ATLANTA (AP) — Davante Jennings cast his first ballot for Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race. Republican Donald Trump’s election that year, he says, turned him from an idealistic college student to a jaded cynic overnight.
Jennings walked away from a system he thought ignored people like himself, a young Black man who grew up politically conscious in Alabama but wielded no obvious power. It took nearly six years for him to see that view as self-defeating.
Now, at 27, Jennings is not only eager to cast his second presidential vote for Democratic President Joe Biden, but he also is fully invested as an activist, top aide to a Georgia state lawmaker and regular volunteer recruiting would-be voters off the sideline as part of the not-for-profit New Georgia Project.
“I was like, I’m not voting for this if it’s all rigged and doesn’t even matter,” he said in an interview. “Now, I can talk to people that have been beaten down by the system and say, ‘I get it. Let’s talk about why this is important.’”
Jennings’ path spotlights the tens of millions of Americans whom political campaigns often refer to as “low-propensity voters,” people who never vote or only occasionally do so in a general election. About 1 in 3 eligible Americans did not vote in 2020. In 2016, it was was more like 4 out of 10.
With presidential elections often decided on close margins in a few states, those voters could determine whether Biden is reelected or Trump completes his White House comeback. Biden’s campaign has had a notable head start in trying to reach such voters, but both campaigns, along with political action groups across the spectrum, aim to build a wide organizing footprint to maximize support in the fall.
“It is so critical to have an actual campaign where people can feel like they see part of themselves,” Roohi Rustum, Biden’s national organizing director, said in an interview.
Biden and…
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