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Dance Monkeys, Dance.
How Stacey Abrams became the 'architect' of Biden's Georgia surge
WASHINGTON — Turning Georgia purple didn’t happen overnight.
Joe Biden, if he retains his slim lead, will be the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the Peach State since Bill Clinton in 1992.
Biden smashed turnout records for Democrats in Georgia, getting over 2.4 million votes, up from less than 1.9 million for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Biden increased the Democratic party’s vote share in the state by over 571,000, more than Barack Obama did in the 2008 election, when he got 478,000 more votes than Democrat John Kerry in 2004.
This massive increase in Georgia’s Democratic vote came from a few things: population growth, the implementation of automatic voter registration in 2016, and Stacey Abrams’s organizing work over the past decade.
“Stacey is the architect of how we are where we are in Georgia,” said DuBose Porter, who was chairman of the Georgia Democratic Party during the years that Abrams was beginning her push nearly a decade ago to start registering more voters in the state.
For years, many Democrats have spoken of growing diversity in states like Texas, hoping it might lead to a political shift. But competitiveness in the Lone Star State has eluded the Democrats, while Georgia is now firmly in swing state territory. The Georgia story shows the importance of on-the-ground organizing, building durable institutions and the kind of leadership provided by a figure like Abrams.
The fact that Biden now may win the state also puts a new shine on the battle for control of the Senate, where Democrats would have to win a pair of runoff elections that are now set for Jan. 5, which would produce a 50-50 tie in the Senate, making a Democratic vice president the tie-breaking vote and giving their party the majority. Skepticism will remain that Democrats can turn out in the same numbers for an early January runoff as they did in a presidential election, but the fact that they may have won the state on election night will electrify these Senate races.
Voting overall has gone way up in Georgia over the last decade among both Republicans and Democrats. A total of 3.9 million Georgians voted in the 2012 presidential election, and eight years later, about a million more people cast ballots.
Democrats have become more competitive even as Republican voting has skyrocketed as well.
Population growth, which has been booming in Georgia for a long time, has fueled this increase in voters. The state gained roughly 1 million people over the last decade, on top of the 1.5 million added the decade before that.
Georgia has become more racially diverse, and younger, as a result. That shift has affected the voting universe as well. There’s been a 68 percent increase in voters under 35 over the past four years, while the group of over 65-year-olds has not grown at all during that time, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Part of Democratic gains is also likely from the implementation of automatic voter registration in 2016, which meant that any state resident who receives or updates their driver’s license is automatically registered as a voter unless they opt not to be. That move dramatically increased registration numbers in the state, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a voting rights group at New York University.
But without Abrams and the work she has spearheaded, all of that would not likely have added up to a situation where a Democratic presidential candidate was in position to win Georgia in 2020.
Abrams began working to register new Democratic voters ahead of the 2014 election, when she was the Democratic leader in the Georgia House of Representatives.
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/georgia-election-results-trump-biden-140754054.html