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A few thoughts, if you'll permit me, on Georgia flipping blue. I'm not a native but have lived here 13 years. I've been volunteering as a Democrat for most of that time. The key thing to understand is that Georgia didn't "flip" blue. 1/
In the early 2000s, the state Democratic Party had faded pretty seriously. There was one senate race that went to a runoff (a fellow member of my church, Jim Martin, lost narrowly) but this was a bleak time with no energy or vision. 2/
Stacey Abrams was the central figure in revitalizing things. Her New Georgia Project directly confronted the racist effort to suppress minority vote. She was my state representative, and she acted boldly. People bought into that. 3/
But this also is not JUST Stacey. In December 2016, I went to my first county Democratic Party meeting. There were about 250 people there. Before the election, there had been 12 people at the average meeting. I became a county official, among literally hundreds of others. 4/
County party meetings are boring! I can't overstate that enough. But we all kept going. We listened to the old diehards who had stuck it out for years. We brought some new ideas and energy. We argued, but mostly we worked. 5/
We put in hours on weekends and evenings, training people in canvassing, knocking on doors ourselves, recruiting more volunteers. And this wasn't just my county. It was all over. 6/
And in the once-Republican suburbs, people were especially active. They talked to neighbors, did the grunt work of civics. They changed minds. Not by shouting or name-calling, but by building relationships and making it, frankly, the cool thing to be liberal. 7/
At the same time, people looked at all of the civic institutions around us that Republicans had dominated, and we reengaged. County election boards. Neighborhood organizations. City councils. School boards. Liberals had been lazy. 8/
But having a state presence starts with having a local presence. We worked our asses off. I'll never forget a trans member of the county party getting elected to her city's council in a once deep-red suburb. Unbelievable. 9/
That was in 2018. A year that was both so disappointing (Stacey) and so amazing in every other way. More friends flipped statehouse seats. A big U.S. house seat win. It showed us what we could do. 10/
Which takes us to now. Georgia is blue. Not something that just happened. Something that all of us worked and fought for. But the real lesson from all of this is not that we won. It's that you have to work hard. And never, ever stop. 11/11
