or contraceptives, or criminal prosecutions for doctors who perform abortions — proposed by an increasingly radical Republican-led legislature. With hospitals shutting down statewide, Abrams could have logged Georgia politicians into some sort of Medicaid extension. tax policy. Legalization of marijuana. gun law.
Georgia faces serious legislative issues in the next four years. The resignation of Rep. David Ralston, a Republican, as speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives – known for his ability to mollify legislative Trumpists in the name of business – complicates things. So did Burt Jones’ inauguration as Lieutenant Governor. Jones is a draft evader under investigation for his alleged role in Donald Trump’s election meddling.
Given that fact, a small number of Georgia voters were easily persuaded. About 200,000 fewer people voted for Herschel Walker than for Brian Kemp: about 1 in 10 Republican voters. Raphael Warnock received around 132,000 more votes than Stacey Abrams. That means about 5 percent of voters actually cared enough about a candidate to change their voting habits.
A few people cried when Abrams admitted last night at the Hyatt in Atlanta. you were young Most of the people in this room had been there before and knew better.
I know that sounds callous. I know that in Georgia – and indeed everywhere in America – politics has become an existential struggle. I know Democrats who were looking at real estate listings in other states when Kemp won here in 2018. I know Republicans in Georgia who have been looking for ammo prices in 2020.
But we’re all about to do it again, dammit. It doesn’t end. It never ends. We can’t escape.
As long as Georgia is divided down the middle, we will be hunted down like locusts by advisors.
