“People who employ a very shallow analysis of American politics divide us into “red states” and “blue states”. But if you peel back the layers just a little bit, you will see that elections have been determined by, one, who shows up and, two, whose votes get counted.”
That’s what Nsé Ufot of the New Georgia Project told us – one of the activists who this week made history by getting out the vote that overturned what she called “the control of conservative Republicans: a pale, male, stale minority that has had an outsized influence on our politics”.
Democrats can also partly thank President Trump for their historic Senate win in Georgia this week. The chaotic scenes at the Capitol Building in Washington DC that followed hard on its heels yesterday were a uniquely divisive presidency taken monstrous form.
Trump may have fired up his base – to violent insurrection, even – but he also made himself so unpopular with moderate voters across the country that in Georgia, a traditionally conservative state, they rejected him in their droves on Tuesday.
The ‘Trump effect’ was so toxic that Georgians punished Republicans not only in the November election, when Trump was actually on the ballot, but by an even greater margin this week, when his allies David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler lost their Georgia Senate seats and ceded control of the US Congress to the Democrats.
But the result here is about much more than voter disgust – in the words of one Atlanta resident, disgust with the “lying, fearmongering, science-denying” that the Republican Party under Trump now represents. It’s now well-known that this week’s election of Georgia’s first Black senator, Raphael Warnock, and Jon Ossoff, the first Jewish Senator from any southern state since the 1880s, is the product of many years of focused grassroots organising work.
It’s not just Stacey Abrams
Years before the Democratic Party establishment took Georgia seriously, a nimble yet powerful operation was being built here. Travelling across the ‘peach state’ this month, we got to see it up close. It is the future of political campaigning: inspiring, connected, authentic – and meticulously organised.
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Mary Fitzgerald Aaron White | Radio Free (2021-01-06T23:00:00+00:00) Democrats control the Senate. Now they must learn why they won. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/01/06/democrats-control-the-senate-now-they-must-learn-why-they-won/
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