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MILTON, Ga. (AP) – In a black mask and cap, activist Garrett Bess walked down the aisle after the aisle of million dollar homes in suburban Atlanta on a recent afternoon, placing a flyer in every door, ringing the bell and walking away to make a socially distant pitch for voting for the Conservative candidates in the second round of the US Senate runoff election in Georgia.
Bess group, Heritage Action for America, plans to knock on half a million doors ahead of the two state contests on Jan.5 that will determine whether Democrats or Republicans control the Senate.
“Everyone in Georgia knows the candidates,” said Janae Stracke, a colleague of Bess who also surveyed the subdivision. “There isn’t much convincing to do. They made their decision. It is above all knowing when to vote, how to vote, encouraging them to vote. “
This election season, the coronavirus pandemic has upended traditional exit-voting efforts where campaign workers go door-to-door to encourage people to vote. With people staying at home and limiting contact with strangers, a prolonged conversation with a campaign agent who shows up without an invitation may actually encourage people to vote for someone else.
But it is a sign of the importance of the two Senate elections that both parties and independent advocacy groups are doing their utmost in their efforts to exit the in-person vote.
After the GOP lost the presidential election in Georgia for the first time in 28 years, Tories urge Republicans to become more aggressive with their efforts to participate in the state to match the reach of the former Democratic candidate for the post of Governor Stacey Abrams.
After Abrams lost the 2018 governor’s race, she devoted herself to voter education, believing that the state was a real battleground if Democrats galvanized young voters, minorities and people from across the country. ‘other states. She has raised millions of dollars to organize and register hundreds of thousands of voters in the state – efforts credited with helping Democrat Joe Biden win Georgia.
Republicans need to catch up, Republican Agent Karl Rove told Fox News.
“Let’s face it: it’s a real race,” said Rove, who is leading the fundraising efforts for the second round.
The Republican National Senate Committee expects to have 1,000 field staff in Georgia. By comparison, the Republican National Committee had a total of 3,000 paid field agents across the country during the presidential race.
Democrats carry their own baggage in the second round. In many parts of the country, they limited the face-to-face campaigning ahead of the November 3 election due to the pandemic, arguing it was the responsible thing to do. But that decision has been guessed at in places like Florida.
The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee plans to spend millions on voter registration and participation efforts.
Outside groups are also hitting the ground, and the in-person calls will be complemented by a shootout of phone calls, texts, mailers and advertisements aimed at increasing turnout in races between Republican Senator David Perdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff and to Republican Sen Kelly Loeffler versus Democrat Raphael Warnock.
The participation rate tends to drop sharply in runoff contests in Georgia. And campaigners fear there will be even more fall this time around, when the excitement of the Trump-Biden race is over. So getting voters back to the polls becomes more of a goal than “trying to find new voters or convincing voters who voted for your opponent,” said Charles Bullock, a Southern politics expert at the University of Georgia.
Historically, that drop has disproportionately affected Democrats, so the party faces strong headwinds as January approaches. The Republican candidate has beaten the Democrat in seven of eight ballots since 1992, including two races for the US Senate.
Democrats have reason to be optimistic after Biden’s victory, but his margin of victory was slim – less than 13,000 votes out of nearly 5 million votes – and it has been 20 years since the state elected a Democrat to the Senate American.
But groups whose efforts tend to favor Democrats are accused. Representatives from the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America went door-to-door in a neighborhood just outside of Atlanta on Friday to encourage people to vote for Ossoff and Warnock.
“If we don’t get those two seats in Congress, everything we’ve done to make Georgia blue isn’t going to help us,” Phyllis Morrow told a couple who pulled into their car.
The African Methodist Episcopal Church in Georgia, which has more than 150,000 parishioners in the state, calls on its members to call eligible voters in their congregations, encourage them to vote early, and participate in rides if they have need help getting to the polls on january 5th. .
Bishop Reginald T. Jackson said black voters are enthusiastic and “realize that the eyes of the nation are on Georgia.”
“They know that people are going to find out whether black people meet or not,” he says.
The New Georgia Project, a group founded by Abrams, will attempt to register some of the estimated 35,000 people who have completed their felony sentences and can re-qualify to vote as well as some of the estimated 23,000 people who are 18 before the second round, l Executive Director Nse Ufot said.
Ufot said the group was also aiming to knock on 1 million doors before the second round, up from 500,000 before the general election, and were training volunteers to take coronavirus precautions.
In Milton, Bess and Stracke were in friendly territory. The affluent, predominantly white city about 50 kilometers north of Atlanta has shown strong support for President Donald Trump in the November election. The neighborhood they walked through last week had manicured lawns and spacious homes set back from the street.
“Oh, you have no problem here,” Holly McCormick, 73, told Bess after ringing the doorbell. The leaflets he carried warned that Georgia was the country’s “last line of defense against a socialist takeover.”
McCormick called the presidential race result “rigged” although there was no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, and she said allegations of Trump’s illegal votes made her more motivated to vote for Perdue and Loeffler in January.
“We have to hold the Senate,” she said.
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Associated Press writer Jeff Amy in Atlanta contributed to this report.
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