I wrote to my friend Roger Cross in Australia and told him that a multiracial coalition of voters in Georgia elected Rafael Warnock to the U.S. Senate. I explained that some in the press wondered if the dual victorious election of Jon Ossoff and Rafael Warnock in January 2021 was a fluke. Even before the 2022 runoff, most of my circle of friends believed it was not a fluke.

One Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) journalist thought it was combination of luck and smartness that won the election for Warnock. I liked how she said Warnock was lucky in that he ran against the “two worst GOP nominees imaginable, footballer Walker and the white conservative robot-stiff billionaire Kelly Loeffler” (Patricia Murphy, Rafael Warnock Takes His Place in History, AJC, December 9, 2022). Warnock also ran a very smart campaign.

He ran an even smarter ad campaign led by Adam Magnus. Shannon McCaffrey said in her AJC article that Magnus’ goal was to “make you smile” when viewing a Warnock ad. It’s not that some ads made you cringe when delving into Walker’s lurid past, but in most cases the ads humanized Rafael Warnock. Walker tried to demonize him and call him a liar, but I think Walker was projecting his own image. Perhaps you remember that Magnus revived the “Alvin the beagle” ad that certainly made us all smile. The dog was first introduced in 2021, and then brought out again this year. Although I was fed up with some ads during the campaign which started last year, Warnock’s ads were interesting and truthful. That was not the case with Walker’s ads. But, again, I voted for Warnock. You’ll have to make your own decision.

Perhaps there is more to Warnock’s victory than luck and running a smart campaign. For years Georgia has moved to the center of a movement to register people to vote. And many of the people who joined the rolls of Georgia voters were registered by the New Georgia Project (NGP). Starting in 2014, their goal was to register more than 700,000 people of color who were not on the voter registration rolls. Stacy Abrams, the founder of NGP has worked to increase the number of brown and black voters to our rolls.

Steve Phillips, founder of Democracy in Color, an organization focused on race, politics, and the new American majority, says that maybe the democratic party is waking up. In his newsletter of December 8 he points out that a new multiracial coalition should be considered when trying to explain elections wins, as in the case of Rafael Warnock.

As the last decade has shown, mobilizing the potential of a mulitracial coalition of voters has set the stage for transforming our entire nation from one teetering on the edge of fascism to one courageously fighting to protect democracy. The latest developments within the Democratic Party suggest that party leadership is finally waking up to the urgency of this moment in history and gaining clarity about what it’s going to take to keep violent white nationalists out of the White House, halls of Congress, and highest court in the land.

The party leadership’s large-scale investments in Senator Raphael Warnock’s successful re-election bid in Georgia; the newly announced Democratic presidential nominating calendar moving heavily-Black South Carolina to the head of the line of primary states, and last week’s House Democrats’ leadership election resulting in Representative Hakeem Jeffries becoming the next House minority leader (and first African American to hold the position) are encouraging structural and systemic changes that will help align progressive and Democratic politics with the latent potential of the demographic revolution.

Steve Philips, Mailing List Email, “Senator Warnock’s win over Walker another sign that Dem Party is finally waking up”, December 8, 2022.

Interesting Shift

The press needs to think through their analysis of the changes that have taken place in Georgia over the past decade. Yes, the Republican ticket did well in the midterm election. But Rafael Warnock’s victory shows that something else is going on in Georgia. For example, I live in Cobb County (after living in Atlanta and Decatur for 25 years). Cobb, when I moved here in 1993 was a conservative hot bed. The Cobb County commission was a Republican Party dominated committee of five white men. Now it is comprised of five women, four of whom are Black. Things have changed.

In the 2022 runoff, Warnock flipped many rural counties, which was surprising given the appeal of Herschel Walker to these areas. Figure 2 provide a snap shot of the movement of Georgia’s rural counties which flipped blue.