Solidarity Won The Georgia Senate Runoff

By: Laura Misumi, Managing Director Of Detroit Action & Executive Director Of Michigan Asian American Progressives

In 2020, Black and Brown organizers with Detroit Action, and AAPI organizers with Michigan Asian American Progressives came together to create Michigan Action, a state and a federal independent expenditure superPAC, to amplify our communities’ voices in the 2020 election. Collectively, we were able to ensure that over 315,000 Black, Brown, and AAPI Michiganders received information on where and how to exercise their right to vote, what was at stake in this election, and who we believed offered the best chance to push for progressive change.

We knew that our targeted universe of Black and Brown voters who don’t often vote and AAPIs are the least likely to be contacted by any organization around the election, and are therefore much less likely to vote. To remedy this, we layered our contacts, making sure that in addition to mailers, we had digital ads in at least 8 different languages talking about the importance of voting and who we were endorsing. We made hundreds of thousands of phone calls, sent hundreds of thousands of text messages and recruited hundreds of volunteers from within our communities and the broader diaspora to ensure the highest quality of conversations.

Our guiding principles were reaffirmed in our successes this election cycle:

1. “Low propensity” voters are just voters that we haven’t organized yet.
2. People respond better when you acknowledge who they are and where they come from in how you communicate with them.
3. This work requires deep relationship building and engagement — we need long-term sustained funding to see these seeds grow and bear fruit.

“Low propensity” voters are just voters that we haven’t organized yet.

If you never talk to our communities, and you don’t know who we are, how can you expect us to reliably vote for your candidates every election? Low propensity voters may not vote regularly because they are newly of voting age, they are limited English proficient, they are apathetic to a system that excludes and oppresses them, they may not know they can vote, any number of reasons. You don’t know unless you talk to us. More than once.

These contacts were the start of conversations. These conversations are important because while as an organization we endorsed candidates, we’re not here to impose our agenda on our communities, we want our communities to join us in setting the agenda and making demands. This requires more listening than talking, which means we need to keep the conversations going and continue to build relationships between election cycles.

People respond better when you acknowledge who they are and where they come from in how you communicate with them.

One-size-fits all messaging — in English, in writing — does not work when you’re trying to engage an intergenerational, multicultural, immigrant community. We aren’t just referring to language accessibility, but also cultural and generational accessibility. Older voters are more likely to read a mailer while younger voters are more likely to watch a video through to completion. Diversity is our strength, and so our tactics must be just as varied.

We know that it’s cheaper and easier to just send mail in English, and not invest in building relationships with multilingual, multicultural vendors who can provide translation and interpretation services that are accurate. But if you want to win, and continue winning, fund that infrastructure.

This work is the work of decades of deep relationship building and engagement — we need long-term sustained funding to see these seeds grow and bear fruit.

Just talking to folks about voting in the current election is not enough. We heard the resentment that people felt that so many organizations were just reaching out about the election. Electoral organizing is just one of our strategies to power, and elections are always about more than just candidates. It was vital for us to hear from voters about what issues matter to them, and also for us to share personalized and specific information on where and how to vote. It reaffirmed for us that our communities need real COVID relief, and that we cannot go back to “normal” as before the Trump presidency and before the pandemic: we need real solutions to systemic problems that leave too many people out and too many people behind.

To that end, we brought around 15 volunteers down to Georgia to support the ongoing efforts of the New Georgia Project Action Fund, New South SuperPAC, and the Asian American Advocacy Fund PAC to elect Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the US Senate and end Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s reign of obstruction. Just as we worked together to send Senator Peters back to Washington and flip Michigan back blue, we were confident and excited to volunteer our time for organizations who have deeply invested in multi-racial coalition building for progressive change in the New South.

Our Michigan Action volunteers collectively knocked over 5,000 doors between December 20th and January 5th. Our team at home made thousands of calls and sent hundreds of texts to Georgians with Michigan numbers in a “call your Aunties and Cousins who moved to Atlanta” campaign. And we won.

We hope that at this point, it goes without saying that Democrats across the country owe their political success to Black voters. We hope that President-elect Biden, Senator Peters, Speaker Pelosi, and soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Schumer have understood and taken the lessons of 2016 and 2020 to heart and stand by the voters that brought them to power.

We hope that this gratitude and recognition of the strategies that Stacey Abrams and Nse Ufot brought to the table over the last decade to register and engage the New American coalition in Georgia translates to long-term sustainable funding and investment in our communities and the organizations that we organize with. We know that flipping the Senate and getting T**** out of office is a critical component in creating the necessary conditions for progressive change, but in order to see it through, our communities must be informed, organized and activated. The work continues.