“I am Gabriel Sánchez, a Democrat running for the state House in this county. I am running because I believe everyone has the right to affordable housing, guaranteed health insurance, and an economy that works for everyone here in Georgia.” This is how this resident of Cobb County, in the metropolitan area of Atlanta, in Georgia, presents himself. Sánchez is from a Colombian family, although he was born in the US and at 27 years old, he is running for election for the first time.
In May he won the primary against Georgia state representative Teri Anulewicz, supported by the establishment of the party, while Sánchez was supported by environmental organizations, LBTGIQ, the housing movement, unions and progressives such as the DSA – Democratic Socialists of America, which includes national congressmen such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Rashida Tlaib, of Palestinian origin, who has avoided supporting Kamala Harris because of her position on Israel.
Sánchez is now just a few hours away from the final vote, although the seat he is running for is traditionally Democratic, so he has a good chance of being elected.
“Is that you?” Chantelle asks him while pointing to the card that Sánchez gives her on which her photo appears. Chantelle is an African-American woman who has opened the door to her house in a neighborhood within the city of Smyrna (Georgia) that depends on the county, and not on the city, because in the past it was segregated as it was mainly inhabited by black people. : “We will go early to vote because I normally walk around the neighborhood at 9:00 in the morning to exercise and then I go to work.”
“And can I count on you?” Sánchez asks him. “Of course,” she answers, who even agrees to let Sánchez place a sign with her name at the entrance of the house.
Sánchez and his team – and, in general, the Democratic and Republican Parties – use a mobile application, MiniVAN Touch, which allows exporting lists so that Gabriel Sánchez and his team can enter the data on their device while talking to people in their list: on the list they have the name of the people registered in each house and they note whether they were there or not and the interaction with them as they go combing streets.
If no one opens the door, two cards are left, one in Spanish and the other in English, asking for the vote for Sánchez.
“Right now the government is not representing the people,” explains Sánchez, “we need to change that. The problem is that many of the politicians here receive a lot of money from large corporations and the rich, and that is not fair. We need more representatives for normal people, for the people. That’s why I made a promise not to receive money from corporations or PACs, which is a very serious form of corruption in the United States: if almost all the money you receive is from corporations, in the end you represent the corporations.”
Chantelle’s home is one of 23,000 whose doorstep Gabriel Sanchez and his campaign team are heading to win the Cobb County seat in the Capitol from Georgia. “People have forgotten the importance of door-to-door contact until I won the primaries. It’s important. We started doing it once a week, and as we get closer to the elections, we are doing it more days and now we are doing it every day, because this is the last chance to get people to vote, it is the best way to do it: It has a lot of influence, that’s why we won the primaries in May, we knocked on more than 17,000 doors and 4,000 people voted. It affects a lot, and since the elections are so close, those few votes that you get by knocking on doors can affect the result.”
And they ask about Harris and Trump? “Sometimes they ask about the presidential election, because obviously a lot of people are thinking about that more than anything.”
At that same time this Saturday, the Democratic candidate for the White House, Kamala Harris, was on her way to the Atlanta Civic Center trying to get the votes necessary to repeat Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia in 2020 and that the polls suggest as a company complicated.
But it is not the only thing that is voted on: in Cobb County they also vote, for example, to expand public transportation, specifically the bus, but it seems that it is a lost battle, because it would mean a small increase in taxes that they do not want. the republicans. “Right now the buses only go to three of the ten cities in the county, and they run every hour,” explains Sánchez.
Kamala Harris’ ‘counterprogramming’
Devin Barrington Ward, a 27-year-old local activist, had called his people this Saturday at 2:00 p.m. in front of Atlanta City Hall. And Harris had done the same, 48 hours in advance – third trip to Atlanta in two weeks – at the same time a couple of blocks away.
The rally of Barrington Ward, a progressive candidate supported by housing associations, LGTBIQ+, environmentalists and the DSA, ended up becoming a meeting with those closest to the campaign.
Harris, in Atlanta, meanwhile, insisted on the key themes of the last stretch of the campaign, which she repeated a few hours later in Charlotte, North Carolina, another disputed state: turning the page on Trump’s political decade and his divisive politics: “We are fed up, exhausted. We know who Trump is, but he is not who we are. “It is time for a new generation of leadership in the United States.”
“We feel like the poor relation in this election cycle.” says Barrington: “We’ve been campaigning since at least June, even before Harris entered the presidential race, and it’s disappointing that in a city where we are one of the centers of the political universe, so to speak [Georgia es un swing state y Atlanta es demócrata]they are forgetting the elections that will have direct consequences for the residents of the city.”
The Atlanta city council candidate adds: “It would have made sense for his campaign and his advisors to talk to me and other candidates aligned with his political agenda, because we give them legitimacy, because we are talking about how the program will actually work in practice, not just from that theoretical place from which sometimes you cannot do everything because you do not have majorities in Congress. I am an ally, but if you want the elected officials of the cities or the area to support your campaign, what do you do to support theirs, who agree with what you do? If there is no reciprocity, it is a lost opportunity to enhance local elections and the importance of voting.”
One of the relevant issues in the campaign in Atlanta is the police issue. Stop Cop City is an Atlanta movement, which collected 116,000 signatures, whose objective is to stop the construction of a macro complex, of 34 hectares and an initial cost of 90 million, intended to house and train police officers from all over the country in urban guerrilla tactics. A “police city”, financed by large corporations, that has not been voted on by citizens and will serve as a school to repress protests.
“We will never be able to repair the damage that was done when the city decided to suppress the votes of 116,000 people” who opposed the construction of the police center: “The referendum is an issue independent of the public security challenges, because if we suppress the right to “Asks candidate Barrington Ward: “It’s an issue of public safety that the Stop Cop City movement took advantage of, but it also has to do with democracy.”
If there is one issue that unites the Democratic mayor of Atlanta, the African-American André Dickens, and the Republican governor of Georgia, the right-wing Republican Brian Kemp, it is the defense of the police state. “We are clear that the Atlanta Police Training Center will likely move forward”; Barrington Ward concedes: “But we need to get the public involved in what we call a community-led public safety model, which is the community prioritizing what kind of public safety measures they would like to see, rather than “Those decisions are made in the City Council, because what works in one neighborhood does not necessarily work in another, and the City Hall bureaucrats who have come to my neighborhood do not know the problems.”
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