The other Democratic Senate candidate, Reverend Raphael Warnock, was making his own bet. He skated during the fall without facing many attacks while the Republicans fought among themselves, but the black preacher who became a politician could predict attacks that painted him as a radical. In late October, two weeks before the attacks started and before he even knew the identity of his Republican opponent, Warnock prepared a humanizing TV commercial to deflect the attacks, featuring a beagle barking and a narrator saying that the Democrat “hates dogs” .
Both bets were fully paid off two months later, when Warnock and Ossoff mobilized massive participation among black voters and other trusted Democratic groups and won enough white suburban to turn both Georgia Senate seats this week, giving Democrats the Senate control by the narrowest margins – a 50-50 Senate with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris casting the tiebreaker vote.
It probably couldn’t have happened without the rapid tactical changes that followed a disappointing November for Democrats, when the party lost Senate contests in states like Maine and North Carolina, which were supposed to be more mature targets. But Ossoff and Warnock increased the score in counties and districts with a large black population, while President Donald Trump’s base did not reach participation levels in November.
This account of how Democrats managed to win two contests, previously seen as unlikely long bids, is based on interviews with a dozen operatives and strategists involved in both contests, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss strategy and deliberations. .
Warnock faced a flurry of attacks immediately, as the run-off campaign began, from Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler and outside Republican groups. Most of the first advertisements focused directly on his sermons, accusing him of being an anti-police and anti-military “radical”, and exhibiting a series of other successes using his own words in the pulpit. An advertisement was run using a police camera from an incident involving Warnock and his wife.
Warnock’s campaign responded in some ads. But most of his messages remained positive, focusing on his childhood in housing projects, his faith and his position in the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church here. A Warnock aide summed up the strategy as “staying the reverend” and not losing your own message.
“We needed, at least for the people who would be willing to vote for us, to win that fight for him as a moral figure,” said a Warnock aide.
He followed a broader Democratic strategy to focus on mobilizing his base with more affirmative messages, including highlighting the need for additional funding for Covid-19.
“We tested many messages that were more negative and based on fear,” said Christie Roberts, a senior advisor to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee who, along with communications director Lauren Passalacqua, moved to Georgia to help with the campaign effort.
“’They don’t want you to vote. They don’t count on you to vote. Trump is trying to stop him from voting, ‘”said Roberts, offering examples of the negative attacks they considered. “And then we tested messages like, ‘You have the power to make the change. Your vote can make the change … ‘It was the positive that mobilized our base much more ”.
Strategy change
As the campaigns absorbed Republican attacks, they also launched an important coordinated field program, abandoning the party’s moratorium in the middle of the door slam elections, a crucial tool for Democrats that was suspended in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. . Jonae Wartel, Georgia’s second-round director who boarded to conduct the coordinated campaign in early November, said in an interview that it was a “gigantic task” to build an operation so quickly, although it was immediately clear that they needed a robust voter contact program.
“This was a little different from the general election, where a lot of the work was remotely organized,” said Wartel. “We had to climb extremely fast.”
The coordinated campaign made 25 million attempts to reach voters, with more than 40,000 volunteers engaged. They knocked on a million doors just in the last four days of the race.
“There was no one out there who didn’t know there was a second round,” said Wartel.
Ossoff himself played an unusually involved role in directing his campaign strategy – from his digital operation to the ground game – and he expressed the desire at the start of the second round campaign to focus heavily on increasing participation among African Americans , according to people familiar with the conversations
Running for Warnock, who will only be the 11th black senator in history, would significantly help black participation. But Ossoff’s campaign spearheaded additional outreach efforts of its own in rural areas of the state, the “black belt” counties, which saw strong participation among African Americans. Ossoff ran TV ads with black voters talking about the importance of their vote. Warnock’s campaign ran several ads highlighting his bus ride to remote corners of the state.
Much of that grassroots work in the state had already been established by Democrat Stacey Abrams, who launched an unprecedented voter registration effort after losing the race for state governor to Republican Brian Kemp in 2018. Groups like New Georgia Project and Fair Fight worked for years to register new voters, establishing a basis for the 2020 election and the effort to get black Georgians to the polls.
Ossoff’s campaign quickly hired a team of 30 employees for an electoral registration team to build on this in the early days of the second round before entering the field program after the December 7 registration deadline, according to a senior official. of the campaign. Ultimately, a campaign that initially had 25 people on the team increased to 200, not including more than 2,000 community organizers hired to do local evangelism. They even built an app that allowed organizers to sync their contacts and automatically call those who haven’t yet voted.
Two prominent Democratic consultants, Cornell Belcher and Karen Finney, conducted extensive research with infrequent black voters. The survey was paid for by the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee and shared with the two campaigns at the start of the second round to lay the groundwork for mobilization efforts, according to multiple people familiar with the effort.
The campaigns also conducted in-depth surveys of Asian and Latino voters, according to people familiar with the matter, knowing that they required high participation and strong margins among different populations of voters who helped deliver the state to Biden in November.
“All the time, Jon Ossoff was deeply and firmly convinced that we could defeat an incumbent entrenched like Perdue just by raising the voices of Georgians, especially black and young Georgians, building a movement from every moment of pain and hope”, said Joshua Karp, a senior campaign advisor.
Surprisingly, more than 100,000 people who voted in the second round did not vote in the November elections – and the vast majority of them voted for Ossoff and Warnock, according to the Democrats’ model. Even before that, Georgia’s Democrats viewed major events in 2020 – such as the death of Congressman John Lewis and the assassination of Ahmaud Arbery – as exciting times for black voters, whose share of the Georgia constituency had already risen more than any. another battlefield state.
An avalanche of TV ads
Ossoff made his previous work for Lewis the center of his campaign. He called Lewis in August 2019 to ask for his Senate endorsement, according to an adviser to Ossoff, and announced his campaign two weeks later, with Lewis’s support, a critical boost in the primaries with multiple candidates. In the first week of last December, Ossoff drove to Selma, Alabama, to film a TV ad on the historic Edmund Pettus Bridge, invoking Lewis’ story as a civil rights leader and calling for a new Civil Rights Act. The ad debuted on TV later that month, during the first week of early voting.
Second-round TV spending skyrocketed, with more than $ 500 million spent on advertising. But the two parties also invested heavily before November. While Warnock did not face attacks in the fall, outside GOP groups spent $ 45 million on the Ossoff race before November, according to data from AdImpact. Majority Forward, a Democratic non-profit organization, appeared on TV in July, weeks after Ossoff won the primaries. Senate Majority PAC, the Democrats’ top outside group, agreed with affiliated nonprofits to invest more than $ 40 million before November, according to AdImpact, much of it focused on attack ads against Perdue.
“It was frankly better for Democratic candidates than many places on the map, and we needed to make it a priority,” said JB Poersch, president of the SMP. “It was a risk that was worth taking for us.”
While the Democrats planned the second round, the Republicans also changed their focus. Republican candidates and groups relentlessly attacked Democrats, both as socialists, who would allow more liberal Democrats, such as Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) And Congressman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (DN.Y.), to enact their agenda.
Gabriel Sterling, the manager of implementing voting systems for the state and a conservative Republican who opposed Trump’s false allegations of electoral fraud, said on Wednesday that the sheer number of new voters was “proof of the hard work that it was done when Republicans were busy attacking the governor and my boss, ”referring to Kemp and Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensberger.
Indeed, Republicans in Georgia and Washington blamed Trump’s internal fighting for his two defeats in Georgia, particularly while Ossoff and Warnock were busy uniting their coalition. Because Perdue and Loeffler refused to acknowledge that Trump lost the election, he complicated the argument about how Ossoff and Warnock’s victories would give Democrats full control of the presidency and Congress. And Trump’s false attacks on the election, combined with his last-minute criticism on Twitter of Republican leaders in the Senate, have overturned his closing arguments.
Democrats did not have much time to celebrate fully, given the chaos that unfolded the day after his election, when violent pro-Trump protesters invaded the United States Capitol. But some employees have had moments to absorb this. On Tuesday night, before the race started, but after it seemed clear that Warnock would win, Motown legend Stevie Wonder joined the Warnock campaign team at Zoom to congratulate them and celebrate their victory. .