Could Black Voters Become A Force To Be Reckoned With In Georgia?

Democrats were hoping that an effort to register new African American voters would help them win tough races for U.S. Senate and governor in Georgia.

That didn’t happen.

But African Americans did come out in droves for the two candidates. The New Georgia Project, the nonpartisan group behind the push to register new African American voters, is hoping to increase that chunk of the electorate the next time around.

The number of registered African American and minority voters in the state ticked up to 29 percent this cycle, an increase from 28 percent in 2010, the last midterm election cycle.

The New Georgia Project’s Stacey Abrams, who also serves as Democratic leader in the state’s House of Representatives, stressed in an interview with TPM on Thursday that there are a number of factors to consider in picking goals for upcoming cycles but said her group would like to see another substantial increase of registered voters in 2016.

“If by that point the African American, Latino, and Asian population is 35 to 36 percent of the population I would like to get us as close to that number in terms of the actual turn out as possible. And so 32, 33 percent [is the goal],” Abrams said.

This means they would have to double the 86,000 voters The New Georgia Project registered this cycle.

“My goal would be to have an additional 200,000 or 250,000 registered by 2016,” Abrams said.

She said that “this year we set our mark by being able to collect 86,000 applications, 120,000 through all of our funded partners and so I think we can certainly double that by 2016.”

African Americans and Hispanics overwhelmingly voted for Democrat Michelle Nunn over now Sen.-elect David Perdue (R-GA) in the Georgia race for U.S. Senate on Tuesday. According to data compiled by The New York Times, 92 percent of black voters backed Nunn while just 7 percent backed Perdue. Among Hispanics, 57 percent backed Nunn while 42 percent backed Perdue. By comparison, just 23 percent of white voters backed Nunn while 74 percent backed Perdue.

A core argument of why Democrats believed that Georgia could go their way in key 2014 races like the Senate race of gubernatorial race is that increased minority turnout would boost the Democratic candidates over the finish line. That didn’t quite happen though, but it wasn’t because of lack of minority voters. Rather, the Democrats didn’t do well among white voters — or at least the well among the white voters who turned out.

“The place that Nunn and Carter fell short is that they underperformed among white voters. And they also probably underperformed their expectations among Latino voters,” Emory University political science professor Andra Gillespie told TPM.

But the goal of The New Georgia Project has been to register more minority voters so down the line that chunk of the Georgia electorate is highly influential in elections in the state. That end goal is not reality yet.

“I mean numerically, collectively, it’s not 2050 yet so even presuming that it’s not 20, 30 years from now, 40 years from now that minorities are still voting as Democratic as we’ve gotten used to voting in the last few election cycles, there just still aren’t enough minorities to be able to win elections with just those votes,” Gillespie said.