Most of all, they flocked to the underdog campaign of Ossoff, a 30-year-old former congressional staffer and documentary filmmaker whose campaign was initially blindsided by the groundswell. By the end, volunteers like Zeigler were sometimes giving the campaign direction, rather than the other way around—she developed a young-voter outreach plan that Ossoff’s staff adopted and funded. (Such outreach frequently involved knocking on the doors of these young adults’ Republican parents, who called the police on more than one occasion.)

“That’s Patricia and Liz and Jenny—they knocked on 450 doors today,” Zeigler told the other volunteers at the table.
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A few miles down the road, at a different strip-mall restaurant, Handel was holding her own election-eve rally, where a woman in her 60s named Debbie Moscato told me how tired she was of all the canvassers marching around her neighborhood, often knocking and asking for people’s voting-age offspring. “They are harassing people,” she said. “I have heard so many stories of people our age with grown children getting harassed.”

As our interview concluded and I started to leave, Ossoff called me back into the room. “Can I ask you a question?” he said. “Everyone talks about how Ossoff won’t mention Trump, right? But when I give a speech about respect and civility and kindness and decency, am I not talking about Trump? I mean, I think everyone in the room understands the contrast, with perhaps a little subtlety, while building a coalition that doesn’t want hair-on-fire partisanship.”

Studies of voter turnout reveal that people are more likely to vote if they’ve developed trust and social relationships with other people through ongoing activities (including churches, sports activities, and issue-organizing campaigns), that people are more likely to vote if someone they know contacts them one-on-one, and that people are more likely to vote if they’ve been involved in some kind of activism in-between elections. You can’t build that kind of trust and organizational capacity by dropping into Congressional districts a few months before election day.

But another dynamic was a work in both contests. A few days ago the Los Angeles Times described Ossoff’s last-minute effort to drive up the Black vote. Ossoff’s campaign, the Times reported, “are scrambling to engage with black voters, who make up 13% of the district’s electorate,” but a much smaller percentage of those who actually vote. Ossoff’s campaign probably made some inroads in increasing Black turnout since the April primary, but fell short of the number needed to prevail.

But If liberals, progressives and Democrats are going to win these “swing” races ? to take back the House next year and the Senate and White House in 2020 ? they have to invest in grassroots organizing in-between election cycles. That means paying for year-long, multi-year organizers to build local organizations and movements, not just occasional protest marches and last-minute get-out-the-vote drives. As Pete Seeger sang, “When will they ever learn?”