ATLANTA —Democrats are canvassing in Georgia’s rural counties and suburban areas, focusing heavily on turning out voters of color across the state to grow their margin of support in the Jan. 5 runoff election for two seats that will determine which party controls the U.S. Senate.
They are counting on the suburbs of Columbus and Savannah and cities such as Macon to deliver the state for Democratic candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in the election.
The strategy builds on Fair Fight founder Stacey Abrams’ organizing effort in the 2018 gubernatorial election and her playbook for 2020 that stressed Democrats must target and engage white voters and voters of color in both rural and urban areas to expand their electorate.
“The key is to run up the score where you can score but then also see emerging opportunities where they exist in places like Columbus, in places like Savannah,” Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez told McClatchy in an interview. “And it’s reflected in our strategy. We’re organizing everywhere.”
Democrats are seeking to build a “fusion coalition” with a foundation of support from young people and Native American, Latino, Asian American and African American voters. Ossoff spent the better part of December on a bus tour of the state intended to reach Black rural voters.
The election strategy has made Columbus a focal point in the runoff, alongside Savannah, with heavyweights from both sides campaigning in Muscogee County. This month, Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Kamala Harris, the incoming vice president, held rallies in Columbus days apart.
President-elect Joe Biden and Harris will return for events in Atlanta and Savannah. President Donald Trump will also visit Georgia for a rally in Dalton.
In a state where the presidential election was decided by roughly 12,000 votes, the margin of victory in areas like Columbus and Macon could be the difference maker for Ossoff, who is challenging Republican Sen. David Perdue, and Warnock, who is competing against Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler. She was appointed to the seat in December 2019 to fill a vacancy.
Muscogee is a heavily Democratic county but a place where candidates in down-ballot races didn’t perform as well as Biden. He defeated Trump by about 19,500 votes in Muscogee County, however, Ossoff carried Columbus by a little more than 17,000 votes.
In Macon-Bibb County both Ossoff and Biden were able to improve on Democrats’ performance from 2016, but Ossoff ran behind Biden in that Democratic stronghold too by nearly 1,500 votes.
“We want to make sure we are showing those voters that we’re not just running a race for metro Atlanta, we’re running to win the whole state,” Maggie Chambers, communications director for the Democratic Party of Georgia, said of Columbus. “This election is going to be a turnout game, so we want to make sure that we are juicing turnout in those more urban centers across the state.”
Runoff elections typically attract fewer voters than general elections and that is expected to be the case in Georgia, even though the competition is likely to produce the highest turnout for an election of its type in the state’s history and a thin margin of victory.
According to the vote-tracking website Georgia Votes, 64.9 percent of Muscogee County voters who cast ballots in the 2020 general election have done so in the special election. Turnout is higher in Bibb County at 65.7 percent.
More than 2.5 million people have voted in Georgia so far, compared with more than 3.2 million at this point in the general election.
Early voting numbers show that Black turnout as a percentage of the overall vote is higher now than it was in November — 31.3% of voters in the runoff are African American, according to Georgia Votes — and Democrats cited the improvement as evidence that their voter engagement strategy is working.
Georgia’s nearly 500,000 Black voters in the 18 to 29 age group helped shift the presidential election to Biden. They supported Biden over Trump, 90% to 8%, according to research from The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.
Black Georgians make up a growing portion of the state’s eligible voters. From 2000 to 2019, Georgia’s eligible voting population grew by 1.9 million — and nearly half were Black residents, according to the Pew Research Center.
The state’s midsize cities have larger than average Black populations. Black residents made up 32.6% of Georgia’s population as of 2019. In Muscogee County, it was an even higher 48%, and in Bibb, home to Macon, 55.8% of the county’s residents were African American.
Trey Hood, political science professor at the University of Georgia, said that for Democrats to win the runoff they will need to see a turnout of roughly 30% of Black voters statewide. In the general election, just 27.8% of voters were Black, and Democrats won the presidential election.
Hood said that voting patterns in the runoff election may be dissimilar to the general election and cautioned that there are key differences — the most important of which may be that Trump is no longer on the ballot.
“There were a lot of people in the general election,” Hood said, “who were sort of motivated to vote for or against Donald Trump. There may be people that still project that onto these races, but there are a lot of people who don’t at this point.”
Democrats, however, remain hopeful that Trump’s ongoing election challenges will cut into Republicans’ margins.
“I think there’s a number of people who are absolutely turned off by this president’s behavior,” Perez, the DNC chair, said. “When you’re talking about elections at the margin — 20, 30,000 people turned off by that — that could be the difference.”
The runoff is on track to be one of the most expensive Senate races in U.S history. Issue groups and candidates from both parties have poured millions into the election, saturating radio and television airwaves, filling up mailboxes, flooding the state with volunteers and paid door knockers, running digital advertising and bombarding potential voters with text messages.
Republicans, similar to Democrats, have made a concerted push in Columbus to get their message out to voters. As of mid-December, more than $27 million had been spent in the Columbus media market alone. Republicans are outspending Democrats $21.3 million to $6.2 million, according to data provided to McClatchy by AdImpact, a media tracking firm. The data includes prebooked ads and doesn’t provide a market-by-market breakdown of digital ad spending.
“We didn’t carry Muscogee County,” the county’s Republican Party chair Alton Russell acknowledged. “But we got 30,000 votes, and let me tell you what, those 30,000 votes are important. I think the candidates are realizing that they need every vote. Our 30,000 votes is just as important as 30,000 in the Atlanta market.”
“If we turn out 30,000 plus votes, I think (the Republicans) win,” he added.
Republicans have placed greater emphasis in the runoff election on mail and in-person early voting, but they remain reliant on the larger portion of their supporters casting ballots on Election Day. That is especially true in the Republican counties of northwest Georgia that make up the 14th congressional district and where voting in the runoff has collectively been the lowest in the state.
Trump is scheduled to appear at a rally on Jan. 4, the eve of the election, in the town of Dalton and Republicans familiar with the matter said the site was chosen based on the lagging turnout.
Georgia native and Faith and Freedom Coalition founder Ralph Reed said that Republicans need to do better than expected in northwest Georgia, but they must also overperform in southeast and middle Georgia to win the election.
“In a race that is this close and this highly contested, where we’re going to have turnout that is going to shatter all records for a runoff election, every vote counts, and every drop of juice that we can squeeze out of any corner of the state is going to matter a lot,” Reed said. “And that’s certainly the case for both middle Georgia and Columbus.”
Republicans are operating a statewide strategy that “leaves no stone unturned,” said U.S. Rep. Drew Ferguson, whose third congressional district stretches from parts of north Columbus to southern suburbs of Atlanta.
“What we know is that there are just thousands of voters that are in smaller communities in mid-sized cities that many times get overlooked,” he said. “We want to make sure that these voters are highly motivated and ready to go to the polls.”
Trump’s unproven allegations of widespread voter fraud in the state during the general election has resulted in mixed messaging from the president’s backers about whether Republicans should participate in voting in the Senate races, which has bolstered Democratic optimism that they can repeat their November win in the state.
Republican State Sen. Randy Robertson, whose district includes portions of northern Columbus, said November’s results — which saw a Democratic presidential candidate carry Georgia for the first time in nearly three decades — make it all the more important that Republican voters cast their ballots.
“I think we have to spend what has to be spent. We have to sweat and bleed and get out there to make sure that every conservative … goes out there and votes for David and Kelly,” Robertson said.
