In the battle for Georgia, Democrats lose a key fighter

ATLANTA — When Democrats flipped Georgia in 2020, Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, the leader of the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s 6th Episcopal District, had been in the state just four years.

That was all the time he needed to turn a disjointed operation into a political machine. His success in mobilizing Black voters of faith played a key role in sending Joe Biden to the White House — and two Democrats, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, to the Senate.

Now, Jackson, who is based in Atlanta, is leaving the state he helped make competitive. He will preside over the 2nd Episcopal District, which includes churches in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia.

His departure, in keeping with rules that dictate a bishop may remain in a district for only two consecutive four-year terms, creates a critical leadership void in the organizing infrastructure that Democrats are relying on to turn out the vote for Vice President Kamala Harris just months before the election. Moreover, it could pose new challenges for the state’s network of activists and operatives already facing significant hurdles to replicating their past successes.

“Bishop Jackson enabled us,” said Rev. Timothy McDonald, the senior pastor of First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta. He credited Jackson for taking their work “beyond an idea — which preachers have a lot of — to an actual plan of how we’re going to turn out the vote.”

The bishop, 70, is leaving as Georgia reemerges as one of the most prominent swing states in the presidential election. Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, are kicking off a bus tour through southeast Georgia on Wednesday that will culminate in Savannah, sending a clear message that Democrats believe the state is back in play after former President Donald Trump built up a double-digit polling lead against Biden.

Over the past year, Trump’s strength, coupled with the lack of a statewide race and general political exhaustion, had led to apathy and atrophy among the state’s once-vibrant liberal network of Democratic-leaning organizations, civil rights groups and faith-based organizations. Black faith leaders had warned for months that the voters in their pews also lacked enthusiasm and were growing disenchanted with Biden over his handling of the war between Israel and Hamas and the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.

Harris’ replacing Biden atop the Democratic ticket has stemmed some of the free fall. But organizers across the state, including Jackson, say there is still a lot of work to do to keep Georgia competitive.

“We have got to do a job of making sure that our community, our people are informed and educated on issues and that they are motivated and they are organized,” Jackson said in an interview. “That’s the challenge that we have.”

A political fixture

After attending seminary in Atlanta, whose rich civil rights history he had been drawn to, Jackson served as the senior pastor of St. Matthew AME in Orange, New Jersey, for more than 30 years. As the leader of New Jersey’s Black Ministers Council, a governing body of Black faith leaders, he became a fixture of local politics. Charismatic and endlessly willing to take a meeting or give a speech, he forged relationships with powerful figures in both parties, becoming something of a political boss himself whose blessing was essential to successful campaigns or legislative efforts.

“You could not do things in politics without coming and engaging with him,” Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said in an interview, recalling how he had met with the bishop before running for City Council, mayor and Senate. “It would be a malpractice in New Jersey to be politically active without seeking his counsel and his wisdom, and understanding that he was a force in his own right.”

After Jackson was elected bishop, he arrived in Atlanta months before the 2016 presidential election frustrated to find a track record of low Black turnout and disjointed efforts from fellow faith leaders to address it. He founded Operation Voter Turnout, encouraging members of Georgia’s more than 500 AME churches to vote.

By the time the 2020 election approached, the bishop had emerged as an instrumental figure in the movement to increase Black voter engagement. He pulled in leaders from other religions and Christian denominations, encouraging them to push their congregants to check their voter registration, develop a voting plan and ensure that members of their communities did the same. He also departed from some of the church’s more antiquated traditions by including women and younger clergy members in his circle of advisers. Allies remarked on his ability to pull the various factions into a common cause.

Stacey Abrams, the voting rights activist and former Democratic candidate for Georgia governor, said Jackson’s influence in the state was so great that a single call to him could generate support from dozens of allies in the faith community and beyond.

“It is a more efficient process to go directly to Bishop Jackson and that will be missed,” she said. “There’s an efficiency to having one person who can do all of the things.”

It remains uncertain whether the infrastructure he built can carry on in full without him. Several of the state’s organizing groups have warned of fewer resources and diminished donor interest this year compared with other election cycles. In meetings with his advisers, they have underlined the need to focus on Georgia’s rural stretches, where some church leaders have had a harder time organizing their members to vote.

Jackson offered a word of warning for Democrats on his way out: They are often, he said, “on the right side of an issue, but they are not as committed to the fight as Republicans of the far right are.”

Battle against voting legislation

Jackson’s organizing influence was particularly pronounced in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election and the 2021 U.S. Senate runoffs in Georgia.

Shortly after those Democratic victories, Georgia Republicans in the state Legislature rewrote the state’s election code and sought to reduce Sunday voting — which many saw as a retaliatory effort to restrict voting after church services, a Black voter rite of passage colloquially known as souls to the polls.

The response from the Black church this time, Jackson realized, would require a shift. He would still activate his network, weary from the slog of a general election and runoff, to marshal another campaign. But he began leaning on business leaders, demanding audiences with the heads of major Georgia-based companies like Coca-Cola, who would declare their opposition to the law. When Home Depot stayed silent, Jackson orchestrated a boycott of the company.

The public pressure campaign against the new law would reach as far as Major League Baseball, and Republicans in the Legislature ultimately struck the language that would have sharply curtailed Sunday voting from the legislation that Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, signed into law.

The experience both rattled and energized Jackson before the 2022 midterm elections, when Warnock was once more on the ballot, this time vying for a full six-year term.

To respond, Jackson co-founded Faith Works, a political nonprofit that brought formal organization to the Black church’s political operation in Georgia, with the express goal of increasing voter turnout.

Sponsored

And in early 2024, Jackson expanded his church’s efforts to partner with the Christian Methodist Episcopal and African Methodist Episcopal Zion churches. Since its forming, the coalition has sought to mobilize more than 140,000 voters across the state.

Leaders in the network said that though their organizing figure was departing, they planned to carry on his work and advance it.

“Losing him will be painful because we are losing a friend and a brother and partner,” said the Rev. Cynthia Hale, the founder and senior pastor of Ray of Hope Christian Church in Decatur, Georgia. “We’re going to stay connected with him and continue this in a nationwide effort.”