In the Georgia Senate runoff elections on January 5, Democrats Jon Ossoff and the Reverend Raphael Warnock unseated Trump-supporting incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue by margins of less than 80,000 votes—abetted by what a UNITE HERE! leader calls an “unprecedented ground game” by labor unions.
“Demographics is not destiny. Demographics is opportunity,” she says. “Talking to people at their doorsteps is necessary to get them to vote.”
“In the last couple weeks, we were talking to 15,000 people a day,” says Gwen Mills, the secretary-treasurer of the 300,000-member hotel and food-service workers union. During the six-week runoff campaign, according to Mills, UNITE HERE! had more than 1,000 members knocking on people’s doors in the Atlanta and Columbus areas a total of 1.5 million times.
Overall, the Service Employees International Union, with nearly two million members in health care and public service jobs, estimates that it and the other unions involved in canvassing, such as the Georgia Federation of Teachers (GFT) and the Communications Workers of America, made more than 10 million visits to voters.
“I went door to door every single day, six days a week,” says UNITE HERE! member Theresa Cross, a hotel worker from Atlanta who was laid off last March.
President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign largely avoided door-to-door campaigning because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but Georgia’s unions decided it was both necessary and possible to do so safely for the Senate elections. “We talked to people from a distance,” says GFT President Verdaillia Turner, “always being conscious that COVID-19 was out there.”
“We wore masks at every single door,” says Cross. She and other canvassers carried hand sanitizer, wipes, and fresh masks to give to people who answered the door without one, and would step off people’s front porches after ringing the bell to keep their distance.
“Most people were willing to talk to us,” she adds.
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Senator-Elect Reverend Raphael Warnock
While Georgia has one of the lowest rates of union density in the nation—only 4.1 percent of employed workers were union members in 2019, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics—the unions’ massive effort didn’t spring up out of nowhere. The GFT, says Turner, drew on its successful 2016 campaign to have voters reject a proposed state constitutional amendment that would have enabled the governor to take over or close schools he deemed failing. UNITE HERE!, says Mills, built on its experience in elections in Nevada, Arizona, and Florida, and its ten years of organizing workers at Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport.
Both unions also did “deep canvassing,” a strategy that centers on talking to voters about their personal experiences and issues before making a pitch for the candidates. Having canvassers begin by speaking about how the pandemic had affected them, says Mills, “cut through a lot of the noise,” and opened the way to discuss how it had been mishandled by the current administration—including Senators Loeffler and Perdue.
With more than three-fourths of UNITE HERE!’s members still out of work after being laid off from hotel and airport jobs, they had common ground with voters feeling crunched by the pandemic and its economic fallout.
“I’ll say something relatable about not having a job, and they’ll agree,” Cross says. The people who affected her the most were the ones who talked about their health, such as a woman in her neighborhood who had breast cancer.
“She told me her story first,” Cross recalls. “That resonated with me, because I am a breast-cancer survivor. I understand.”
The GFT’s canvassers would talk about “why we had to balance the Senate for the sake of democracy,” says Turner. When they encountered voters who supported Republicans because they’re stridently anti-abortion, they told them “don’t hang your head on one issue,” and talked about how the HEROES Act, the COVID-19 relief bill passed by the House and blocked by the Senate last year, would help them.
But if voters were obviously hostile or unmoved, “we didn’t waste energy, we just walked on,” she adds. “Christ didn’t save everybody. He just made the way.”
The issue most important to voters was the intertwined crises of the pandemic and the economy—or, as Turner summarizes it, being able to make a living “but also to be alive.” The people Cross talked to were worried about their unemployment benefits running out, losing their health care along with their jobs, being evicted, and the new round of stimulus checks—which Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock advocated for increasing from $600 to $2,000.
Another issue was access to health care. At least nine rural hospitals in Georgia have closed since 2010, between former Governor Nathan Deal’s refusal to accept Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid and the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Senator-Elect Jon Ossoff
Mills says voters also cited lack of access to the Internet, with some talking about their children doing their homework in convenience-store parking lots because they could use the Wi-Fi there; and racism, as manifested in the tone of the attacks on Warnock and the curtailment of early voting in the state.
For UNITE HERE!, however, the campaign was more about turning out likely supporters than persuading voters, she says. The union concentrated on the Atlanta area, where about two-thirds of Local 23’s 3,000 members work at hotels and the airport, and Columbus, where it represents about 1,000 workers at the Fort Benning Army base.
The GFT sought out “low-propensity voters,” says Turner. It focused on places with Black and poor voters, including south Atlanta, DeKalb County (Atlanta’s east side and inner suburbs), and the cities of Savannah, Augusta, and Macon, but it also canvassed in Valdosta, near the Florida-Georgia line, and Dalton, in the northwestern area that sent QAnon cult supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene to Congress last November.
About 65 percent of the voters UNITE HERE! canvassed were Black, and 85 percent were people of color, says Mills. But that doesn’t mean their votes were a sure thing. “Demographics is not destiny. Demographics is opportunity,” she says. “Talking to people at their doorsteps is necessary to get them to vote.”
Experienced union organizers, she adds, can tell “when a yes is a yes and when it’s not,” and take the time to get a stronger commitment to voting.
On Election Day, she says, an eighty-two-year-old woman told a canvasser that she couldn’t vote because she didn’t have any way to get to the polls. The union used money from its canvassing budget to get her a cab.
In the end, though, the results reflected the nation’s urban-rural and racial splits. Loeffler and Perdue carried almost every rural county, with the main exceptions in the largely Black southwestern part of the state, and took more than 80 percent of the vote in the heavily white northwest. Warnock and Ossoff won about 70 percent in the five-county Atlanta area, running up a margin of more than 600,000 votes.
The two Democrats also won Columbus, Augusta, Macon, and Savannah. They got 70 percent of the vote in southwestern Dougherty County, where in 1962 the civil rights movement suffered a major defeat trying to desegregate the county seat of Albany.
Politics is just one part of “building an organization that will fight for workers’ rights,” Mills says; canvassing involves the same social skills as organizing, and winning an uphill battle is exhilarating and encouraging.
“They’re going to take that experience back to the airport and use it to expand the union,” she says. “Two years from now, this same group of people is going to be out canvassing in other races.”