After Georgia set a turnout record, these groups want to add even more voters for the runoffs
In the two months before the state’s general election voter registration deadline, the nonpartisan group Register2Vote helped roughly 50,000 new Georgians become eligible to cast a ballot.
With Joe Biden winning the state by less than 12,000 votes out of 4.9 million cast, even a quarter of those new registrants — who are mostly young, Black or Hispanic — could have made the difference.
“When elections are this close, this has outsize importance,” said Jeremy Smith, Register2Vote’s executive director.
Smith’s work isn’t done yet.
Even after Georgia smashed its turnout record in November, Smith and others working on Georgia’s two U.S. Senate runoff elections — expected to be determined by thin margins — are racing to add tens of thousands of more voters to the state’s electorate ahead of Monday’s registration deadline.
It may seem unlikely that someone who wasn’t interested enough in this year’s historic presidential race to vote would suddenly feel provoked to participate in the unorthodox January contests, even though they will determine which party controls the Senate.
But Smith believes there are a sizable number of prospective first-time voters in Georgia who would -- if only organizers spent time communicating with them about how exactly to do so.
“Every campaign has defaulted to only texting, mailing, digitally advertising to those who are already registered,” said Smith, a West Point graduate who created Register2Vote in 2018. “We’re trying to help people who are historically underserved, who tend to be overlooked by political campaigns. … Most people just haven’t done it because they were embarrassed, they didn’t know how, they feel uncomfortable as a college student, like, ‘Am I allowed to vote here in Georgia?’”
Much of the work the Senate campaigns and outside groups are doing ahead of Jan. 5 is focused on re-mobilizing voters from last month’s election rather than trying to bring new ones into the fold.
Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff has dedicated two dozen organizers to registering new voters, but his campaign did not disclose what their efforts had yielded. The Sunrise Movement, a progressive environmental group, has set a goal of registering 10,000 to 20,000 young Georgians who will turn 18 by Election Day.
While Ossoff and fellow Democrat Raphael Warnock have peppered their social media feeds with reminders about the pending registration deadline, Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue have mostly raised doubts about the efforts.
What’s more, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffenperger has launched an investigation into a collection of groups, accusing the New Georgia Project launched by Stacey Abrams of sending registration forms to people in New York and citing evidence of other operations trying to convince college students to temporarily change their residency to Georgia.
Register2Vote is not among the accused. The nonprofit group is largely volunteer-driven, posting a public map of homes of people believed to be eligible to vote but are not registered, empowering neighbors to approach members of their communities about filling out the necessary forms.
“I would call it a Kickstarter-style approach,” Smith said.
Smith said his group has already registered about 20,000 new Georgia voters since the general election and has a goal of at least doubling that number by Monday’s deadline.
Republican strategists working on the races say they are expending the vast amount of their time and energy on reaching their existing reliable base of supporters with a proven record of voting. One million Georgians have already applied for absentee ballots.
Still, at least one conservative group, the Faith and Freedom Coalition, is also trying to register new voters from their vast network of evangelical Christian churches. Ralph Reed, the group’s chairman, said they have targeted 5,500 Georgia churches with registration drives that have been orchestrated by local pastors.
“We think its entirely possible we have as many as 50,000 people in these 5,500 churches that are not registered to vote,” he said.
Reed’s goal is relatively modest: Sign up half of the 50,000, and they are likely to cast ballots for Perdue and Loeffler.
“It’s going to be on the margins but we’re talking about an election here that was just decided by 12,000 votes,” Reed said. “You can’t leave anything to chance. We have to assume this is going to be as close as the November election. If we hit our number, that’s double the margin by which Biden is ahead.”
Most strategists expect turnout in the January runoffs to fall off from November, but no one is exactly sure by how much.
And registering new voters is only half the battle. The next piece is making sure they actually follow through and vote, a process that begins in another week starting with the early voting period. Even as Georgia shattered its turnout record this November by nearly 20% over 2016, roughly one-third of the state’s eligible voting population did not cast a ballot.
But if the runoffs end up anywhere as close as the presidential race, a small batch of first-time voters may just determine which party controls the U.S. Senate in January.
