Campaigning across our great state during the last nine weeks of 2020, I reminded Georgians of Sen. Chuck Schumer’s giddy prediction: “Now we take Georgia, then we change America.” He promised to clear a path for the Left in its march to grow government and shrink our freedoms. Said another way, socialism.
At the time, Democrats and even some Republicans scoffed at the idea that socialism could take hold. We’re now seeing the consequences of our elections. The Biden administration has quickly overseen the expansion of government and cancel culture, helped unions win out over children, enabled human trafficking at the border, and threatened both our energy independence and job security at a single pen stroke. And it’s only been two months.
These challenges to our country’s foundations are compounded by unprecedented mistrust over elections. Many states made rapid, opaque, and inconsistent changes to elections in 2020. Ironically, it was Democrats who spent most of 2020 decrying election fairness and integrity, warning about the post office, voting machines, and suppression, and calling for protests.
Our Senate runoff was the result of many variables. But within our control was the fact that Republicans were outmaneuvered by the Democratic machine. In Georgia, Stacey Abrams’s Fair Fight built a national fundraising organization that created a fundamental shift in voting. Fair Fight has become a lucrative enterprise for Abrams to grow the Democratic Party under the guise of nonpartisan voter registration. In fact, it is so well-funded that not only is it actively engaged in partisan registration, but it also leads major legal efforts to weaken election integrity and supports other organizations and efforts that promote voting conspiracy theories.
While refusing to accept her own 2018 election results, Abrams calls measures for election integrity a “dog whistle” for voter suppression. To add insult to injury, Abrams supports allowing undocumented illegal immigrants the right to vote while her own related organization, The New Georgia Project, is under active investigation for voter fraud. This is why we simply cannot allow a monopoly on voter registration to stand.
The other (and often unsaid) fact is that Fair Fight is not just about registering everyone to vote. It is solely focused on registering Democrats, orchestrating unprecedented dark money for liberal candidates, and using the courts to change our electoral system. As a result, Democrats made significant gains in both the November and January elections.
Our work at Greater Georgia is designed to help move our state forward by supporting more voices, diversity, engagement, and trust in our elections. The data show that more than 2 million of Georgia’s eligible voters are unregistered, the majority of whom lean conservative. That means a single mother working as a waitress who values school choice and safe communities probably hasn’t heard how important her voice is. We need to reach these hard-working Georgians with our pro-opportunity message because they know firsthand that the path to prosperity is not a growing reliance on government handouts.
But there’s another group we must engage with our positive message: registered but unengaged or disillusioned voters. A staggering 2.5 million already registered voters in Georgia did not vote in the November general election. And, in the final analysis, 500,000 voters who voted in November did not vote in the January runoff, the vast majority of whom were Republicans. This is why so many of us are confident that this is still a red state, but also that there is much more room to grow.
In 2002 for the first time in over 130 years, Georgia conservatives won the governorship and both chambers of the statehouse. This was done through years of organizing, registering, and building coalitions by the grassroots, candidates, and the state party — all with a singular goal of turning Georgia red. We can do it again. Yes, Georgia has changed in recent years due to our rapid growth. As the No. 1 state in the country to do business, Georgia has benefited from a diversity of people, industries, and opportunity-centered policies.
But the well-documented growth of liberal voter registrations, outpacing conservatives by thousands each month, combined with the narrow margins of victory show that we have an incredible opportunity to make the fight truly fair for all Georgians.
Democrats have relied heavily on Fair Fight and other voting groups for filing lawsuits, registering Democrats, directing fundraising, executing the ground game, and organizing Election Day operations. We must respond by supporting more voices, diversity, engagement, and trust in our elections, and Greater Georgia is building the infrastructure and operations to do just that. When more people vote with confidence, we will create more opportunities for every Georgian.
Kelly Loeffler represented Georgia in the U.S. Senate from 2020 to 2021.
