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      Fight to vote: the Georgia organizers who helped mobilize voters

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      Dear Fight to Vote readers,
      Welcome back! I’m Sam Levine, the voting rights reporter here at Guardian US. I’ll be taking over this newsletter from the stalwart Ankita Rao.
      After the attack on the US capitol last week it’s easy to forget that Georgia’s nationally-watched Senate runoff races were just a little over a week ago. While it’s difficult right now to think about anything other than what’s going on in Washington, I wanted to begin 2021 by looking at how democracy can work, rather than how it can fall apart. I saw this firsthand in Georgia, where grassroots groups organized to mobilize unlikely voters and worked to overcome severe voting barriers in Georgia, a state that has become an epicenter of voter suppression.
      Methodical organizing
      I spent the Monday before election day with canvassers from Georgia Stand-Up, one of several civic action groups that spent the weeks before the election getting out the vote. Our day began in a chilly church parking lot in Atlanta, where canvassers, equipped with Dunkin’ coffee and Bojangles chicken biscuits, quickly piled into vans, which were then dispatched into different neighborhoods.

      Sam Levine
      (@srl)
      An army of canvassers with Georgia Stand Up gets ready to go out one day before the senate runoffs here. Their goal is to hit 6,078 doors today, which would put them at 100,000 doors statewide pic.twitter.com/6tWG3oU9Rn

      January 4, 2021

      I followed along with one group as they went into a neighborhood in Fairburn, just outside of Atlanta. In the silence of the morning, the organizers flew out of the van in groups of twos and threes and quickly, methodically covered different houses. Their goal that day was to knock on just over 6,000 doors, bringing their total across the state to just over 100,000.
      ‘So many people are not aware of simple voting information’ More

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      in US Politics

      The Democrats owe their new control of the Senate to Black voters in Georgia | Theodore R Johnson

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      Last week, Raphael Warnock made history by winning a special senatorial election in Georgia, becoming the first Black Democrat from the south ever elected to the United States Senate. Warnock, the senior pastor of the same church Martin Luther King Jr once led, pulled off the upset thanks to high turnout among Black voters across the state, in metro and rural areas alike. While his victory may have the feel of an overnight success story to much of the nation, it is the product of voter engagement that’s occurred over the last decade.The signs that Warnock could pull off an unexpected victory were all there. In 2018, Stacey Abrams came within 1.4 percentage points of becoming Georgia’s first Black governor and the first Black woman to be governor in the nation’s history. Then, last November, Joe Biden carried the state, becoming only the second Democrat to win it in more than three decades. And it happened by the slimmest of margins: Biden bested Donald Trump by just 11,000 votes when more than 5m were cast. After these two statewide contests, Democratic strategists were optimistic that strong turnout among Black Georgians would allow them to win both Senate seats up for grabs. Warnock’s victory is a culmination of that trend and sustained voter engagement work by figures such as Stacey Abrams and years of Democratic organizers.As has been well-established, Black Americans are the most reliable Democratic voters in the country – for the last five decades, Democratic presidential and congressional candidates win about 90% of Black voters on average. This basically held true in Georgia in 2020, where Biden beat Trump among Black voters 88–11. Strategists understand that increasing Black voter turnout creates lopsided advantages for Democratic candidates for elected office. So in Georgia, where the number of Black Americans has steadily increased in recent years and presently makes up about a third of the state’s residents, Democrats recognized that a window of opportunity to win statewide contests would open.Stacey Abrams’ gubernatorial campaign leveraged the work of grassroots voter mobilization and civic engagement efforts and directed resources to expand outreach, especially in communities of color. And though she lost that election in an outcome clouded by voter suppression, the playbook for how to increase turnout by educating Georgians about the voting process and getting disengaged citizens to show up on election day was well-established. And it worked.Warnock beat Senator Kelly Loeffler, who was appointed to the seat in December of 2019, by 75,000 votes in an especially high turnout election where 4.4 million Georgians participated. Black turnout exceeded nearly all projections. Initial analysis from the New York Times shows that turnout in precincts with a supermajority Black population only fell about 7 points from the presidential election whereas turnout in white working-class precincts – traditionally Republican strongholds – fell by 13 points. And Black precincts voted more for Warnock than they did for Biden by about 3 points.The sustained engagement and mobilization strategies aimed at Black voters never let up after the presidential election; resources continued to flow. Black Georgians – who are disproportionately affected by long wait times to vote, polling station closures, and voter identification requirements – weathered attempts to complicate and discourage their participation. The outcome of these recent elections isn’t the product of a new movement, but rather the result of a long, steady build to increase and maintain Black turnout.In addition to turnout, Warnock was also aided by his race and gender. Political science scholarship reliably shows that Black Democratic candidates increase both turnout and support for Democrats up and down ballot; it is no surprise that in Georgia’s other senatorial election, featuring two white men, the Democrat Jon Ossoff also outperformed Biden.And my own research shows that Black men, in particular, are especially motivated by race and gender descriptive representation. That is, the opportunity to help a Black male Democrat make history is alluring to even Black Republicans or disengaged eligible Black male voters. So it makes sense that Warnock outperformed both Biden and Ossoff with Black men. According to exit polls, Biden won 83% of Black men in Georgia to Trump’s 16%, and Ossoff won 88% of them; but Warnock won 90% of this bloc – one in eight of all voters.In this way, Warnock leveraged the momentum of other Black Democrats in the south running for statewide office, merging the appeal of descriptive representation to turn out and win more Black voters with policies that appeal to white Democrats who have become increasingly liberal over the last several years. Black candidates with progressive agendas in states with a significant Black population may become a winning formula. Warnock’s victory suggests that the close losses by Abrams and Florida’s Andrew Gillum in 2018 governors’ races were not flukes, but harbingers of what may come.In the end, Black voters in Georgia not only delivered historic victories in last week’s Senate races, but they also completed a flip of the United States Senate back into Democratic control, with Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaking vote.The voter turnout work that began years ago in reliably Republican Georgia overcame efforts to suppress the votes of its Black citizens and managed to elect its first Black senator. Perhaps more importantly, those efforts not only changed the state, but they have the potential to shift the direction of the country after the Trump era. More

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      ‘They always put other barriers in place’: how Georgia activists fought off voter suppression

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      Deborah Scott has been registering voters for well over a decade in Georgia, but about five years ago she began to notice a problem. Georgia Stand-Up, the civic action group she leads, started getting a spike in calls from people who said they filled out a voter registration form but never received an official voter registration card. “We’re like ‘hey, what’s going on here?,’” she said.Scott’s group adjusted their voter registration strategy. After they got someone to register, they started tracking their voter registration and following up with them to ensure it went through. When there was a problem, they would help the voter follow up with local election officials. Sometimes, after that follow-up inquiry, the election officials would “miraculously” discover the registration was there all along, Scott said.Georgia Stand-Up took their strategy into the general election last year and Senate runoff this year, both of which saw extremely high turnout among Black voters. It’s a surge that many have attributed to years of investment by activists like Scott and Democrat Stacey Abrams, to mobilize voters of color, who traditionally have had lower turnout than their white counterparts, and flip the state for Democrats in stunning upsets in both the presidential race (Joe Biden was the first Democrat to carry the state in a presidential race in nearly 30 years) and two US Senate runoffs.As voter suppression has become more brazen in Georgia, overcoming it has become a core part of the work that Abrams and other organizers have done to mobilize the new electorate in the state. This work is not glamorous, focused on helping new voters navigate a bureaucracy designed to make it more difficult to vote. It’s making calls to voters to ensure they know their polling place, explaining how to fill out a mail-in ballot, and making sure they aren’t wrongly purged from the voter rolls. But the multi-year investment in overcoming voting barriers significantly contributed to organizers’ success in Georgia this year.“What we kept seeing was no matter what turnout we had, if we turned out in larger numbers, they always put other barriers in place,” said Helen Butler, the executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, another civil rights group focused on mobilizing voters of color. “We had to go through strategies that would help us to be more proactive.” Georgia Republicans have already signaled they plan to move ahead with new restrictions on vote-by-mail after an election in which a record number of people used the process.Butler said her group had to shift considerable resources to combat voter suppression starting in 2013, when the US supreme court struck down a provision of the Voting Rights Act that required places with a history of voting discrimination to submit voting changes to the federal government for approval before they went into effect. After the decision, her group began sending representatives to local boards of election so they could learn about polling place changes and consolidations and other changes they needed to know about before election day.Those strategies crystallized during the 2018 gubernatorial race, when Abrams lost to Brian Kemp, then the state’s top election official, and Georgia’s voting barriers were thrust to the center of the race. There was harsh scrutiny of state policy that placed 53,000 voter registrations in suspense over small discrepancies, 70% of which were Black voters. Georgia’s practice of aggressively purging hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls became a matter of national attention. For many, the election illuminated how severely restrictive voting rules could affect an election outcome.“There were so many people who had problems with their registration and didn’t discover the problem until they were already at the polls,” said Sara Tindall Ghazal, who worked as the Georgia Democratic party’s voter protection director from 2018 to 2019. “And when more than half of voters would vote on election day, it’s too late to fix anything then.”Beyond highlighting severe barriers in Georgia, the 2018 election also highlighted Democrats’ political strength in Georgia, Ghazal added, opening up money and other resources for grassroots groups that previously hadn’t existed. Abrams’ decision to focus on voting barriers in the state after the election only further galvanized support.In recent years, Butler said, her group has stepped up efforts to prevent voters from being wrongfully purged. Regularly monitoring Georgia’s voter rolls, her group will contact voters who are at risk of being purged to inform them of how they can confirm their eligibility. If someone has been purged, they tell them how they can re-register.“We didn’t always do that. We didn’t have to do that until recently,” Butler said.This year, Fair Fight, the organization Abrams started after the 2018 election, had a network of more than 15,000 volunteers to help people overcome barriers to voting. When it looked like Pooler, a city just outside Savannah, wouldn’t offer any ballot drop boxes, Fair Fight texted voters there to get them to push local officials to install one, said Marisa Pyle, the group’s volunteer and rapid response organizer. Once officials announced there would be a drop box after all, Fair Fight followed up with voters and let them know the location. The group took a similar approach to pressure officials to allow early voting on campus at the University of Georgia.“Our goal was to make sure they got [voting information] in a way that was accessible. And when there were access gaps, trying to fill them with advocacy and our volunteer work,” Pyle said.The effort to contact voters doesn’t stop after election day. Once the polls closed in theSenate runoff, Butler and other groups launched an aggressive effort to contact voters who submitted a provisional ballot at the polls – a special kind of ballot election workers are required to offer if there is uncertainty about their eligibility.Butler said her group will often work with voters to help them understand what kind of documentation they need to provide to election officials in the days after the election in order to ensure their ballot isn’t rejected. If they are on the phone with a voter, organizers will sometimes even set up a three-way call with the board of elections to ensure they understand what they need to do to have their vote counted.The approach was deployed deftly in the general election and runoff. This year, when there were polling place changes in Georgia, organizers sent volunteers to the old locations to make sure voters were redirected to the new one. And as organizers knocked on doors trying to turn out new voters, teaching them about the voting process was at the heart of their conversations.As she knocked on doors ahead of the Senate runoff, Lacreasa Acey, a 38-year-old canvasser, said the emphasis on overcoming voting barriers was a big part of the conversations she had with voters. Sometimes, the information she offered could be as simple as telling people where they could vote or showing them how to fill out an absentee ballot.“It’s amazing how so many people are not aware of simple voting information. They don’t know where to go, they don’t know how to mail in ballots or anything like that, so they get frustrated and they say ‘you know what, I’m just not gonna vote at all,’” said Acey, who knocked on doors on behalf of the New South Super Pac, which backed the Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. “I have everything already. I have the answers.” More

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      In Georgia, Trump’s Attacks on Election Still Haunt Republicans

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Trump ImpeachmentliveLatest UpdatesHouse Introduces ChargeMcConnell Said to Support ChargeHow Impeachment Might Work25th Amendment ExplainedAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyIn Georgia, Trump’s Attacks on Election Still Haunt RepublicansIn the aftermath of President Trump’s efforts to subvert the election, state officials face harassment and threats, and a district attorney is weighing an inquiry into the president’s actions.As absentee ballots were counted in Georgia, Joseph R. Biden Jr. overtook President Trump, eventually winning the state’s 16 electoral votes.Credit…Audra Melton for The New York TimesRichard Fausset and Jan. 12, 2021, 7:39 p.m. ETATLANTA — The impeachment charge that House Democrats have filed against President Trump stems from his role in inciting a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol last week. But included in the resolution is another element of Mr. Trump’s behavior that is also drawing condemnation as an abuse of presidential power: His pressure campaign to persuade Georgia officials to overturn his electoral loss in the state.Before inspiring a throng of supporters to attack the Capitol, Mr. Trump had previously sought to “subvert and obstruct” the results of his failed re-election effort, a draft article of impeachment released Monday reads, citing in particular the president’s extraordinary intervention in Georgia.Even if Democrats’ second effort to remove the president from office fails or fades, Mr. Trump’s efforts to subvert the will of Georgia’s voters will continue to resonate, both for the president and for politicians in Georgia. State elections officials continue to face harassment and death threats. A number of Georgia Republicans are now blaming Mr. Trump’s baseless accusations of election fraud for the losses by the state’s two Republican senators this month.And in Atlanta, the Fulton County district attorney is weighing whether to start a criminal investigation into Mr. Trump for a phone call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which the president exhorted him to “find” the votes that would deliver Mr. Trump victory.That call was part of a much broader push by Mr. Trump and his allies to subvert Georgia’s election results. The effort played out over two months and in the end was based on allegations of fraud that were consistently debunked by his fellow Republicans charged with overseeing the state’s election.Gabriel Sterling, one of the most outspoken of those officials, said in an interview this week that the president’s effort was both inappropriate and crude.“There was never an overarching strategy,” Mr. Sterling said, adding: “It was a series of tactical moves in an attempt to get a different outcome here. The president shouldn’t be trying to do things to put his thumb on the scale. I don’t care if it’s a Republican or a Democrat, no president should do that.”Mr. Trump’s relentless campaign to change the result first came to public attention in a startling act of intraparty discord six days after Election Day.Mr. Trump could face a criminal investigation in Georgia for exhorting top election official to “find” the votes that would deliver him victory.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesOn Nov. 9, the two Republican senators forced into Georgia runoff races, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, released a joint statement calling for the resignation of Mr. Raffensperger, a fellow Republican. The senators, who were both Trump loyalists, made hazy allegations that Mr. Raffensperger’s oversight of the election was marred by “mismanagement and lack of transparency.”An official in the secretary of state’s office, who requested anonymity because of the threats that were still coming in, said the office learned that same day that Mr. Trump was behind the statement; he had warned the two candidates that he would turn his Twitter account against them if they did not publicly call for Mr. Raffensperger to step down.The state official learned of the threat in a phone call with consultants from one of the two senators’ campaigns.There had been other, quieter attempts to move Mr. Raffensperger, a Trump supporter and lifelong Republican, more firmly and publicly into Mr. Trump’s camp. In January of last year, he rejected an offer to serve as honorary co-chair of the Trump campaign. He also rebuffed subsequent efforts to get him to publicly endorse the president, according to two state elections officials. The efforts, which Mr. Raffensperger rejected on the grounds that he needed to be seen as impartial, were first reported by ProPublica.The assault on Mr. Raffensperger and Gov. Brian Kemp, who also is a Republican, came as Mr. Trump watched his chances of victory melt away, with swing states counting mountains of mail-in absentee votes that tilted the race in favor of his Democratic challenger, Joseph R. Biden Jr.In Georgia, David Shafer, the chair of the state Republican Party, assailed the vote-counting process in Fulton County, which encompasses much of Atlanta. Soon, a succession of Trump allies and aides, some of them much more powerful than Mr. Shafer, began exerting pressure on state officials to overturn the election results.One of them was Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. He called Mr. Raffensperger later that month, and asked him if he had the power to toss out mail-in votes from some counties, according to Mr. Raffensperger’s account of the call, which Mr. Graham has disputed.The president unleashed a barrage of tweets baselessly challenging his loss and calling for a special session of the Legislature to consider overturning the results. Conspiracy theories blossomed on the far-right fringes of the internet.On Dec. 1, Mr. Sterling, in an emotional news conference, implored Mr. Trump to stop claiming that the election had somehow been “rigged” against him.“Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language,” he said, expressing fury over the threats that election officials and poll workers were receiving. “It has to stop.”Shortly after the Nov. 3 election, Georgia’s two Republican senators called on Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, also a Republican, to step down.Credit…Brynn Anderson/Associated PressIt did not. On Dec. 3, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph Giuliani came to Georgia for a State Senate hearing and made a series of specious claims about voter fraud, even as officials from the secretary of state’s office debunked such claims at a separate hearing taking place just one floor below. The next day, the Trump campaign filed suit in Georgia to try to get the state’s election results overturned and was joined by the state party.On Dec. 5, Mr. Trump called Mr. Kemp to pressure him to call a special session of the Legislature to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory in the state. Just hours later, the president again criticized Mr. Kemp and Mr. Raffensperger at a rally that was putatively intended to bolster the electoral chances of Ms. Loeffler and Mr. Perdue. Two days later, after two recounts, Mr. Raffensperger certified Mr. Biden’s victory.By then, the schism within the party had widened. A senior official in the secretary of state’s office said at the time that the state party needed “to stop passing the buck for failing to deliver Georgia for Trump.”In the days before Christmas, Mr. Trump called the lead investigator for the Georgia secretary of state’s office, pressing the investigator to “find the fraud,” those with knowledge of the call have said. Around the same time, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, made a surprise visit to Cobb County, with Secret Service agents in tow, to view an audit in process there. (“It smelled of desperation,” Mr. Sterling said in the interview. “It felt stunt-ish.”)The pressure campaign culminated during a Jan. 2 call by Mr. Trump to Mr. Raffensperger, which was first reported by The Washington Post. “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” Mr. Trump said on the call, during which Mr. Raffensperger and his aides once again dismissed the baseless claims of fraud..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-c7gg1r{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:0.875rem;margin-bottom:15px;color:#121212 !important;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-c7gg1r{font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-rqynmc{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc strong{font-weight:600;}.css-rqynmc em{font-style:italic;}.css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1cs27wo{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1cs27wo{padding:20px;}}.css-1cs27wo:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}.css-1cs27wo[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-1cs27wo[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-1cs27wo[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-1cs27wo[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-k9atqk{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-k9atqk strong{font-weight:700;}.css-k9atqk em{font-style:italic;}.css-k9atqk a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ccd9e3;}.css-k9atqk a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;}.css-k9atqk a:hover{border-bottom:none;}The Trump ImpeachmentFrom Riot to ImpeachmentThe riot inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, followed a rally at which President Trump made an inflammatory speech to his supporters, questioning the results of the election. Here’s a look at what happened and at the ongoing fallout:This video takes a look inside the siege on the capitol. This timeline shows how a crucial two hour period turned a rally into the riot.Several Trump administration officials, including cabinet members Betsy DeVos and Elaine Chao, announced that they were stepping down as a result of the riot.Federal prosecutors have charged more than 70 people, including some who appeared in viral photos and videos of the riot. Officials expect to eventually charge hundreds of others.House Democrats have begun impeachment proceedings. A look at how they might work.Of all of Mr. Trump’s efforts to change the Georgia results, it was this call, recorded and released to the public, that could end up causing him the most trouble. The impeachment resolution cites the call in asserting that the president “threatened the integrity of the Democratic system.”The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, implored Mr. Trump to stop what had become an incessant barrage of baseless allegations that the election had somehow been “rigged.”Credit…Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressOn Jan. 5, Ms. Loeffler and Mr. Perdue lost their races, giving Democrats control of the Senate. A day later, Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol.The ramifications of Mr. Trump’s false claims of voter fraud continue in Georgia. Mr. Sterling said that his house, as well as Mr. Kemp’s, showed up on a website called “enemies of the people” that the F.B.I. concluded was part of an Iranian effort to disrupt the election.“I got doxxed again last night on Gab,” Mr. Sterling said Monday, referring to a site favored by right-wing extremists.Georgia Republicans were already confronting the daunting prospect of a Democratic Party reinvigorated by changing demographics and suburbanites’ growing distaste for Mr. Trump’s political style. Now they are left with a party badly split between the Trump supporters who continue to believe that the election was stolen from him and those who believe Mr. Trump’s fight to overturn the results was misguided.“I think that by President Trump going so far beyond even the date that Al Gore conceded hurt the Republican Party in the runoff,” said Martha Zoller, who chairs Georgia United Victory, the most prominent political action committee that backed Ms. Loeffler’s bid. “I think he had the right to pursue the avenues, but he should have called for peace and unity a lot sooner.”The legal ramifications of Mr. Trump’s attempts to reverse the election here are uncertain — and complicated. Some legal scholars have said that Mr. Trump’s call to Mr. Raffensperger may have violated state and federal laws, though many note that a charge may be difficult to pursue.A spokesman for Fani Willis, Fulton County’s new prosecutor, did not return calls seeking comment this week.In a Jan. 3 letter to Mr. Raffensperger, David Worley, a Democratic member of the state elections board, said that probable cause might exist that Mr. Trump violated a Georgia law concerning solicitation to commit election fraud. State law makes it illegal for anyone who “solicits, requests, commands, importunes” or otherwise encourages others to engage in election fraud.In an interview this week, Anthony Michael Kreis, a constitutional law expert at Georgia State University in Atlanta, said that Ms. Willis was facing a difficult decision of whether to use her office’s time and resources to go after the president, given her significant challenges at home, including a spike in Atlanta’s crime rate.But Mr. Kreis argued that the nature of the debate might have changed since the mob attacked the U.S. Capitol last Wednesday.“Now it well might be worth her time,” he said, “because there’s been real life-and-death consequences for these lies, as well as the president attacking state and local officials to do his bidding to overturn the election in an anti-democratic thrust.”Astead W. Herndon and Nick Corasaniti contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How Martin Luther King Jr.’s Imprisonment Changed American Politics Forever

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storynonfictionHow Martin Luther King Jr.’s Imprisonment Changed American Politics ForeverMartin Luther King Jr. under arrest, Oct. 19, 1960.Credit…Associated PressAmazonApple BooksBarnes and NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshopIndieboundWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.Jan. 12, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETNINE DAYSThe Race to Save Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life and Win the 1960 ElectionBy Stephen Kendrick and Paul KendrickThe African-American struggle for freedom and civil rights is replete with dramatic and harrowing stories, many involving intimidation and threats of violence from white supremacist defenders of the status quo. One of the most consequential of these stories is the subject of “Nine Days,” a compelling narrative written by the father-and-son team of Stephen and Paul Kendrick, co-authors of two previous books on race, law and politics.The story begins in mid-October 1960 with Martin Luther King Jr.’s incarceration (his first) in a Georgia jail cell and ends three weeks later with John F. Kennedy’s narrow victory over Richard M. Nixon in the most competitive presidential election of the 20th century. Kennedy’s razor-thin triumph depended on several factors ranging from his youthful charm to Mayor Richard J. Daley’s ability to pad the Democratic vote in Chicago. But, as the Kendricks ably demonstrate, one crucial factor in Kennedy’s electoral success was the late surge of Black voters into the Democratic column. In all likelihood, this surge represented the difference between victory and defeat in at least five swing states, including Illinois, Michigan and New Jersey, ensuring Kennedy’s comfortable margin (303 to 219) in the Electoral College.This last-minute shift was precipitated by two impulsive phone calls: one from John Kennedy to Coretta Scott King, expressing his concern for her jailed husband’s safety; the second from the candidate’s younger brother Robert to Oscar Mitchell, the Georgia judge overseeing King’s incarceration. Arrested on two minor charges — participating in a student-led sit-in at Rich’s department store in Atlanta and driving with an Alabama license after changing his residency to Georgia — King was thought to be in grave danger after a manacled, late-night transfer from an Atlanta jail to a remote rural facility in Klan-infested DeKalb County, and soon thereafter to the state’s notorious maximum-security prison in Reidsville.Coretta King, panic-stricken that her husband might be murdered or even lynched, contacted Harris Wofford, a friend and longtime civil rights advocate working on Kennedy’s campaign. Along with Kennedy’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver and the Black journalist Louis Martin, Wofford was part of a campaign initiative charged with expanding the Black vote for Kennedy by offsetting the senator’s mediocre record on civil rights — somehow without alienating the white South.On Oct. 26, after consulting with Wofford, Shriver persuaded Kennedy to call Mrs. King. The conversation was brief, but the message was powerful: “I know this must be very hard for you. I understand you are expecting a baby, and I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you and Dr. King. If there is anything I can do to help, please feel free to call on me.” When Bobby, Jack’s campaign manager, learned what had happened, he was furious, fearing this was a liberal stunt that would destroy his brother’s chance of winning the South. But after cooling down and realizing that the die was cast, he called Judge Mitchell to plead for King’s release on bail.Mitchell agreed, King was soon released and on the last Sunday before the election, the Kennedy campaign blanketed the nation’s Black churches with a flier later known as the Blue Bomb. The choice was clear, the bright blue flier insisted: “‘No Comment’ Nixon Versus a Candidate With a Heart, Senator Kennedy.” With Black ministers leading the way, Kennedy won an estimated 68 percent of the Black vote on Election Day, 7 percent higher than Adlai Stevenson’s showing in 1956.No brief review can do full justice to the Kendricks’ masterly and often riveting account of King’s ordeal and the 1960 “October Surprise” that may have altered the course of modern American political history. Suffice it to say that any reader who navigates the many twists and turns and surprises in this complex tale will come away recognizing the power of historical contingency.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      State Capitols ‘on High Alert,’ Fearing More Violence

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutliveLatest UpdatesInside the SiegeInauguration SecurityNotable ArrestsIncitement to Riot?AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyState Capitols ‘on High Alert,’ Fearing More ViolenceOfficials around the country are bracing for any spillover from last week’s violent assault on the U.S. Capitol. State legislatures already have become targets for protesters in recent days.A member of the Georgia State Patrol SWAT team looked on outside the Georgia State Capitol after the opening day of the legislative session on Monday in Atlanta.Credit…Brynn Anderson/Associated PressNeil MacFarquhar and Jan. 11, 2021Updated 8:22 p.m. ETIt was opening day of the 2021 legislative session, and the perimeter of the Georgia State Capitol on Monday was bristling with state police officers in full camouflage gear, most of them carrying tactical rifles.On the other side of the country, in Olympia, Wash., dozens of National Guard troops in riot gear and shields formed a phalanx behind a temporary fence. Facing them in the pouring rain was a small group of demonstrators, some also wearing military fatigues and carrying weapons. “Honor your oath!” they shouted. “Fight for freedom every day!”And in Idaho, Ammon Bundy, an antigovernment activist who once led his supporters in the occupation of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, showed up outside the statehouse in Boise with members of his organization carrying “wanted” posters for Gov. Brad Little and others on charges of “treason” and “sedition.”“At a time of uncertainty, we need our neighbors to stand next to and continue the war that is raging within this country,” Mr. Bundy’s group declared in a message to followers.State capitals across the country are bracing for a spillover from last week’s violent assault on the U.S. Capitol, with state legislatures already becoming targets for protesters in the tense days around the inauguration of the incoming president, Joseph R. Biden Jr.Gone is a large measure of the bonhomie that usually accompanies the annual start of the legislative season, replaced by marked unease over the possibility of armed attacks and gaps in security around statehouses that have long prided themselves on being open to constituents.“Between Covid and the idea that there are people who are armed and making threats and are serious, it was definitely not your normal beginning of session,” said Senator Jennifer A. Jordan, a Democratic legislator in Georgia who watched the police officers assembled outside the State Capitol in Atlanta on Monday from her office window. “Usually folks are happy, talking to each other, and it did not have that feel.”Dozens of state capitals will be on alert in the coming days, following calls among a mix of antigovernment organizations for actions in all 50 states on Jan. 17. Some of them come from far-right organizations that harbor a broad antigovernment agenda and have already been protesting state Covid-19 lockdowns since last spring. The F.B.I. this week sent a warning to local law enforcement agencies about the potential for armed protests in all 50 state capitals.In a video news conference on Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said that “everybody is on high alert” for protests in Sacramento in the days ahead.The National Guard would be deployed as needed, he said, and the California Highway Patrol, responsible for protecting the Capitol, was also on the lookout for any budding violence. “I can assure you we have a heightened, heightened level of security,” he said.In Michigan, the state police said they had beefed up their presence around the State Capitol in Lansing and would continue that way for weeks. The commission that oversees the Statehouse voted on Monday to ban the open carry of firearms inside the building, a move Democratic lawmakers had been demanding since last year, when armed protesters challenging government Covid-19 lockdowns stormed the building.Two of those involved in the protests were later arrested in what the authorities said was a plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and put her on trial.Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, took to Twitter to warn the public away from the Statehouse, saying it was not safe.Images from the Wisconsin state legislature in Madison showed large sheets of plywood being readied to cover the ground-floor windows. In St. Paul, Minn., the Statehouse has been surrounded by a chicken-wire fence since early last summer, when social justice protests erupted over the killing of George Floyd in neighboring Minneapolis.Workers boarded up the Wisconsin State Capitol building in Madison on Monday.Credit…Todd Richmond/Associated PressPatricia Torres Ray, a Democratic state senator, said the barrier had served to protect the building and the legislators, but concerns remained about possible gaps, such as the system of underground tunnels that link many public buildings in Minnesota to allow people to avoid walking outdoors in the winter.Gov. Jay Inslee in Washington ordered extra security after an armed crowd of Trump supporters breached the fence at the governor’s mansion last week while he was at home. State troopers intervened to disperse the crowd.In Texas, Representative Briscoe Cain, a conservative Republican from the Houston suburb of Deer Park, said that the legislature in Austin was likely protected by the fact that so many lawmakers carry firearms.“I have a pistol on my hip as we speak,” Mr. Cain said in a telephone interview on Monday. “I hope they’re never necessary, but I think it’s why they will never be necessary.”The Texas Legislature, dominated by Republicans, meets every two years and was scheduled to begin its 140-day session at noon on Tuesday.There may be efforts to reduce the presence of guns in the Capitol, Mr. Cain said, but he predicted that they would be doomed to failure given widespread support for the Second Amendment.In Missouri, Dave Schatz, the Republican president of the State Senate, said hundreds of lawmakers had gathered on Monday on the Statehouse lawn in Jefferson City for the swearing-in of Gov. Mike Parson and other top officials. Although security was tight, with the roads around the building closed, the presence of police and other security officers was normal for the day, Mr. Schatz said, and no fellow legislators had buttonholed him so far about increased security.“We are far removed from the events that occurred in D.C.,” he said.In Nevada, a Republican leader in Nye County posted a letter on Friday that likened recent protests of the election results across the country to the American Revolution, declaring: “The next 12 days will be something to tell the grandchildren! It’s 1776 all over again!”The letter — written by Chris Zimmerman, the chairman of the Nye County Republican Central Committee — prompted a rebuke over the weekend from Representative Steven Horsford, a Democrat who represents the county.Gov. Mike Parson of Missouri and his wife, Teresa Parson, waved outside the State Capitol in Jefferson City, escorted by members of the Missouri Highway Patrol during the governor’s inauguration celebration.Credit…Jeff Roberson/Associated PressNext door in Clark County, Nev., which includes Las Vegas, Democratic officials sent out a public safety alert on Sunday about potential violence across the state, warning, “Over the past 48 hours, the online activity on social media has escalated to the point that we must take these threats seriously.”While most of the protests announced so far are expected to focus on state capitals, law enforcement and other officials in various cities have said they believe that other government buildings could also be targeted.Federal authorities said on Monday that they had arrested and charged one man, Cody Melby, with shooting several bullets into the federal courthouse in Portland, Ore., on Friday night. Mr. Melby had also been arrested a couple of days earlier when, the police said, he tried to enter the State Capitol in Salem with a firearm.Some of those protesting in Oregon and Washington said they were opposed to state lockdown rules that prevent the public from being present when government decisions are being made.James Harris, 22, who lives in eastern Washington State, said he went to the Capitol in Olympia on Monday to push for residents to be full participants in their state’s response to Covid-19. He said he was against being forced to wear masks and to social distance; the lockdowns are “hurting people,” he said.Mr. Harris is a truck driver, but he said the virus control measures had prevented him from being able to work since March.Georgia already has seen trouble in recent days. At the same time that protesters were swarming into the U.S. Capitol in Washington last week, armed Trump supporters appeared outside the statehouse in Georgia. Law enforcement officers escorted to safety the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who had refused President Trump’s attempts to depict the presidential election as fraudulent.Senator Jordan noted that many of the security measures being put in place, including the construction of a tall iron fence around the Capitol building, were actually decided on during last summer’s social justice demonstrations, when protesters surrounded many government buildings.Now, she said, the threat is coming from the other end of the political spectrum.“These people are clearly serious, they are armed, they are dangerous,” Ms. Jordan said, “and from what we saw last week, they really don’t care who they are trying to take out.”Contributing reporting were More

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      Inside the Billion-Dollar War Against Right-Wing Conspiracists

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySwayInside the Billion-Dollar War Against Right-Wing ConspiracistsJohn Poulos is the C.E.O. of Dominion Voting Systems. His $1.3 billion suit against an ex-Trump lawyer might be the “first step” in a powerful fight against actual fake news.Hosted by Kara SwisherMore episodes ofSwayJanuary 11, 2021  •  More

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      Georgia Senate Race Is Proof: The South Is Really Changing

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyLies, Damn Lies, and GeorgiaThe election of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff is a clear message: The South truly is changing.Contributing Opinion WriterJan. 11, 2021A public art installation in Atlanta.Credit…Damon Winter/The New York TimesNASHVILLE — It’s impossible not to notice how many members of Congress who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election were white Southerners — more than half the legislators who professed to believe Donald Trump’s lie that the election was stolen are people who represent the American South. Even after his supporters, egged on by the president himself, staged a violent insurrection inside the United States Capitol, these craven, feckless legislators would not vote to certify the results of an election that has survived the scrutiny of more than 60 baseless challenges in various courts.Others, including my own state’s two senators, entered the Senate chamber on Jan. 6 fully intending to join them but were moved by the violent attack on the Capitol to reverse course. “These actions at the US Capitol by protestors are truly despicable and unacceptable,” tweeted Marsha Blackburn, a Republican senator from Tennessee. “I condemn them in the strongest possible terms. We are a nation of laws.”We are also a nation of free and fair elections, but somehow Ms. Blackburn had managed to ignore that necessary part of our democratic compact. She was not alone in her tardy about-face. All across the Southern states, politicians scrambled to reassert their own faith in the rule of law after publicly flouting it for weeks — or years, depending on when you start counting.Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, belatedly recognizing the nature of his own constituency, called the insurrectionists “terrorists, not patriots.”“Violence is abhorrent and I strongly condemn today’s attacks on our Capitol,” tweeted Senator Kelly Loeffler, Republican of Georgia, who had just spent two months running for re-election while simultaneously joining the president in insisting that the election was rigged.With such elected “leaders” representing this region — and with the insurrectionists parading through our nation’s Capitol carrying Confederate battle flags and other symbols of white supremacy — it’s not surprising that so many people outside the South seem to believe that the voters who support Marsha Blackburn, Lindsey Graham and Kelly Loeffler, not even to mention Donald Trump, are the only people who live here.All I can say is thank God for Georgia.In the runoff elections last week, the good people of Georgia sent two Democrats to Washington, D.C.: the Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once served as a co-pastor, and Jon Ossoff, a Jewish film executive who ran for Senate with the blessing of John Lewis, the civil rights activist and longtime member of Congress who passed away in July. In electing them, Georgia delivered the Senate to Democrats and at the same time offered a clear illustration of something Southerners, liberal and conservative alike, have known for years: The American South in the midst of profound change.This is not a story of 21st century carpetbaggers moving to the South to take advantage of our cheap cost of living and then blowing up our longstanding election patterns, an argument I’ve heard from more than one conservative Southerner.Partly, as other writers have noted, what is changing in the South is the demographic makeup. Urban and suburban voters, and the residents of college towns, are more apt to be progressive, and that’s true whether they’re homegrown or new residents. Every red state in the region has them. Think of Memphis and Nashville. Think of Chapel Hill and Birmingham and Louisville and New Orleans and Austin. As small towns dry up and jobs in the countryside disappear, it only stands to reason that these ever-growing cities and their suburbs will eventually loosen the stranglehold that rural voters have always had over elections in the South — at least in statewide elections, where gerrymandered districts don’t matter.But Republicans still hold the power in almost all Southern state legislatures (Virginia’s is the exception, and only since 2019), and they will continue to do everything possible to make it harder for Democrats to vote. In Georgia, state legislators are already eyeing new ways to avoid a repeat of the elections that turned Georgia blue. Consequently, change in the South may always be of the two-steps-forward-one-step-back variety.Which brings us to the other major explanation for why the South is changing: Liberals and progressives keep fighting back. Stacey Abrams is the face of this fight, and she is rightly credited with flipping Georgia two years after unapologetic voter-suppression tactics ended her own hopes of serving as governor. But the New Georgia Project, the mighty voter-outreach organization that Ms. Abrams and her colleagues have built to register new voters and persuade long disenfranchised Black and brown voters not to give up on the democratic process, has analogues across the South. These efforts may be less visible than Ms. Abrams’s, and some of them are still embryonic, but they are growing.That’s why Democrats down here haven’t completely lost heart, despite consistently losing elections to Republicans on one side and despite being chastised by liberals outside the South on the other. (“Everyday Democrats need to see beyond the electoral map to acknowledge the folks pushing for liberal ideas even in the reddest of areas,” the Kentucky novelist Silas House notes in a new essay for The Atlantic. “If they don’t, the cultural divide will grow only wider.”)In addition to voting demographics and voter outreach, a small but not inconsequential explanation for the changing political landscape of the South is that Donald Trump has finally inspired a change of heart in plenty of white Southerners. You won’t find them waving banners at political rallies or posting diatribes on social media, but they are here.Many of them sat out the last election, true, but others quietly, bravely cast their votes for Democrats, often for the first time in their lives, because this president has made them see how thin the veneer of democracy really is in today’s Republican Party. It isn’t easy for them to defy their entire family or their entire church to vote for candidates who stand for fairness and inclusion, but they did it in 2020, and already in 2021, and I believe that their numbers will continue to grow.I hope you’ll remember them, and all the passionate liberal activists here, too, the next time you see a sea of red on an election map. I hope you’ll remember them the next time a Southern statehouse passes another law that constrains the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. citizens or guts public education or makes it harder to choose an abortion but easier to buy a gun. I hope you’ll look beyond the headlines to what is also happening here, often at great risk to those who are making it happen. Because Georgia is the clearest proof yet that this is not our grandfather’s Southland anymore. And it will never be again.Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She is the author of the book “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More