How are you doing, friend?

I’m Hope Jackson, a Deputy Campaign Director here at the Human Rights Campaign, and, with everything that’s happened recently, I wanted to write you.

As the events of last week unfolded before us, we wanted to make sure we properly acknowledge the history we made in Georgia: Both Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won their respective U.S. Senate runoff elections, securing a pro-equality majority in the chamber with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote. This is extraordinary! 

As someone who has been organizing in the Peach State for years, I have seen firsthand the hard work of our 185,000 members and supporters statewide — from our volunteers and advocates to the voters themselves, HRC Georgia gets the job done and has since we first touched down there in the 1990s.

This year in Georgia’s races alone:

Through out the entire 2020 election cycle:

We went into 2020 ready to elect leaders that would fight for us, identifying a number of priority states like Georgia and endorsing a historic slate of 650 candidates up and down ballots — 54 percent of whom were women, 35 percent were people of color and roughly 11 percent were LGBTQ-identified. 

Alongside our wins in Georgia, we also sent Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to the White House, retained a pro-equality majority in the U.S. House, elected more LGBTQ leaders to office — including our very own Sarah McBride who will today become the first openly transgender person to serve in the upper chamber of a state legislature — and won two other key Senate seats: John Hickenlooper in Colorado and Mark Kelly in Arizona. Arizona has been a priority state for us for several cycles and like Georgia, our work this and last cycle flipped both Senate seats and the presidential electorate blue since 2018! 

None of this is a happy accident, Friend. For years now, we have been amassing critical data on Equality Voters — using our sophisticated modeling — which helps us identify and mobilize more people year after year. Not only that, our data pinpoints key talking points and messaging proven to turn out voters. And it all came to a head this year – with the wins up and down the ballot we needed to start making real change in our country.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you for all you have done this cycle! I hope you are as proud of yourself as we are of you. With the soon-to-be trifecta of pro-equality leadership in the White House, the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House, now is the time to look ahead. 

We have already laid out our comprehensive Blueprint for Positive Change and, with you and our pro-equality leaders by our side, we have a real opportunity to enact pro-equality policies and legislation like the Equality Act, erase the rollbacks of the last four years and make historic gains for our community. 

Thank you again for everything you do.  You are changing the world for the better.

Onward,