Nsé Ufot is the Chief Executive Officer of the New Georgia Project (NGP) and its affiliate, New Georgia Project Action Fund (NGP AF). Ufot leads both organizations with a data-informed approach and a commitment to developing tools that leverage technology with the goal of making it easier for every voter to engage in every election. Here she shares her insights into the 2020 election and what the future holds for Georgia.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: I want to start off by talking about your efforts in turning the state of Georgia blue. Literally, you guys made Biden the first person since Clinton in 1992 to get Georgia in a Presidential Election. So what was it like on election day and when the election was officially certified on November 20? What were the feelings, the emotions in the room when that happened?
Nsé Ufot: Election day brought me no relief at all because I knew that it was going to be close. I knew that much like the 2018 gubernatorial election, the people in charge of our elections infrastructure were hostile to democracy and that they would use their influence and platform to suppress votes. And I knew clearly that it was not going to be over on election day. So I spent a couple of weeks ahead of that, reminding people that this was election day, not results day, that in a pandemic, it takes a lot longer to count absentee ballots and paper ballots. So that is what Election Day was like — a lot of action, a lot of brainstorming, and a lot of caffeine!
November 20 was a different and special day for us because we knew that we had done our work and despite the voter suppression attempts, the lies, and hostility to democracy, we had pushed through. We had the highest level of participation in the Georgia elections ever in Georgia history. There are only 10 million people in Georgia, 7 million people voted in the 2020 presidential election and the margin of victory between President Biden and former President Trump was just over 11,000. That’s .0015 percentage points. It was so close! There were five recounts of the Georgia election and it is still a miracle to me that the results of the election stood given how much the GOP tried to steal the election. And so as a person that’s laser-focused on winning: winning for young people, for queer folks, for people of color, for Georgia families, my work was not done until January 20 when Harris and Biden took their oath of office. But we need to get back to work. We need to be guardians of democracy. We need to keep our eye on the ball because the threat is still inside the house.
HPR: Can you also walk me through what the mood was like in January? Be it community participation, the advocacy that the new Georgia project did alongside other grassroots organizers, or your efforts into getting Ossoff and Warnock into the Senate on January 5. What was the mood change from the victory on January 5th, to the insurrection on January 6?
Ufot: For January 5th, I think that there was still a sort of defiance. I think that there was a recognition that this was people’s power at its strongest. Warnock is literally only the third person to command Martin Luther King’s pulpits since he was assassinated. And then there is John Ossoff, a 33-year-old Jewish kid from the North Atlanta suburbs, who got elected to the United States Senate when the majority of the Senate was born before there were either 50 states! I think it was the highest of highs on January 5, because an overwhelming majority of people attributed Biden’s victory to anti-Trump sentiment only. But then we did it again nine weeks later! This was our chance to push back against the narrative about the Deep South because there was a multiracial, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, progressive majority in the Deep South that delivered these wins for Georgia and working families in Georgia.
And then January 6th was such a low point because it was an attack, a failed murder plot!! I remember looking at the TV screens with absolute shock and horror. But I think it was a reminder that there are people who are seeing our progress and interpreting it in a completely different way and they are the ones in power. That is something we need to address. I think it was the highest of highs on January 5, and the lowest of lows on January 6, but here’s the other thing: I think with these fundamental questions about democracy coming up right now, the question is- Are you a January 5th American or a January 6th American? The line is very pertinent now. The very basic question is- are you future-focused, are you thinking about an America that works for all of us, or, are you going to be violent and align yourself with these domestic terrorists? Which one do you choose?
HPR: The special thing about the last election was that it really happened twice, right? You had to organize twice, once for the 2020 election and then again for January. Wasn’t that a tenuous process because for people who’d already voted once, you had to get them to the polls again?
Ufot: So everything that we did over this year of campaigning from November 2019 to November 2020, had to be condensed down to nine weeks. We had to be more responsive, more nimble than we’ve ever been. The funny thing was that going into the 2020 Presidential election, the top priority of voters was COVID across every identity marker possible! However, when we used the same message in the runoff, we observed that it wasn’t working well. It being the end of the year, people cared much more about family, end-of-year payments, etc. so we went back to the drawing board, we went back and listened to the people: the way that we train our organizers is that you have twice as many ears as you do mouths and it is our responsibility to listen. So we got back to the people.
Interestingly, what emerged out of that was ‘Mitch better have my money.’ As the then-Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell was blocking the American Rescue plan from happening. So what we said was just this — send Warnock and Ossoff to the United States Senate because they will give President Biden a governing trifecta, they will give him the votes that he needs and bring the emergency relief that our families desperately need. The fact that we won that election simply tells us that we have to be led by the people in the communities that we’re organizing with and that they must be the ones driving our campaign.
HPR: I feel like one of the biggest effects of the Trump administration was the impact it had on people’s faith in the legitimacy of government. In response to the same, how did you guys work to restore people’s faith in the legitimacy of the State as they see their own government being undermined in front of their eyes?.
Ufot: You never lie to the people. That is a key tentpole of our organizing. So we don’t make people have faith in anything and especially not in the government, we encourage people to have faith in themselves. There are a lot of people in Atlanta and metro Atlanta who were evacuees from Hurricane Katrina, and they know the experience of being abandoned by your own government, and they know that the only thing that we have to rely on is each other. So, of course, there is an idea that the government can be a force for good, but as an activist, an organizer, and as a citizen, I think that the government won’t do anything that we don’t make them do. So at the core of our messaging, and our organizing is two things: information and power. We give people the information- Why is voting in the runoff important? What is it actually going to do? How is it going to change your life? And power- You literally have elected a president! You have the power to change the stakes in the US Senate. With the correct information, you have the power to change. So yes, there continue to be attacks on people’s faith and belief in government but we focus on faith and belief in one’s own self and the power of community because that is the only thing that has saved our lives over and over again.
