Georgia voted blue. NC didn’t. Democrats are looking to their neighbor for answers.

A better ground game. An earlier start. A more inclusive approach. A willingness to listen.

Those are some of the things Democrats say they need if they are to duplicate their Georgia counterparts’ electoral success in North Carolina. What they don’t need, they say, is a single figure who can lead them to victory.

“Folks talk about: ‘We just need the Georgia plan. We need a Stacey Abrams,’” said Kara Hollingsworth, a partner at a national firm that works to elect Black women. “You actually have those people in your state who have been pushing for a long time to be bolder and move away from the formulaic assumptions of how you win elections. And there’s been resistance to it.”

Georgia is, most definitely, on Democrats’ minds after the state voted for Joe Biden in November and elected two Democrats to the U.S. Senate in runoff elections in early January. Democrats in North Carolina, long expected to be the next Southern state to flip from Republican control, are looking south for inspiration after their disappointing 2020 election results.

“We are taking a page from Stacey Abrams’ playbook, which I read the day after Georgia,” said Democratic state Sen. Jeff Jackson, who announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate earlier this week. “We are going to start organizing much sooner than any U.S. Senate campaign has at any point in our state.”

Said former state Sen. Erica Smith, the other Democrat officially in the Senate race: “I’m a big fan. I love her. I love her grit and her spirit. When she lost the gubernatorial race, she continued to work, to build the coalition necessary to have an agenda that works for everyone. I’m certainly following those steps.”

Abrams, a former Georgia House minority leader who lost a close race for governor in 2018, wrote “Lead From the Outside,” a New York Times bestseller, and then authored a 16-page playbook outlining “the strategy and path to victory in 2020.” Her Fair Fight organization put it into action — registering, mobilizing and educating voters of color and young voters.

It paid off in wins for Biden and Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, all of which gave Democrats unified control of the executive and legislative branches as of Jan. 20.

North Carolina Democrats, which lost top-of-the-ticket races for president and U.S. Senate in 2020 as well as the majority of Council of State offices and a string of statewide judicial races, have taken notice — and notes.

“You learn from these things. You need to apply the lessons. It’s not just a matter of more money or more energy, sometimes it’s a matter of being more strategic,” said U.S. Rep. David Price, a Chapel Hill Democrat.

The race to apply those lessons is on already. Republican U.S. Sen. Richard Burr is not running for re-election in 2022, leaving an open seat that could determine control of the Senate.

“Do everything we can to register Black voters and Democratic voters, and we need to do that now,” said state Senate Democratic Whip Jay Chaudhuri.

Smith, who is running for U.S. Senate in 2022 after failing to win the Democratic nomination in 2020, said one of the many lessons from Georgia — which elected a Jewish man and a Black man to the Senate for the first time in the state’s history — is a need for different candidates.

“It should always be about who the best candidate is,” said Smith, who is Black. “Let’s establish that. Unfortunately, though, we don’t always go for the best candidate. We go for a cookie cutter version of a white male that we think makes them the most qualified because they’re white and they’re male.”

Georgia bolstered its voter registration by 520,000 between 2016 and 2020 with the largest percentage increase among Black voters (130,000). The number of Latino voters increased by 95,000, according to data from the Pew Research Center.

Biden carried the state by less than 13,000 votes.

“Use organizing not just to get out the vote in the last 60 days, but use it to expand the electorate,” Jackson said. “In order to execute that strategy, you need to start organizing much sooner.”

Finding NC’s Stacey Abrams

Abrams, a likely candidate for Georgia governor in 2022, has gotten much of the attention — and she wasn’t even on the ballot in 2020. But organizers and Democratic elected officials in Georgia and North Carolina said there are people putting in the work already.

“Every community has a Stacey Abrams. Every community has a woman of color doing the work,” said state Sen. Natalie Murdock.

The Democratic election victories in Georgia were a long time in the making and by no means a guarantee, said Jacquelyn Bettadapur, the chair of the Cobb County (Georgia) Democrats.

Bettadapur laid out a near-decade long shift — both in demographics around a booming Atlanta, which attracted new residents from across the nation, and in the message from Democrats. She said when she first got involved in politics around 2014, she didn’t have Democrats to vote for in her county elections.

“That’s where Stacey Abrams came in and she had a different vision. We need to be Democrats and run as Democrats and not be afraid of it,” Bettadapur said. “Her plan was more to expand the electorate through voter registration.”

There were not immediate statewide results. Donald Trump carried the state in 2016, but he unleashed a backlash among Democrats that helped surge participation in Georgia and other states.

Trump tapped then-U.S. Tom Price for his Cabinet, creating a special election in the Atlanta suburbs. Ossoff raised a bunch of money and while he narrowly lost, Democrats caught their first glimpse of the energy, fundraising ability and organizing strength in the Trump era.

Abrams lost a bitterly narrow race for governor in 2018. She redoubled her organizing efforts with Fair Fight and, in 2020, it led to national electoral victories.

“It’s not any one thing. It’s sort of stuff that was beyond our control in terms of demographic shift and harnessing that energy coming off 2016,” Bettadapur said. “It made a difference for us.”

Cobb County is one of eight counties around Atlanta that voted for Biden in 2020 by the same or larger margins than they did for Clinton in 2016. Cobb moved from 48% for Clinton to 56% for Biden, a representative shift in the Atlanta metro area.

In the runoff elections, voter turnout in heavily Republican North Georgia dropped off significantly while Democrats were able to hold onto much of their turnout in other parts of the state.

Work to do in NC

In statewide races in North Carolina, Republicans won elections for president and U.S. Senate, six of 10 Council of State races and all eight Supreme Court and appellate court seats. Incumbent Democrats won their races for governor, attorney general, auditor and secretary of state.

Democrats didn’t flip either chamber in the General Assembly in 2020. The party raised a lot of money, but needs to look at how to invest in districts, Chaudhuri said.

Some say North Carolina Democrats didn’t present a full enough vision of what they believe in, instead hoping to win elections by running against Trump and Sen. Thom Tillis, whose approval ratings were low throughout the campaign.

“I just don’t think that Democrats had a strong message on what we were running on versus who we were running against,” Smith told The News & Observer.

As a party, Democrats need to have an agenda that works for everyone, Smith said.

“On the campaign trail they want someone to speak to the real issues,” she said. “We had a lack of an economic message, and that killed us in 2020.”

Cal Cunningham, who defeated Smith in the Democratic primary, lost to Tillis by less than 95,000 votes. Cunningham led in polling throughout the campaign, but a sex scandal in the final weeks sent him into hiding and doomed his bid.

There’s already a debate simmering about whether Democrats should nominate another white male candidate for U.S. Senate or should pick a Black woman. There are no Black women in the Senate after Vice President Kamala Harris left the chamber for her position.

“Trust Black women. We believe in Black women,” said Hollingsworth, who was a senior leader on President Barack Obama’s grassroots campaign in North Carolina in 2012. “What are we doing in terms of actually investing in them at the same level we are investing in white men that are running and white women?”

Gov. Roy Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein, both white men, won statewide elections on the same ballot as Trump, but Democrats have lost all four U.S. Senate and presidential races since 2008, Obama’s first election.

“The historic trend of successful white Democrats statewide is that they are moderates,” Bitzer said. “Looking at Georgia, some progressive liberal Democrats in the state are going to say it’s time to try someone else.”

Murdock, a Durham Democrat who also worked on voter outreach for the Biden-Harris campaign, said the party needs to invest in organizations led by Black and brown people, so the people who come to the door are people they already know in the community.

“I can’t stress enough [it’s about] going to the voters and not assuming you have the right message,” Murdock said.

Among the other lessons she said North Carolina Democrats need to learn from Georgia is not to skip the step of doing a deep-dive analysis, like Georgia Democrats did after Abrams’ 2018 loss.

Do the autopsy and use that as a blueprint, Murdock said. Find an untapped county? Go there. Find disengaged voters in another county? Go there, too. And, importantly, send people with connections to the community armed with messages on jobs, wages and health care.

“Always have a jobs message,” she said.

COVID-19 and organizing

The coronavirus pandemic, which first hit North Carolina right after the March primaries in 2020, altered Democrats’ plans for in-person canvassing and organizing. Republicans did more in-person campaigning throughout the 2020 election, which some GOP strategists have credited for their success.

“Progressive Democrats made a choice to follow what the health and safety and guidance from science was telling us. We were not able to do what we do best which is have face-to-face conversations,” Hollingsworth said. “It played a huge factor and can’t be discounted.”

Murdock said that part of being in the field is learning what voters want. Having conversations with voters can change your campaign. It did for her, she said, in the primary, when she learned that wages and paying bills needed to be emphasized more than other issues.

“Elections are won in the field,” she said.

Chaudhuri said the Democratic base in North Carolina is a coalition of young voters, people of color, and college- and non-college-educated white voters.

“It’s not a secret that for Democrats to win, they need to do two things: drive turnout in urban areas and cut their losses in rural areas,” he said.

Older voters, who tend to vote Republican, turned out at much higher rates than younger voters, who tend to vote Democrat, in North Carolina. Voters aged 41-65 had an 82% turnout rate, while those over 65 turned out at 84.1%.

Voters aged 26 to 40 had a 64.8% turnout rate, while those under 25 turned out at 60%. All four age groups saw an increase in turnout from the 2016 election.

As in Georgia, where the races were decided by narrow margins, the results in North Carolina are likely to remain very tight.

“Maybe an election comes soon where that dynamic truly does flip,” Bitzer said. “But it doesn’t feel like to me there’s going to be an earthquake moment. It’s going to be a slow grind toward 51% Democrat or 51 Republican. That’s just the way it’s been.”

For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Domecast politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it on Megaphone, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.