Brian Kemp, as well as Warnock’s reelection - and Democrats’ prospects of maintaining control of the Senate - in the balance, Democrats and their grassroots allies are hoping to once again organize their way to victory. With Abrams’s second campaign for governor against incumbent Republican Gov.
And it assisted long-shot Democratic candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in surprise victories in their US Senate races, handing the party narrow control of Congress. Organizing modeled on Abrams’s run helped Joe Biden flip the state by a less than 12,000 vote margin in 2020, a critical win in his path to the presidency. In 2018, their years of work paid off when Democrat Stacey Abrams ran for governor, rewriting Democrats’ playbook in a narrow loss powered largely by nonwhite voters. Grassroots groups have long struggled to draw investment from funders and campaigns, many of whom believed their efforts to be in vain. Those minority voters make up 40 percent of the electorate, but have historically been neglected by both parties.
Groups like the voter registration group New Georgia Project and Black Voters Matter have worked for years, some for more than a decade, to mobilize the political power of Black voters and other voters of color in the state. Now, Democrats are hoping that they - and the multiracial coalition they assembled - can deliver another miracle in 2022. Grassroots groups have helped turn the once reliably red Georgia into a battleground over the course of the last two election cycles.