Most visibly, Trump started with Spanish radio ads in June that accused Democrats of being "radical socialists." The smears went unanswered for weeks, which, in retrospect, showed that the Biden campaign and the national party were not staking out Florida's tipping-point communities.
"They had no idea what they were doing -- there was no Latin campaign at all," said Sancho, who believed that South Florida's Latino communities could have been persuaded to vote for Democrats, and had coattails that would have broken the GOP's lock on statewide power.
Sancho listed a series of big lapses, starting with not responding to Trump's Spanish ads. A lack of support continued throughout Florida's August primary, whose late date makes it hard for winners to launch a fall campaign unless a vast field campaign is waiting in the wings. But Biden's campaign did not want Florida volunteers talking to voters in person due to COVID-19, Sancho said, and did not support alternatives suggested by Latino Democratic officials.
When Biden finally visited, Sancho said that he did not invite enough local leaders and did not mention local issues -- such as raising the minimum wage or restoring remittances and travel to Cuba. Post-election media analyses echoed these points.
"You can't replace hard work with anything else," Sancho said. "You need a message. I saw nothing that they did in South Florida with Latinos."
In Contrast, GeorgiaWhat unfolded in Georgia, Florida's neighbor to the north, is a different story.
Georgia is a regional hub and a populous Southern state, but it still has half as many voters as Florida. Unlike Florida, Georgia has seen some of the nation's most aggressive grassroots voting rights organizing in recent years. These efforts are not just a counterpoint to Biden's 2020 efforts in South Florida but could make the difference with the two impending U.S. Senate runoffs on January 5, 2021.
From a national perspective, the figurehead leading Georgia's voting rights movement is Stacey Abrams, a Black woman and lawyer who was the Georgia House minority leader and 2018's Democratic gubernatorial candidate.
Abrams' opponent in what became the closest governor's race in a quarter-century was Brian Kemp, a Republican and at the time Georgia's top statewide election official.
Kemp was accused by Abrams of doubling down on voter suppression tactics that had gone on for years. After the election, a federal court ordered Georgia to install a new voting system for 2020, which, in part, is why its 2020 election results have so far withstood attacks by Trump supporters.
In 2018, Abrams had an unapologetic progressive message and focused on reaching and turning out voters, especially from Georgia's cities. (Thirty-eight percent of Georgia's voters are from communities of color, according to voting rights activists.) Abrams' New Georgia Project -- registered hundreds of thousands of voters and inspired many young activists -- much like Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign.
Though she lost the 2018 governor's race by fewer than 55,000 votes, Abrams continued her voting rights campaign by creating Fair Fight, filing a major federal lawsuit to overturn voting barriers, and branching out from Georgia to other states. (Her efforts were helped by a $5 million donation from Bloomberg, Fair Fight's biggest donor.)
But Abrams' new group, Fair Fight, was not the only voting rights group active in Georgia in 2020. The Black Voters Matter Fund is also headquartered in Atlanta and working with the state's activists. People Demanding Action, led by Miller, enlisted thousands of volunteers across the country to reach non-white voters in rural regions -- what she calls "the Black Belt" -- of eight Southern states. Georgia also had active chapters of many older-line civil rights organizations.
"We work on voter registration all over the state," Miller said. "But when we do GOTV [get out the vote], we go straight to the Georgia Black Belt. Why? There's no Democratic Party out there. If the party exists, it's small. They don't have any money. They don't have VAN [voter activation network -- the party's national voter database] access. They don't know how to use VAN."
Unlike South Florida's Latino Democrats who were frustrated by the Biden campaign, Georgia's civil rights groups -- and new allies such as the Lincoln Project run by anti-Trump Republicans -- pushed ahead. While the national media has made much of Biden's debt owed to Black voters in South Carolina, whose 2020 primary victory revitalized his campaign, Miller said that organizers from communities of color in non-battleground states were not treated "that great."
The Senate RunoffsDuring the next two weeks, Georgia will conduct a statewide audit to affirm the accuracy of its new voting system and then a presidential recount, both of which are likely to be controversial. But behind those headline-grabbing exercises, a bigger political battle will be taking shape.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
