The other Democratic Senate candidate, Rev. Raphael Warnock, made his own bet. He skated through the fall without facing many attacks while Republicans fought among themselves, but the Black pastor, who was turned as a politician, could foresee that attacks would paint him as a radical. In late October, two weeks before the attacks began and before he knew the identity of his GOP opponent, Warnock prepared a humanizing TV ad to divert the attacks, with a barking brat and ‘ a narrator who beat to death that the Democrat ‘hates puppies’.
Both bets paid off two months later as Warnock and Ossoff mobilized a massive turnout among black voters and other trusted Democratic groups and conquered enough white suburbs to turn both Georgia’s Senate seats this week. margins – A 50-50 Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the decisive vote.
That probably would not have happened without the rapid tactical shifts that followed a disappointing November for the Democrats, when the party lost Senate games in states like Maine and North Carolina that were supposed to be richer targets. But Ossoff and Warnock scored in counties and areas with high black populations, while President Donald Trump’s base did not match his November election level.
This version of how the Democrats managed to win two races, once seen as unlikely long shots, is based on interviews with a dozen agents and strategists involved in both games, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss strategy and deliberations.
Warnock was immediately faced with an avalanche of attacks, when the run-off campaign was launched, by appointed GOP senator Kelly Loeffler and Republican outreach groups. Most of the early advertisements focused directly on his sermons, accusing him of being an anti-police, anti-military ‘radical’, and broadcasting a number of other hits using his own words from the pulpit. An advertisement was made using the body material of the police of an incident involving Warnock and his wife.
Warnock’s campaign has responded in some ads. But most of his messages were positive and focused on his childhood in housing projects, his faith and his position in the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church here. One assistant from Warnock summed up the strategy as ‘staying the pastor’ and not dropping his own message.
“We had to, at least for the people who would ever be willing to vote for us, win that battle over him as a moral figure,” a Warnock assistant said.
This is followed by a broader democratic strategy to focus on mobilizing their base with more affirmative messages, including the need for additional Covid-19 emergency relief funding.
“We tested a lot of messages that were more negative and based on fear,” said Christie Roberts, a senior adviser to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, along with communications director Lauren Passalacqua, who traveled to Georgia to help with the campaign.
“They do not want you to vote. They do not trust you to vote. “Trump is trying to stop you from voting,” Roberts said, giving examples of the negative attacks they considered. “And then we tested messages like ‘You have the power to make change. Your voice can make a difference … ‘It was the positive that mobilized much more for our base. ‘
Strategy shift
As the campaigns picked up the Republican attacks, they also launched a large-scale coordinated field program, which abandoned the party’s by-election moratorium on beatings, an important tool for the Democrats set up in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. Georgia’s runaway director Jonae Wartel, who came on board in early November to conduct the coordinated campaign, said in an interview that it was a “huge task” to quickly build up an operation, although it was immediately clear was that they needed a robust voter contact program. .
“It was a bit of a departure from the general election, where a lot of work was arranged remotely,” Wartel said. “We had to scale very fast.”
The coordinated campaign eventually made 25 million contact attempts with voters, with more than 40,000 volunteers. They knocked on a million doors in the last four days of the race.
“There was no one walking around who did not know there was a run-off election,” Wartel said.
Ossoff himself played an extraordinarily important role in the strategy of his campaign – from digital operation to the ground game – and early in the run-off campaign he expressed a desire to focus strongly on increasing the turnout among African Americans, according to people familiar with the conversations
As a ticket with Warnock, who will be only the 11th black senator in history, it will help significantly with the black turnout. But the Ossoff campaign was at the forefront of additional efforts of its own in the rural provinces, “Black Belt,” which had a strong rise among African Americans. Ossoff hosted TV commercials with black voters talking about the importance of their vote. Warnock’s campaign featured several advertisements highlighting his bus tour to remote corners of the state.
Much of the foundation in the state has already been laid by Democrat Stacey Abrams, who launched an unprecedented voter registration effort after losing the state government’s race against Republican Brian Kemp in 2018. Groups like the New Georgia Project and Fair Fight have been working for years to register new voters, laying the groundwork for the 2020 election and the effort to get Black Georgians to the ballot box.
The Ossoff campaign quickly hired a team of 30 staff members for a voter registration team to build on in the early days of the run-off before joining the field program after the December 7 registration deadline, according to a senior official of the campaign. Eventually, a campaign with 25 staff members initially stood at 200, which did not include more than 2,000 community organizers hired to reach out to the ground. They even built an app that allows organizers to sync their contacts and call those who have not yet voted.
Two prominent Democratic consultants, Cornell Belcher and Karen Finney, conducted an extensive poll among black irregular voters. The survey was paid for by the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee and was shared early in the run-up to the two campaigns to lay the groundwork for the mobilization efforts, according to several people familiar with the endeavor.
According to the people familiar with the campaign, an in-depth survey has been conducted among Asian and Latino voters, knowing that they need a high turnout and strong margins among different populations of voters who voted for Biden in November. helped deliver.
“Jon Ossoff always had the deep and steadfast conviction that we could defeat an established incumbent like Perdue only by uplifting the voices of Georgians, especially Black Georgians and young people, and building a movement from all the moments of pain. and hope, “said Joshua Karp, a senior campaign adviser.
Strikingly, more than 100,000 people who voted in the run-up to the election did not vote in the November election – and the vast majority of them cast their votes for Ossoff and Warnock, according to the Democrats. Even before that, Georgian Democrats viewed important events in 2020 – such as the death of Representative John Lewis and the assassination of Ahmaud Arbery – as galvanizing moments for black voters, whose turnout in Georgia has already risen higher than that of any other battlefield state.
A TV commercial deluge
Ossoff put his previous work for Lewis at the center of his campaign. According to an Ossoff adviser, he called Lewis in August 2019 to seek his approval for the Senate, and two weeks later he announced his campaign with Lewis’ support, a critical boost in the by-election with many candidates. In the first week of last December, Ossoff drove to Selma, Alabama to film a TV commercial about the historic Edmund Pettus Bridge, calling on Lewis’ history as a civil rights leader and calling for a new civil rights law . The ad appeared on TV later that month, during the first week of early voting.
TV spending in the past has flown fast, with more than $ 500 million in commercials. But both parties also invested heavily before November. While Warnock did not face any attacks in the fall, GOP groups spent $ 45 million in the Ossoff race outside of November, according to AdImpact. Majority Forward, a non-profit Democratic organization, went on TV in July, weeks after Ossoff won his primary. Senate Majority PAC, the Democrats’ top outsider group, combined with affiliated nonprofits, invested more than $ 40 million before November, according to AdImpact.
“It was honestly better for Democratic candidates than many places on the map, and we had to make it a priority,” said SMB president JB Poersch. “It was a risk that was worth taking for us.”
While Democrats were planning for the run-off, Republicans also shifted their focus. The candidates and GOP groups relentlessly attacked the Democrats as socialists who were the most liberal Democrats, such as Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) And Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (DN.Y.), would enable them to carry out their agenda.
Gabriel Sterling, the state implementation manager for the state and a conservative Republican who pushed back against Trump’s false allegations of voter fraud, said Wednesday the large number of new voters is proof of hard work done when Republicans were running for governor and to attack my boss, ”referring to Foreign Minister Brad Raffensberger in Kemp.
Indeed, Republicans in Georgia and in Washington blamed the Trump-fueled fighting for their twin losses in Georgia, especially while Ossoff and Warnock were uniting their coalition. Because Perdue and Loeffler refused to admit that Trump lost the election, it complicated the argument about how victories would give Ossoff and Warnock Democrats full control over both the president and Congress. And Trump’s false attacks on the election, coupled with his last-minute Twitter criticism of Senate GOP leaders, have bolstered their closing arguments.
Democrats did not have too long to fully celebrate, given the chaos that unfolded the day after their election, when violent pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol. But some staff members had moments to pull it off. Tuesday night, before the race was hosted, but after it emerged Warnock would win, Motown legend Stevie Wonder congratulated the Warnock campaign staff on Zoom and celebrated the victory.