What Georgia can teach us.

I started writing this the night that Georgia Democrats won both of the United States Senate special elections, with the thought I would hit "publish" sometime on Wednesday.  Then the insurrection happened.  The time in this case has been useful - a chance to reflect on this piece again.  

So here goes.  Point one: They did the work.  Actually, that is the only point.

The work that has been done in Georgia over the last few years didn't guarantee success - but it did create opportunity.  Nothing in politics is a sure thing, and the results often don't mean as much as people think.   In addition, good campaigns lose, and bad ones can still win.  That being said, winning requires playing on a field where you can win:  if you are a Democrat, a perfect campaign probably isn't going to win in Wyoming under any circumstance - and a lousy one still beats a Republican virtualy every day in a place like Oregon.  

What they did in Georgia was move the window enough to allow good campaigns to take adavantage of good atmospherics and to get a win.  Here is the awesome news:  it is 100% replicable - and I would argue, is something we actually did here before.

And here's the secret to how they did it - and how we can do it again here...

...actually there is no secret.  It is just hard work.  

So let's start with some facts. 

Between 2004 and 2008, the Democratic advantage in voter registration grew from 375K voters to over 680K voters.  Over that period of time, Democrats won 50% of the statewide races in Florida, and picked up significant number of congressional, legislative, and local races.  

Since 2012, the Democratic advantage in voter registration has dropped from about 558,000 voters, to just over 100,000 when the books closed on the 2020 election - and it dropped to under 100,000 by the end of the year - and I don't need to tell you what the record has looked like since then.

Yes, twitter observers, some of that advantage back in the day was old North Florida Democrats who haven't voted for a Democrat for President since Kennedy - but most of it is just Republican growth.  This at a time when the state is getting more diverse, where one logically might assume that Democrats would be in a place to see growth.

So let's take a look at what happened in Georgia, the effort spearheaded by Stacey Abrams. 

First of all, it didn't start after her race in 2018.  Abrams has been in the fight to fund registration and organizing efforts for several cycles now, starting with the New Georgia Project, and now with Fair Fight, the organization she founded following her 2018 campaign.  They raised money and built confidence among donors.  They leaned into organizing, focused on registration and voter engagement, trained leaders to work within their own communities - giving more people ownership over the work, and they stayed focused on the work.  

If you look at Georgia, just between 2016 and 2020, more than 600K new voters joined the roles, and over 80% of them were from communities of color.  This is 100% a result of a laser focused, extremely well-funded, locally-organized voter registration effort.  That registration took a state that was just outside the window of being competitive, and made it competeitive. 

We did this between 2004 and 2008.  With help from the DNC's 50 state project, the Democratic Party had organiziers who trained leaders in registration.   In addition, as the Presidential campaigns ramped up in absentia in Florida (remember Florida's primary was boycotted), the grassroots voluneers of both campaigns focused on one thing: registering voters.  And the Obama campaign came in with massive boots on the ground to help organize all those volunteers - and focused on, you guessed it:  registration.  

And while the registration numbers came down after 2008, the advantage remained significant through the 2012 election, thanks to the DNC, Organizing for America, and eventually the re-election campaign's work.  

In the years since, well, the numbers speak for themselves. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again with the same result, well, when it comes to our organizng model, it is time to shake it up - and by shake it up, get back to what we know works. 

So let's take a few lessons from Georgia.

1.  Someone has to lead the thing.  In the Obama years, the power of the candidacy and the White House meant that organizing ran through us/them.  Sure there were outside groups doing good work, but the vast majority of it ran through the various Obama organizing entities.  

In Georgia, Abrams had a plan.  She took her plan to funders - she found money - built an organiztion and supported others - but in the end, there was a sense she was accountable for it. 

In my view, the party is the natural place for this work.  Now I get it, the party is a dumpster inferno at the moment, but I have a lot of confidence in Mayor Manny Diaz and Judy Mount - and here's the truth:  the Florida Democratic Party can be whatever fundraising allows it to be, and it has never had the resources to do real work.  The party is an empty vessel - but with real resources and leadership, it is the right ship to lead this effort.  This doesn't mean that the organizations outside the party who are doing good work shouldn't continue to do their work,  but the reality is the party can deliver partisan and candidate messaging, and can coordinate with candidates.  

I know plenty of folks disagree with this, but in 2005, we went into a party that was deeply in debt, and couldn't even get a credit card - and got that ship oriented in a way that allowed us to take advantage of 2 good cycles.  I never truly understood why we moved away from a model that was working (2006 and 2008) to one that was untested.  Again, this doesn't mean that there isn't vital work that the outside groups do -- they absolutely do vital work - just that the core organizing functions of the party shouldn't be outsourced.  

There are literally a million things we could complain that the Florida Democratic Party should do - honestly if they did two things well:  register voters, and recruit high caliber downballot candidates, we'd win more races.  Full stop.

2.  Organizing leads to regsitration - and registration leads to organizing:  Putting people on the ground to organize solves two problems:  the lack of a sustained, real, and partisan-oriented registration effort. - and the sesne that the party and its candidates aren't in communities in enough.

The latter criticism is true.  People say to me all the time "hey Steve, why don't we see the campaign like we did when Obama ran and was in office" - well. the answer is simple:  we had hundreds of organizers, which led to tens of thousands of essentially full-time volunteers.  

We don't need that kind of effort year round - but if you put enough organizers out there, they can build meaningful relationships in communities, and train volunteers to drive the essential converations that are needed.

3.  Ownership matters.  People need to have the ability to do the work in their own way, ane be accountable for the work by knowing the effort is counting on them.   Florida is a big, diverse state - and while you need to teach organizers good fundamentals - you have to let people figure out their own communities.    Take the Georgia special election - what worked in rural Georgia wasn't necessarily the same thing as what worked in Atlanta - but taken together, well, it all worked.

I used to tell our staff that everyone on the campaign was counting on everyone else - no one job was more important than the other.  If we all owned our own work, we would do just fine.

4.  Nothing about this is cheap, and it doesn't make for cute viral twitter content.  This is hard work.  To put 100, well-trained organizers on the ground (which isn't enough), it is an investment of at least $6 million a year - and the work they do will largely take place in silent - managing volunteers, and driving conversations with community leaders.  Real organizng also builds an aparatus that can help push back on misinformation at a community-based level. 

Moreover, while there is a place for paid canvass type operations, it isn't here.  You need people who wake up every day thinking about the work, learning the community and growing into the job.  You also create a pipeline for political talent to learn and grow, something we desperately need here in Florida (and everywhere). 

The special elections in Georgia cost hundreds of millions of dollars.  Put 20 million a year into party organizing (which is far more than has ever been spent on a consistent basis), and you will see real results.

5.  It won't happen overnight.   This isn't about registering X number of voters by next year.  Georgia had a sustained model, not built cycle to cycle, but instead, they worked cycle after cycle.  We can change the weather if we can expand the electorate.

People ask - "is Florida still winnable" - and the answer is, of course...IF we do the work.  Kerry lost Florida by 5% in 2004 and we won it by 3% just four years later.  Just as Florida was never trending as Democratic as my Democratic friends wanted to think - it is never as bad as it looks either.  

I also recognize, as I am sure will get pointed out on Twitter, that this work has been done before - which I will acede, and there have been plenty of good folks who have done good work (there has also been a lot of money spent here with not the kind of organizational results we should expect).  My point on all of this is this - these efforts have not been consistent, sustained, or centralized for many cycles.  In my honest opinion, if we want to right the ship and put the state in a place where it is in play:  consistency, sustained effort, and central/accountable leadership are key. 

if you are a Democrat, we need Florida to do better - as the upper midwest shrinks in terms of its electoral college rerpresentation - and those states remain razor tight, we need to expand.  Nothing about what happened in Arizona or Georgia is a guarantee going forward - and Texas isn't there yet either.  While I am beyond ecstatic - particuarly as a Biden loyalist, that we won in November - November also identified some real issues in our path to winning going forward.  We aren't in a place where we can write off anything. So yes, Florida is still vital. 

But the work has to get done.  And if we don't get back to the basics, it is going to be a long winter.

Fortunately there is a model.