From TPM Reader AC in Georgia …
You are undoubtedly getting a massive number of emails from across the country, and especially the most contested races. I thought I’d throw in a few cents, fwiw.
We live in John Lewis’s City of Atlanta district, but we’ve been canvassing heavily in the burbs — GA-6 and GA-7, both competitive House races in increasingly Asian and Latinx communities (Gwinnett County), as well as the southern suburbs of Clayton County, which are majority African American. Much of this organizing has been done through the Working Families Party (which you no doubt know from NY politics, and is trying to build a base in the South) and the New Georgia Project (founded by Stacey Abrams herself as the sort of ACORN-ish nemesis of the GOP vote-suppressing crowd).
People are extremely enthusiastic about Abrams. People are showing up to organize, phone bank, canvass. Obviously this is not surprising in a diverse metropolitan area in this kind of charged political climate and with such a high stakes election. But it feels different than when we organized for Jon Ossoff’s ill-fated special election in 2017.
Abrams’s theory of the case is all GOTV: target your people, get nonvoters registered and make sure they vote. The Sleeping Giant theory, let’s say. Ossoff was trying to do a Hillary-esque bid for affluent suburban moderates and Republicans, and so those were the neighborhoods we were sent to canvass. People were not excited about him. His message (fiscal responsibility and new jobs in tech!) and personality were just weak. Lucy McBath, the current Dem candidate for GA-6, has her own issues, but she’s still a more galvanizing candidate.
I have no real predictions to make. I’m seeing things from inside a fervent campaign, but I feel like Abrams will not win in the end. She might eke out a narrow margin over Kemp, but we have a run-off system that’s designed to kneecap the non-majority party and I don’t see her reaching 50% + 1 vote. Just my gut feeling. I hope and pray that I’m wrong.
My Georgia State colleague Carolyn Bourdeaux, a policy prof, has run a tight and disciplined campaign in GA-7, and though she might not be favored to win, her opponent Rob Woodall ran a lazy campaign and didn’t even air an ad until a day or two ago. I think she has a shot.
