Conservative Groups Lean on Ground Game in Georgia Runoff

Conservative groups are spending millions to dominate in-person voter outreach ahead of Georgia's crucial runoff elections, exploiting an opening they believe was left wide open by pandemic-leery Democrats.

Heritage Action, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation, is putting $1 million into a multi-faceted canvass that plans to knock on 500,000 doors. Women Speak Out PAC, a partner to the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, is following suit with a $4 million multi-channel effort to support door-to-door outreach. And CatholicVote is putting up to $500,000 behind a campaign to turn out about 215,000 Mass-going Catholics.

"Democrats are realizing that part of the reason why the blue wave didn't happen is because those low propensity voters were never engaged through a ground game," Heritage Action executive director Jessica Anderson told the Washington Free Beacon.

The groups say there is no substitute for face-to-face engagement, especially when thousands of voters lack the time or means to participate in campaign webinars or parking lot rallies. Most Democrats retreated to digital ahead of the general election, leaving countless doorsteps open to Republican volunteers who owned the open field.

Even as President Donald Trump lost the state, down-ballot Republicans appear to have benefited from an aggressive in-person canvass. The GOP retained comfortable majorities in both chambers of the Georgia statehouse, while Democrats were left grasping at Biden's coattails.

Even though prominent Peach State progressives such as Stacey Abrams have networks in place to help Democrats compete, it's not clear that they can mobilize on doorsteps in force at this point, if they're even inclined to do so. Georgia reported over 3,000 new cases of the virus Wednesday, in keeping with a national surge in transmission.