The stakes could not be higher. If the Democrats win both Senate seats up for grabs on Tuesday, President Biden will be able to pass laws on climate change, racial justice and much more without Republican obstruction. If they lose, Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, who has previously called himself “the Grim Reaper”, promises to be just that: an implacable block on badly needed COVID relief, as the pandemic continues to claim thousands of American lives daily.
With the polls predicting a dead heat, unprecedented sums of cash are piling into Georgia: a record-breaking half-a-billion dollars will have been spent by the end of this race. The airwaves are filled with political ads; residents are getting bombarded daily, sometimes hourly, with campaign text messages and phone calls. Both Trump and Biden will stage big-ticket events in Georgia in the final hours before polling day.
But the money and the pricey political set-pieces are only a small part of the story. What’s really been happening here, and was happening for many years before most in the Democratic Party establishment ever took the possibility of Georgia going blue seriously, is a massive, grassroots voter-engagement effort.
It’s been run predominantly by Black women such as Nsé Ufot of the New Georgia Project (in the film above), Helen Butler of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda and, most famously, Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost her bid to become Georgia’s governor back in 2018.