In the Georgia Senate runoff on January 5, Democrats Jon Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock ousted Trump-supporting incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue by less than 80,000 votes – benefiting from what a UNITE HERE! Führer calls an “unprecedented ground game” by the unions.
“Demography is not fate. Demography is an opportunity, ”she says. “Talking to people on their doorstep is necessary to get them to vote.”
“We’ve spoken to 15,000 people every day for the past few weeks,” said Gwen Mills, secretary and treasurer of the 300,000-member hotel and hospitality union. During the six-week runoff election, Mills said UNITE HERE! had more than 1,000 members, knocking on people’s doors a total of 1.5 million times in the Atlanta and Columbus areas.
Overall, the Service Employees International Union, with nearly two million members in the health and public sector, estimates it and the other bidding unions such as the Georgia Federation of Teachers (GFT) and Communications Workers of America to be more than 10 million Visits to the voters.
“I went door to door every day, six days a week,” says UNITE HERE! Member Theresa Cross, an Atlanta hotel worker who was laid off last March.
President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign largely avoided door-to-door campaigning due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but Georgia’s unions decided it was both necessary and possible for the Senate elections. “We spoke to people from afar,” says GFT President Verdaillia Turner, “knowing that COVID-19 was out there.”
“We wore masks on every single door,” says Cross. She and other recruiters carried hand sanitizer, towels, and fresh masks to give to people who opened the door without one, and stepped from people’s verandas after the doorbell to keep their distance.
“Most of the people were ready to speak to us,” she adds.
While Georgia has one of the lowest union density in the country – according to the Federal Labor Statistics Office, only 4.1 percent of the workforce were union members in 2019 – the massive efforts of the unions did not come from nowhere. The GFT, Turner says, drew on its successful 2016 campaign to get voters to reject a proposed state constitutional amendment that would have allowed the governor to take over or shut down schools he believed had failed. UNITE HERE !, says Mills, building on his experience in elections in Nevada, Arizona and Florida and ten years of organizing workers at Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta.
Both unions also conducted “deep canvassing,” a strategy that involved talking to voters about their personal experiences and problems before advocating on behalf of the candidates. The contenders begin by talking about how the pandemic has affected them, Mills says, “cutting through a lot of noise” and opening the way to discuss how they got it wrong by the current administration – including Senators Loeffler and Perdue was handled.
With more than three-quarters of UNITE HERE! Members still out of work after being laid off from hotel and airport jobs, they had one thing in common with voters who felt the pandemic and its economic fallout had affected them.
“I’m going to say something correct about not having a job, and they’ll agree,” says Cross. The people who affected her the hardest were the ones who talked about her health, such as a woman in her neighborhood who had breast cancer.
“She told me her story first,” recalls Cross. “That resonated with me because I am a breast cancer survivor. I understand.”
The GFT recruiters would talk about “why we had to balance the Senate for democracy’s sake,” says Turner. When they met voters who backed Republicans for being vocal against abortion, they told them “don’t let your head hang on an issue” and talked about it, like the HEROES Act, the House-passed COVID-19 relief bill and blocked by the Senate last year would help them.
But when voters were clearly hostile or unmoved, “we didn’t waste energy, we just moved on,” she adds. “Christ did not save everyone. He has just made the way. “
The main issue for voters was the intertwined crises of the pandemic and the economy – or, as Turner sums it up, being able to make a living “but also being alive”. The people Cross spoke to worried about running out of unemployment benefits, losing health care and jobs, being displaced, and the new round of economic checks – which Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock advocated an increase from $ 600 to $ 2,000.
Another issue was access to health care. At least nine rural hospitals in Georgia have closed since 2010, between former Governor Nathan Deal’s refusal to accept Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mills says voters also cited lack of internet access, with some saying their children were doing their homework in supermarket parking lots because they could use Wi-Fi there; and racism, as manifested in the tone of the attacks on Warnock and the restriction on early elections in the state.
For UNITE HERE! however, the campaign was more about attracting likely supporters than convincing voters, she says. The union was focused on the Atlanta area, where about two-thirds of Local 23’s 3,000 members work in hotels and the airport, and Columbus, where it represents about 1,000 workers at the Fort Benning military base.
The GFT was looking for “low-propensity voters”, says Turner. It focused on locations with black and poor voters, including South Atlanta, DeKalb County (Atlanta’s east side and inner suburbs), and the cities of Savannah, Augusta, and Macon, but also campaigned in Valdosta, near the Florida-Georgia line. and Dalton, in the northwest area, which sent QAnon cult supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene to Congress last November.
About 65 percent of voters UNITE HERE! Blacks and 85 percent colored people were recruited, says Mills. But that doesn’t mean their voices were safe. “Demography is not fate. Demography is an opportunity, ”she says. “Talking to people on their doorstep is necessary to get them to vote.”
Seasoned union organizers, she adds, can say “when a yes is a yes and when not” and take the time to be more involved in voting.
On election day, she says, an 82-year-old woman told a candidate that she could not vote because she had no way of going to the ballot box. The union used money from its advertising budget to get her a taxi.
In the end, however, the results reflected the urban-rural and racial divisions in the country. Loeffler and Perdue led almost all rural districts, with the most important exceptions in the predominantly black southwestern part of the state, and received more than 80 percent of the vote in the strongly white northwest. Warnock and Ossoff won about 70 percent in the five-county area of Atlanta, giving them a lead of more than 600,000 votes.
The two Democrats also won Columbus, Augusta, Macon and Savannah. They received 70 percent of the vote in southwest Dougherty County, where the civil rights movement suffered a heavy defeat in 1962 when it attempted to dissolve the county seat of Albany.
Politics is only part of “building an organization that fights for workers’ rights,” says Mills; Recruiting requires the same social skills as organizing, and winning an uphill battle is exciting and encouraging.
“They will take that experience with them to the airport and use it to grow the union,” she says. “In two years, the same group of people will be recruiting in other races.”
