Days before the Georgian Senate runoff elections this month, an advertiser from the progressive Latino faction Mijente knocked on the door of an 80-year-old man who didn’t know there was an election or was on.
The man asked the recruiter to speak to him about who was best for the community and that would get his vote, said Tania Unzueta Carrasco, political director of Mijente, who told the story she was told by a recruiter .
“Here in Georgia, supporting the two candidates was a little exercise of confidence,” Unzueta Carrasco told NBC News. “We looked at the big picture. We looked at the fact that if they didn’t win, we wouldn’t have a democratic majority. “
They have won. And the double victories for Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the January 5 runoff elections put the Democrats in control of the Senate. But the violent and deadly storming of the Capitol the next day largely eclipsed that news and threatened to overshadow what Latinos in the state had contributed to the campaigns.
The day before the runoff election, Mijente PAC announced that it had contacted every Latino voter in Georgia, knocked on more than 310,000 doors, called more than 257,000 cell phones and landlines and sent more than 376,000 texts during a pandemic.
These numbers left no doubt among local and national Latino activists – as well as their funders – that something important had happened in Georgia and that the years of struggle to win Latino voters for democratic candidates were yielding results.
Furthermore, ahead of the upcoming congressional elections, it showed what is possible.
“I hope this election has helped convince people that if you invest in our community, we’ll stand out,” said Mayra Macias, executive director of Latino Victory, a progressive Latino group that started growing in 2017 of a chapter founded in Georgia has the Latino electorate.
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Leaders of many of the state-descended Latino groups as well as Georgia Latino community groups said there is a concerted, collaborative, and multicultural effort to mobilize the estimated 377,000 Latino voters in Georgia. The Latino electorate also tends to be younger.
Admittedly, having only drains in one state meant that resources did not have to be shared among multiple states as in the general election. However, several group leaders said they saw more bilingual and Spanish language advertisements, as well as more mailings and digital publicity, in Georgia.
“Georgia was important to us. The community there was ready to take power and use it to make change, ”said Yadira Sanchez, co-executive director of Poder Latinx, a social justice group.
Use and funding of grassroots groups
Although some voters needed to be educated about why they had to return to the election, several progressive organizers said that after years of fighting against 287, many Latino voters in the state knew exactly what democratic control of the Congressional could mean for them (g) agreements that enable local law enforcement officials to enforce federal immigration laws.
“Talk to anyone on the ground and they’ll be better at quoting than people in politics about what 287 (g) is and how it’s harmed the community,” Macias said. “So much of the Latino community was really driven to be active in this election cycle because of the impact of 287 (g) raids that took place at the start of the Trump administration.
They also paid tribute to Stacey Abrams, the voting rights activist and former Georgia State House minority leader, who built a mobilization infrastructure and relationships with grassroots Latino groups who campaigned to become voters in their unsuccessful 2018 governor campaign.
Tory Gavito, co-founder and president of Way to Win, a network of progressive donors and organizations, said the network is tracking about $ 5.8 million in funding for groups like Mijente, the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, and others trying to Mobilize Latinos.
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“I’m looking at what we can extrapolate from the lessons of our work if we fully fund the community from the Georgian to the national level because it’s pretty phenomenal,” Gavito said.
Esteban Garces, treasurer of Votar es Poder PAC, Poder Latinx’s political action committee, said the PAC spent $ 1 million funding a Latino registration and mobilization program in Florida and learned lessons from Georgia. The PAC worked with the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement and the Decatur, Georgia-based International Union of Painters and Allied Trades.
Poder Latinx reported that he made at least 400,000 calls and knocked on at least 15,000 doors following the November election, building on what he did in the state’s November 3 presidential election. He raised $ 300,000 for the Georgia effort. The pre-runoff expenses included $ 120,000 for an ad on Univision.
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One of the PAC’s most visible endeavors during the runoff election was to sponsor the East Las Angeles band Las Cafeteras for their remake of the classic Georgia on My Mind. A digital ad was also sponsored featuring Latina superhero La Borinqueña, who was also featured in digital ads from Voto Latino and Fair Fight Action, an Abrams organization.
“The hope was people knew color communities needed investment, and we invested,” said Sanchez of Poder Latinx.
Other groups too.
Mi Familia Vota, who has been promoting the Latino community in multiple states for years, said it made 1.4 million attempts to reach out to Georgia voters, including 42,517 unique door knocks and 755,800 text messages. it registered 861 voters. The group worked with the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials.
Latinos weren’t the reason Warnock and Osoff beat Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. Black voters were key. Their turnout was higher than any other demographic, and turnout for whites has declined, according to surveys and other analysis.
But Latinos far exceeded their own turnout at other statewide drains and were part of a critical multicultural coalition and infrastructure.
According to Bernard Fraga, associate professor of political science at Emory University and author of “The Turnout Gap: Race, Ethnicity and Political Inequality in a.” Diversify America. “In surveys on the exit, the percentage is around 71 percent.
That was a big jump from a runoff in 2018 when only 15 percent of Latinos who voted in this year’s general election returned.
Ossoff won his race with 54,944 votes and Warnock with 93,272 votes, according to the Georgian Foreign Minister.
Fraga said the Democrats won with a multicultural, multiethnic coalition focused on mobilizing local voters. This ensured that minority voter turnout did not decline as much between the general and runoff elections as in the past.
“Republicans have achieved their goals. They hit the numbers they needed to hit. It’s just that the turnout among black voters and other Democrats on Election Day was so high that it didn’t matter, ”Fraga said. Republicans did the job, Fraga said, but it wasn’t enough because of all the work that was done to get minority voters out.
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“Trust the mobilization organizations that do this work on the ground, at each election, but also between elections,” said Fraga. “Trust these organizations, especially minority organizations, to know what it takes to mobilize communities.”
Gavito said the lessons for Democrats from Georgia are important as they received a wake-up call in November that brought Trump and other Republican candidates into contact with Latino voters, especially in rural areas.
“Democrats need to take the Latino vote more seriously,” she said, “and that means engaging it, and I hope that is the lesson that evolves.”
According to OpenSecrets.org, the Senate races were the most expensive ever, at at least $ 470 million.
There was last minute controversy over closing elections and only two counties in the state provided bilingual ballot papers, forcing many groups to send their own staff to the polls to provide translations on election day.
The pandemic was still raging in the state and Georgia struggled with Trump’s attempts to reverse the November 3 election results.
“Despite all the obstacles our communities have encountered,” said Garces of Votar es Poder, “we still went out in record numbers and changed Georgia.”
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