Political donors poured more than $800 million into the two U.S. Senate races in Georgia. But a coalition of nonprofits with a much smaller budget may have made a huge difference in getting people out to vote in the run-off election, which resulted in a pair of Democratic victories last week.
For two months, from the November general election to last week’s run-off election, nonprofits blanketed the state to encourage potential voters to get to the polls.
Alicia Johnson, who runs Step Up Savannah, led phone-bank operations in rural Liberty County, a neighboring jurisdiction outside of Step Up’s normal reach. Aklima Khondoker, Georgia state director of All Voting Is Local, worked with other nonprofits including the Coalition for the People’s Agenda and Black Voters Matter to organize brigades of volunteers to hang voting literature on the doorknobs of state residents in areas where high-speed internet is scarce.
Johnson, Khondoker, and leaders of 31 other nonprofits that are members of the Georgia state table, a network of voter-education nonprofits supported by the State Infrastructure Fund, coordinated their efforts to get out the vote, squelch the flow of misinformation about voting requirements, and report any attempts to prevent people from casting a ballot. If voters needed rides to the polls, members of the table looked to each other for help. If there was confusion about early voting, members of the group sought each other out to clear up any misunderstandings.
The State Infrastructure Fund has helped establish “tables” in many states. Its funding comes from 31 foundations, including the Carnegie Corporation, Democracy Fund, MacArthur Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Wallace Global Fund, as well as individual donors including MacKenzie Scott. The State Infrastructure Fund made a total of nearly $6 million in grants to support get-out-the-vote efforts in Georgia, with about $2.7 million of that coming in the two months leading up to the run-off.
One primary benefit of the tables, say leaders of the State Infrastructure Fund, is that donors can avoid negotiating many separate grant agreements, allowing them to speed money to nonprofits. The arrangement also allows members of the tables to meet to prioritize where grant money would be put to best use and avoid a duplication of efforts.
In addition to supporting nonprofit members of the Georgia state table, the fund also made grants to other prominent efforts to encourage Black voting, including the New Georgia Project, a group founded by Stacey Abrams, the unsuccessful candidate for Georgia governor in 2018.
Rapid Response
The groups supported by the State Infrastructure Fund are 501(c)(3) nonprofits and cannot make direct political expenditures. But some of them, including Black Voters Matter, which was co-founded by activist LaTosha Brown, and the New Georgia Project, are associated with 501(c)(4) organizations, which can participate in politics, subject to limitations.
Within a week of the November 3 general election, the members of the table finalized a plan for the run-off. In the weeks that followed, they frequently checked in with each other and with Pro Georgia, the nonprofit that manages grant money from the State Infrastructure Fund. Members got up-to-the-moment reports on misinformation campaigns being waged across the state, challenges to early voting, and the needs of their fellow table members. They were then able to tailor their work to suit the moment.
That meant helping provide face masks and hand warmers for canvassers out on their feet during cold December days and nights. It meant providing the Georgia Peanut Gallery, a coalition of civil-rights groups, with volunteers to monitor polling activity and report any potential wrongdoing. It meant publicizing numerous John Lewis “Good Trouble” marches around the state to pay tribute to the deceased civil-rights hero and encourage people to vote. And it meant setting up additional voting drop-off boxes and ensuring that voters knew how to tell a real drop-off box from a fake one.
The guiding principle behind the fund is that nonprofit civic-engagement groups shouldn’t suffer from the “boom and bust” cycle of election spending. The Georgia table was founded a decade ago, and since then members have not only received a steady flow of grant money but have built trust with one another and among the people they serve.
“Our relationships did not start over the course of this pandemic or over the course of this presidential election,” says All Voting Is Local’s Khondoker. “We have been working, building relationships, and building community for years.”
Page Gleason, senior program officer of the State Infrastructure Fund at NEO Philanthropy, where the fund is housed, says the table structure helped members agree to a single plan during the run-off, allowing them to have greater impact and work faster. Instead of having to write more than a dozen grant agreements and hash out details of how the money would be spent, the trust among members of the table gave Gleason confidence the money would be put to good use.
“If people are all in their own orbit, you don’t get a coordinated, effective effort where people work in unison,” she says. “We’re trying to move very fast, and every day that we didn’t move money mattered.”
Too often, Gleason says, nonprofits have to fight for money before an election to hire canvassers or social-media experts. But as members of the table, they were already a known quantity to grant makers.
“They weren’t scrapping,” Gleason says. “They weren’t trying to prove their worth.”
Billion-Dollar Effort
Foundations have spent about $996 million on “democracy” issues over the past two years, according to preliminary data collected by Candid, a group that tracks foundation spending. That number, which will surely grow as information on grants continues to roll in, includes a breadth of activities beyond voter education and mobilization, such as civic education and support of journalism.
The lesson from the Georgia run-off is that getting people to become more politically involved doesn’t happen overnight, and it isn’t necessarily the result of a huge political ad buy, says Hahrie Han, director of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. The immense voter turnout was made possible, according to Han, by entrenched networks of groups led by women of color across the state like the nonprofits supported by the State Infrastructure fund.
Nonprofits can potentially have a bigger impact than spending by parties to promote their candidates, according to Han. That’s because political spending tends to focus on likely voters who are on the “bubble” about whether to vote in the current election, Han says. If they are indecisive, a well-timed or clever postcard could make the difference in getting them to the polls. Nonprofits, on the other hand, tend to reach would-be voters that parties and campaigns overlook. While campaigns can energize a party’s base of voters to score a majority in a particular election, the goal of nonprofit civic engagement efforts is to identify people who have been disconnected from the democratic process and remove barriers from their participation so officials are elected by something closer to a true representative democracy.
“The bigger question that we should be asking if we want to see more changes like what we saw in Georgia is, what gets people up on that bubble in the first place,” Han wrote in an email. “That is the work that happens between election seasons, the kind of work that philanthropic organizations can easily invest in.”
In the eight weeks leading up to the run-off elections, the members of the Georgia state table successfully contacted 250,000 voters by phone. Potential voters received more than 9 million texts and 8 million emails from nonprofits that are part of the group, resulting in more than 6,000 voter pledges.
“It was a steady drumbeat of communication and a steady drumbeat of interaction,” says Malika Redmond, executive director of Women Engaged, a nonprofit that supports Black women’s rights and leadership development in Georgia.
But the messages would likely be ineffective if Women Engaged hadn’t been developing a reputation as a trusted source of information and support for women across the state, she says. During the early days of the pandemic, Women Engaged staff members were more likely to ask “How are you?” than “Are you voting?” says Redmond.
Women Engaged helped secure medical and financial assistance for more than 1,000 people during the pandemic. By developing relationships with potential voters, Redmond and her staff were able to get a clear sense of their aspirations.
Potential voters, particularly Black Gen Z Georgians, were intensely focused on racial justice, health care, and economic opportunity, Redmond says. Messages highlighting particular candidates, especially those that came in weeks before the election, fell flat, she says, adding: “We’re not coming in two or three weeks out in an election cycle, dropping off a bunch of literature, and talking about who you should vote for.”
Dan Parks contributed to this article.
