"Kerry Win Georgia is a totally grassroots Volunteer Organization of Georgia and Greater Atlanta.  Our group includes business leaders, professional leaders, and grass roots activists.  Our mission is to reach out and involve every community possible and, above all, to see John Kerry win in Georgia. "
	AIDSWalk Atlanta, early Oct. 2004 (KWG photo).

"...a grassroots army, swarming over the city, door to door, in phone banks, radio appearances, marches and rallies."
Text by Brian LaRose Oct. 2005 as edited by Eric M. Appleman.

Meetup.Org was all the rage in early 2004.  Groups started springing up all over the country and Georgia was no exception.  In DeKalb County, a traditionally Democratic stronghold, two groups started independently from the Meetups.  "North Atlanta For Kerry" met at the Atlanta Diner at the intersection of I-85 and North Druid Hill Road on the last Thursday of each month.  "North Highlands For Kerry" formed a little south in the Virginia Highlands section of DeKalb County and met in a coffee shop.

In June the leadership of the two groups met to discuss joining forces.  They decided to work together in one stronger organization named KerryWinGeorgia (KWG).  By a show of hands seven leaders were named to the Steering Committee: Rachel Fest, Dave Sharp, Joe Thomas, Allison Faust, Carla Schiff, Sharon Haire and Brian LaRose.  The mission was to win in Atlanta and deliver the State of Georgia to John Kerry.  It would CRUSH Bush to lose in the South.  Yes, that sounds very optimistic, but in Georgia politics, as Atlanta goes, so goes the state.  This victory would be keyed by a grassroots army, swarming over the city, door to door, in phone banks, radio appearances, marches and rallies.  The leaders divided up responsibilities and everybody began working.  Weekly phone conferences by the leadership team helped to coordinate activities of the entire organization, a diverse group comprising Atlantans from high school students to 80 year olds.

Also in June KerryWinGeorgia purchased a voter database and began planning a block by block "Get Out the Vote" effort.  The GOTV effort, under the direction of Sharon Haire, focused on Democratic strongholds at first, and then moved into 'swing' precincts.  Every weekend from June until November, the troops headed out door to door with flyers[PDF] and maps through Atlanta's oldest neighborhoods.  Typically walkers would meet at a donut place at 8:30 on Saturday morning, eat breakfast, form into groups of two, and go out for three or four hours; on Sundays we started later, around 11:30.  KWG was well received and we estimate that we visited over 15,000 Atlanta homes.

We planned a huge rally for September 1 entitled "Zell Miller Does Not Speak For Us" to coincide with Senator Zell Miller (D-GA) speaking to the Republican National Convention.  Over 600 people attended the rally, at the Park Tavern in Piedmont Park, and it was covered by three local TV news channels and was even carried on a segment of CNN Headline News.  The event featured several key speakers from Georgia and a mock trial during which the Georgia Democrats divorced Zell Miller and revoked his party privileges.

Following the rally leadership met to decide what to do next and how to finish the campaign.  The group was really beginning to gain momentum.  There were numerous requests for TV and radio interviews.  Our membership swelled to a peak of 715 members.  We marched at AIDSWalk Atlanta early October.  In the last month, Teresa Heinz Kerry flew into Atlanta to meet the Georgia Team and KWG was included.  After printing and posting over 1,000 VOTE KERRY signs with various themes, we rolled on with a street campaign, doing sign waving at various key intersections during peak commute hours.

Then one day in early- to mid-October, the call came -- the Georgia Democratic Party asked us to take over operations of the phone bank for the whole state.  We responded with a schedule for phone coverage by a team of volunteers using cell phones and "FREE NIGHT & LONG DISTANCE CALLING PLANS."  We called thousands of Atlanta residents.  Eighteen days before the election, the national Kerry-Edwards campaign called KWG and asked us to begin to redirect our phone bank efforts into other states.  Over those 18 days, an average of ten KWG volunteers per day manned phones and made calls out of state from a set of scripts.  It was disappointing that we were giving up on winning Georgia, but we knew the larger effort of winning the election was much more important than our conservative state.

KWG also began coordinating with other grassroot groups such as Georgia WAND "Women Action for New Directions" to plan "drive voters to the polls" efforts.  We advertised on radio and in interviews that KWG could help voters get the polls if they would call in.  WAND had the vans and drivers, and KWG provided the phones and coordination.  It worked -- we took hundreds of people to the polls to exercise their right to vote.

In the final days before the election, the state party asked us again to assist with the election, this time to run the boilerroom.  KWG brought in our own laptops and printers, manned headquarters with our own cell phones, and prepared an elections monitoring office to gather and report results.  We sent out an email, another in the stream of thousands, asking for people to drive to the polls and phone us with the numbers.  On Election Day, 32 volunteers monitored polls and called in numbers (total number of votes) each hour on the hour for their 100-plus "key" precincts (a mix of pro-Bush, pro-Kerry and swing precincts).  KWG emailed these results to the national Kerry headquarters every hour on the hour.  It was clear by 11:30 a.m. that we had a problem.  The rural communities were coming in VERY large numbers in Georgia.  Our hope was that by staying quiet enough in the rural areas, conservatives there would feel they didn't have to go the polls, and then we would SWEEP IT in Metro Atlanta.  Obviously the rural south gave the election to Bush.  In hindsight we might have tried to reach out to and work with local Democratic parties in more rural areas.

We are proud to say that 72% of DeKalb and Fulton Counties voted for John Kerry, although we lost statewide by 58%-41% (closer than some pundits predicted).  Those numbers were hard to swallow for the leadership of KWG but we decided to move on and fight another day.  In December we formed a new organization called GrassRootDemocrats.Org.  The membership now stands at over 300 people.  We are quietly meeting every few months and getting ready for the 2006 election cycle.  We will pick our fights and be ready to mobilize to impact another election when the time comes.  We have not forgotten our mission from early in 2004:

"Kerry Win Georgia is a totally grassroots Volunteer Organization of Georgia and Greater Atlanta.  Our group includes business leaders, professional leaders, and grass roots activists.  Our mission is to reach out and involve every community possible and, above all, to see John Kerry win in Georgia. "
 

"North Highlands For Kerry" Meetup group, March 25, 2004.
"North Atlanta For Kerry" Meetup group, May 27, 2004.	Kerry volunteers.
Kerry volunteers prepare to go door to door.
Phone banking in October 2004.
	www.kerrywingeorgia.org