In Midwest Battlegrounds, Progressives Mobilize Voters of Color

When political observers discuss the key battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, it is often in the context of how Donald Trump swung them into his column, launching him to victory in 2016.

It's a vision that typically centers on white voters, but as the fall campaign ramps up, grass-roots groups on the ground are working to mobilize voters of color who could be the deciding factor in who wins each state, and the presidency.

Both Michigan and Pennsylvania are one-quarter non-white, while people of color make up one-fifth of Wisconsin's population. Those numbers are enormous, considering that Trump won Michigan by only 10,704 votes, Pennsylvania by just 46,765, and Wisconsin by a margin of 22,177 votes.

In Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee, groups involved in preparations for census and voter registration were forced to abandon those efforts in the short term after the pandemic hit. They transformed themselves into community service groups offering food and financial assistance resources to people in need. These same groups are now using the relationships they built during one of the most difficult periods in American history to ask voters of color for their votes.

From Pittsburgh and North Philadelphia to the steel town suburbs where Black home ownership is high, grass-roots group One Pennsylvania says their membership and 250,000 voter universe is 85 percent African American.

"Since the Clinton-era, we've been very focused on swing voters, soccer moms, the voter at the diner story," said One Pennsylvania's executive director Erin Kramer. "What we don't talk about is folks that are completely left out of the conversation with limited resources."

For One Pennsylvania, these citizens are not "low propensity" voters, as they are often called elsewhere. To their group, they are "politically neglected" voters, while another group calls them "high potential."

Kramer said her organization is looking to empower these people.

"We identified a need for politically neglected voters to have that deep engagement that swing voters get," Kramer told Newsweek. "Our members wake up every day with political problems, and they need to have political power to solve those problems."

Kramer described the tedious, unsexy work of cobbling together a coalition of like-minded but very different voters in the state, where another group in central Pennsylvania might be focused on Latino voters, while labor organizations target nurses or teachers.

The coronavirus pandemic affected their work as well. Half of the One Pennsylvania staff lost an immediate family member, and some lost multiple loved ones. The team pivoted from door-knocking and showing up at popular events to handing out Clorox wipes, masks, Lysol, and even delivering diapers and toilet paper.

One effect of the closing of schools was that fewer Black children were being suspended, Kramer said, an area of focus for her group in normal times. That enabled her education justice team to concentrate more on food insecurity and remote learning for families.

In Michigan, where Black voters historically comprise the totality of outreach to minorities, a new group is trying to crack the code on getting a burgeoning population of Asian-American voters out to the polls. The organization, Rising Voices of Asian-American Families, has identified 183,000 voters who are typically not reached by campaigns, and hopes to increase the rate of Asian-American turnout just 3 percent, which would be 20,000 voters, exceeding the margin Hillary Clinton lost Michigan by in 2016.

Here, too, the pandemic presented clear challenges for organizers, but also potential for reaching more voters than they had previously.

"For us, being able to transition to mail and digital strategy on one hand offered lower-quality interactions, but also gave us the ability to reach more people," said Laura Misumi, the group's executive director.

As a new organization, Rising Voices had little capacity to go door-to-door, but with the pandemic making that tried and true outreach tactic impossible, the organization was able to redirect resources to its mail and digital campaign, which included direct mail sent to voters in their home language.

In Wisconsin, Voces de la Frontera Action is anything but a new group. The organization is a veteran of legal battles with state Republicans, including former governor Scott Walker, over a voter ID law that was overturned for discriminating on the basis of race.

It's a case of simple math for Voces de la Frontera Action: Trump won Wisconsin by more than 22,000 votes four years ago, so the community organization is targeting 23,000 mostly Latino and immigrant voters in Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, and Racine, among others.

The group told Newsweek they firmly believe Trump won not because he had more support, but because a lot of young, multiracial, and Latino voters stayed home. That conclusion led to their development of a "relational voter program," based on the premise that friends and family are the best tool to get others registered and mobilized.

The peer-to-peer contact may come in the form of a Dreamer, an undocumented youth brought to the country as a child, sending a WhatsApp message to a friend to say "I need your vote, your vote is my voice," the group said. Besides WhatsApp, the program includes phone-banking and Facebook messages.

As the outbreak and infections grew, the mission of Voces de la Frontera Action did as well, leading to an essential worker's rights network which helped organize meat-processing and agricultural workers to attain better work protections through collective bargaining.

A COVID Emergency Relief Fund started by the group raised 100,000 for mixed-status families, which are families that include U.S. citizens as well as undocumented people. The unprecedented nature of the pandemic meant the group was asking itself a difficult but necessary question: "How can we talk to people about their civic duty, if they can't even eat?"

Back in Pittsburgh, Kramer said the group's tactics were proven effective in the 2019 municipal elections, in which voters were 33 percent more likely to vote after receiving multiple contacts from One Pennsylvania.

Democrats say this nitty gritty, on the ground work from 501(c)(4)'s, the tax designation for not-for-profit groups that shift into partisan political messaging—texts, Facebook messages and phone calls—are all the more important as the national party and Joe Biden's campaign feel the heat in a tightening race, where Trump is pouring money into these states as well.

"This is absolutely vital, let's be real," Irene Lin, the campaign manager for Andru Volinsky's recent New Hampshire's governor's campaign, told Newsweek. "I'm hugely concerned. The Democratic Party has oftentimes not invested in communities of color, and I hope the c4's are able to pick up the slack."

One of the major groups funding this work is the progressive donor network Way to Win, which raised $50 million to fund group's like One Pennsylvania and Rising Voices of Asian-American Families.

Way to Win, which calls these voters "high potential" voters, said they are 300,000 strong in Pennsylvania and more than 300,000 in Michigan. The voters don't have a long voting history, so Way to Win argues the way to connect with them isn't through a traditional campaign or party apparatus.

"They may have gotten a campaign visit, but it's not enough," Way to Win president Tory Gavito, told Newsweek. "They need to be connected with people that represent their community."