“I am Gabriel Sánchez, a Democrat running for the House of Representatives in this county. I’m running because I believe everyone has the right to affordable housing, guaranteed health insurance, and an economy that works for everyone here in Georgia. That’s how this resident of Cobb County, in the Atlanta, Georgia metropolitan area, describes himself. Sánchez comes from a Colombian family, although he was born in the United States and at age 27 he was running for office for the first time.
In May, he won the primary against party-backed Georgia State Rep. Teri Anulewicz. establishment of the party, while Sánchez was supported by environmental organizations, the LBTGIQ, the housing movement, unions and progressives like the DSA – Democratic Socialists of America, which includes national deputies like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Rashida Tlaib , of Palestinian descent, who has avoided supporting Kamala Harris because of her stance on Israel.
Sánchez is just 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, showing the card that Sánchez gives her on which his photo appears. Chantelle is an African-American woman who opened the door to her house in a neighborhood in the city of Smyrna (Georgia) that depends on the county and not the city, because it used to be segregated because it was mainly inhabited. by blacks: “We will go to vote early because usually I walk around the neighborhood at 9 a.m. to exercise and then I go to work. »
“And can I count on you? »Sánchez asks him. “Of course,” she replies, even accepting that Sánchez places a sign with her name at the entrance to the house.
Sánchez and his team – and, in general, the Democratic and Republican parties – use a mobile app, MiniVAN Touch, which allows lists to be exported so that Gabriel Sánchez and his team can enter the data on their device while talking to people of their list: on the list, they have the names of the people registered in each house and they note whether they were there or not and the interaction with them as they go raking streets.
If no one opens the door, there are two cards left, one in Spanish and one in English, asking to vote for Sánchez.
“Currently the government does not represent the people,” explains Sánchez, “we must change that. The problem is that a lot of politicians here get a lot of money from big business and the rich, and it’s not fair. We need more representatives for normal people, for the people. That’s why I made a promise not to take money from corporations or PACs, which is a very serious form of corruption in the United States: if almost all the money you receive comes from corporations , ultimately you represent businesses. »
Chantelle’s home is one of 23,000 people Gabriel Sanchez and his campaign team are preparing to win the Cobb County seat in the Capitol from Georgia. “People forgot the importance of door-to-door canvassing until I won the primaries. It’s important. We started doing it once a week, and as we get closer to the election, we’re doing it on more days and now we’re doing it every day, because it’s the last chance to get people to voting 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 of things, and because the election is so close, the few votes you get from knocking on doors can affect the outcome.”
And they ask about Harris and Trump? “Sometimes they ask about the presidential election, because obviously a lot of people think about that more than anything. »
This Saturday at the same time, Democratic candidate for the White House, Kamala Harris, went to the Atlanta Civic Center to try to obtain the votes necessary to repeat Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia in 2020 and which polls suggest as a complicated business.
But that’s not the only thing that’s voted on: in Cobb County, they also vote, for example, to expand public transportation, especially the bus, but it seems like that’s a losing battle, because that would mean a small increase in taxes. which the Republicans don’t want. “Currently, buses only serve three of the ten towns in the department, and they run every hour,” explains Sánchez.
Kamala Harris’s “counterprogramming”
Devin Barrington Ward, a 27-year-old local activist, called his loved ones this Saturday at 2 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, just a few 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, emphasized the key themes of the latter part of the campaign, which she repeated a few hours later in Charlotte, North Carolina, another contested state: turning the page on the decade politics of Trump and his divisive policies: “We are fed up, exhausted. We know who Trump is, but he is not who we are. “It’s time for a new generation of leaders in the United States. »
“We feel like the poor relation of this election cycle. Said Barrington: “We’ve been campaigning since at least June, before Harris even entered the presidential race, and it’s disappointing that in a city where we are one of the centers of the universe, so to speak policy [Georgia es un swing state y Atlanta es demócrata]they forget the elections which will have direct consequences on the inhabitants of the city.
The Atlanta City Council candidate adds: “It would have made sense for his campaign and his advisors to speak with me and other candidates aligned with his political agenda, because we give them legitimacy, because we are talking about the how the program will actually work in practice, not just from this theoretical place from which sometimes you can’t do everything because you don’t have a majority in Congress. I am an ally, but if you want city or territory elected officials to support your campaign, what are you doing to support theirs, who agree with what you are doing? If there is no reciprocity, it is a lost opportunity to promote local elections and the importance of voting.
One of the major themes of the campaign in Atlanta is that of the police. Stop Cop City is an Atlanta movement that has 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 big businesses, which was not voted for by citizens and which will serve as a school to repress demonstrations.
“We will never be able to repair the damage caused when the city decided to suppress the vote of 116,000 people” who opposed the construction of the police station: “The referendum is a question independent of public security issues, because if we suppress the right to,” asks candidate Barrington Ward: “It’s a public safety issue that the Stop Cop City movement has benefited from, but it also has to do with democracy.”
If there is one subject 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 confident that the Atlanta Police Training Center is likely to move forward”; Barrington Ward concedes: “But we need to engage the public in what we call a community-led public safety model, in which the community prioritizes the type of public safety measures they would like to see, rather than ‘These Decisions are made in the city council, because what works in one neighborhood doesn’t necessarily work in another, and the city hall bureaucrats who came to my neighborhood don’t know the problems.
