Sen. Jon Ossoff is not running for office this cycle. But while Democrats try every trick in their arsenal to keep Georgia — and the Senate — from switching back to red, he’s launching into the midterm elections in Georgia and reactivating the organising apparatus that helped turn the state blue.
Ossoff, who won the Jan. 2021 runoffs alongside fellow Democrat Sen. Raphael Warnock, is reviving a field organisation that experimented with novel strategies to turn out voters two years ago. The strategies assisted in bringing out enough Democratic voters to flip the Senate.
The risks are still very substantial. Despite the recent disclosure of multiple problems involving Walker, recent public polling indicates a dead heat in this year’s campaign between Warnock and the Republican Herschel Walker. The 50-50 Senate’s power structure might once more be decided by the state. Additionally, on a live microphone on Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was heard assuring President Joe Biden that the campaign was “going south.”
According to his campaign advisers, Ossoff is spending six figures from his personal leadership PAC account in an effort to change the electorate because he thinks a strong field organisation can do so.
After starting a canvassing campaign with Warnock, Democratic House candidate Wade Herring, and Savannah Mayor Van R. Johnson in a strip mall parking lot, Ossoff said in an interview with AWN, “We’ve demonstrated since 2017 that continually investing in organising, especially young voters, is so important. I’m using the organisation that I’ve built and putting it back to work.”
In the state, Warnock and Democrat Stacey Abrams, who is running for governor, have organised a vast network of field operations that Ossoff’s efforts will join. As Democrats seek a strategy to finish strong following many weeks of public polling gains by GOP Senate candidates, including Walker, a number of groups dedicated to getting out the vote are also involved.
The network of field organisers is working feverishly to turn out as many voters as they can on November 8; however, if the Warnock-Walker election goes to a runoff because no candidate received a majority of the vote, they may have to start all over again four weeks later.
However, it should be noted that some of the outside organisations canvassing neighbourhoods before the midterm elections have raised significant worries that they are not as well-funded as they have been in the past, drastically restricting the scope of their turnout efforts in 2022.
Because it wasn’t a presidential year, LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, stated, “I expected [the money] to be different.” But in terms of resources, it isn’t even comparable to 2018.
Brown referred to the major modifications to the runoff procedures made by Georgia’s new voting legislation, which was put into effect in 2021 by the Republican-controlled state legislature. The major change was the reduction of the runoff period from nine to four weeks, but the new rule also restricted early voting and effectively ended new voter registration during the runoff period because the registration deadline is 29 days before an election.
As a result, planning in advance of a potential runoff election on December 6 is crucial.
Ossoff stated, “I believe the state GOP made adjustments to the runoff procedure that they believed would help them electorally. But because every single one of our volunteers has participated in the two most important elections in recent memory, this is the most combat-proven political organisation in the nation.
Ossoff has a unique perspective on the planning that went into Georgia’s recent transformation as a battleground state. His narrow defeat in a special election for the House in 2017 signalled the suburban uprising against then-President Donald Trump, which turned the House in favour of Democrats the following year.