OPINION: ‘The power of possibility’: Georgia Democrats come off the bench for 2022

When Joe Biden, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won their races in Georgia in the 2020 elections, they didn’t just flip the balance of power in Washington.

They flipped the nature of power in the state itself, showing Democrats and Republicans alike that anybody from any party can win in Georgia if the circumstances align.

Democrats’ statewide success in 2020 is now fueling decisions by some of the party’s fastest rising stars to bolt their seats in the General Assembly to take a shot at winning higher office.

Until recently, half the job of a Democrat running in Georgia has been convincing donors, family, and even themselves that a statewide run was worth the effort. That job got exponentially easier when Biden, Ossoff and Warnock won.

“It’s the power of possibility,” said state Sen. Jen Jordan, who announced this week that she’s running for attorney general against the Republican incumbent Chris Carr.

“Before you could crunch the numbers, you could talk about demographics, you could talk about trends. But until we could deliver a statewide win, it really just didn’t have much force.”

In addition to Jordan’s run for attorney general, state Rep. Erick Allen, D-Smyrna has announced he’s running for Lieutenant Governor. State Sen. Lester Jackson, D-Savannah, and Democratic state Rep. William Boddie of East Point, have each gotten in the race for labor commissioner.

Several others are expected to follow, including state Rep. Bee Nguyen, D-Atlanta, for secretary of state, as the idea of running and winning statewide becomes a real possibility.

It’s hard to overstate how unfamiliar the sensation of victory is for Georgia Democrats, who dominated nearly every lever of power for more than 100 years before watching the governor’s office flip to Republican control in the 2002 elections, along with one U.S. Senate seat, followed by the state’s second Senate seat, the Legislature and all statewide offices by 2011.

Melita Easters founded the Georgia WIN List 21 years ago to recruit pro-choice Democratic women to run for office in the state. She worked through the Democrats’ leanest times to find and recruit women to run , if not in those years, then at some point in the future.

That Democrats have qualified candidates to run statewide today is proof of the work that went on behind the scenes, even as Republicans dominated the state.

“There were years when it was tough to recruit people,” Easters said. “We have been working very hard to build the bench since then. Jen Jordan literally was in our first leadership academy class with Nikema Williams in 2012.”

Williams won the Fifth Congressional District seat in 2020.

Along with efforts to recruit candidates in the out years, Democrats looking at statewide runs in 2022 know they’ll have a huge assist from years of groundwork by grassroots leaders, including Stacey Abrams, to identify, motivate, and register Democratic voters who made statewide wins a possibility — especially if Abrams gets into the race for governor herself.

“With the anticipated top of the ticket being Stacey Abrams, and the operation she has developed for getting out the vote, it gives hope for Democrats all the way down-ballot on the statewide constitutional offices and even those the state legislative districts may haven’t quite turned,”Easters said.

Rep. Allen knows all about tough races in his Cobb County district. But he said running and winning in Cobb makes him feel ready to do the same across the state.

“It’s not lost on me that I’m in one of the most competitive seats in the state,” he said. “If I’m going to work my heart out, and I want to work that hard, I need to be looking at where I can be of best value. And I think my best value is in a statewide office.”

Even as Democrats like Allen, Jordan and others make their moves into statewide races, Republicans are hardly staying on the sidelines.

State Sen. Bruce Thompson, R-White, is set to challenge Labor Commissioner Mark Butler, a fellow Republican who is under fire for a glut of delayed jobless benefits during the pandemic.

And U.S. Rep. Jody Hice has announced he’s giving up his House seat to challenge Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in a GOP primary.

Although Raffensperger was one of the most popular statewide officials in an AJC poll in January, he’s more than vulnerable in a Republican primary, thanks to former President Donald Trump’s relentless attacks on the Johns Creek Republican.

But family feuds and attacks from Trump are the two things GOP strategist Brian Robinson said Republicans can’t afford in a toss-up year, when Kemp has just started to shore up the Republican base and independent voters. The GOP could even have the wind at their backs, since a midterm elections often favor the party out of power in Washington.

“We have got to have a unified party or Georgia Republicans will have a bad night,” he said. “If we take out our statewides in divisive primaries, it is horribly damaging. If the message against our current state officials is that they didn’t “Stop the Steal,” and the people making those statements win the primary, this is not going to be pretty.”

One unknown for Democrats and Republicans alike is what the process of legislative and congressional redistricting will do to their future prospects.

A more favorable district is a reason for any potential candidate to stay put, of course.

A worse district, as Jen Jordan fully expectsin her Fulton and Cobb territory, can tip a good candidate’s hand to the race most worth running.

“I have no doubt (Senate Republicans) were going to monkey with me one way or the other,” Jordan said. “So, in some ways, the timing is great because it’s kind of like, ‘It’s okay guys. You don’t have to bother.’”

But she added that the way Republicans choose to redraw the lines in their own favor could give her and other Democrats one more message point they’ll use in 2022.

“That’s what makes these statewide offices so important, because we have to have a check on all this, this complete power up and down the government where it’s really just not okay.”