Black people save the country -- again

The Senate elections in Georgia -- the two new Democrats that the Peach State is sending to DC to break the Republican legislative strangehold -- mean, once again, we can hope for sane governance from the Feds. Congrats to "Rev. Warnock and Mr. Ossoff" as I've been naming them to voters on phones for a month.

It was a tremendous privilege to work with UniteHERE on this campaign, while knowing that every progressive force and person in the country was pulling hard for a Democratic and small "d" democratic result. And the people of Georgia have delivered, even if it isn't quite official at the moment of this writing.

The insightful reporter Perry Bacon Jr. pointed out a meaning of this result during a FiveThirtyEight live blog of the election. He wrote:

Democrats spent a lot of time the last four years obsessing about states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and wooing white voters without college degrees in particular. And while it’s not clear that Biden did that much better than Hillary Clinton with white voters without college degrees, he did win Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

But Georgia is a different ball game, in part because of its big Black population. And notably, the Democrats ran a campaign for these Senate seats that reflected the large Black electorate in the state:

1. They embraced the approach of Stacey Abrams, a Black woman, of really trying to boost turnout among voters of color, younger voters and those in the Atlanta area.
2. They embraced two candidates with lots of ties to Atlanta’s Black community. In Warnock, the pastor of the church MLK and his father ran, but also in Ossoff, who worked for two Atlanta Black congressmen, the late John Lewis and Hank Johnson.
3.  And lastly, they embraced a kind of social justice message. Ossoff and Warnock talked a lot about voting rights and other “Black” issues on the campaign trail.

If Democrats win one or both of these races, I would expect them to run similar campaigns to this in other states in the South with large Black populations.

Southerners have been telling the rest of us for years that there's a hopeful promise in their region arising from the Black history of pain, of enslavement, and of struggle. If we're to preserve and extend freedom, Black southerners will be among our leaders. Let us continue ...