Ms. Abrams and her team, including her deputy campaign manager, Ms. Byrd, have spent a majority of campaign funds on canvassing and get-out-the-vote efforts. A heavy field strategy may seem counterintuitive in this digital era, but the chance to look someone in the eyes and connect might just be the thing to slice through “fake news” that exposes voters to so many conflicting messages that they often don’t know what to believe.

And it’s working. The New Georgia Project, which Ms. Abrams started in 2014, has registered more than 200,000 voters, many of them young or of color or both. In response, the Republican candidate for governor, Brian Kemp, has unleashed a wave of voter suppression, tossing 53,000 registered voters off the rolls, 70 percent of whom are black.

Jessica Byrd began her electoral consulting firm Three Points Strategies after Michael Brown Jr. was killed in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014. She had two goals. The first was to bridge electoral work with activism, which has led to the creation of the Electoral Justice Project within the Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of groups across the country. Her second goal, she said, was to “specifically focus on electing really unapologetic, hyperprogressive black women.”

Her goal as a millennial and a member of the Black Lives Matter generation, which is skeptical of liberal politics, is to get close enough to the operations of political power to transform electoral politics. Given increasing evidence of rampant voter suppression nationwide, some radical kind of transformation is urgent and necessary. Expanding the voter rolls won’t help if in the end, voters are still disenfranchised.

Ms. Byrd says the two-party system is “the greatest barrier to black political participation of all other systemic barriers,” even though she manages and strategizes for campaigns of black female Democrats, including, in 2017, several mayoral campaigns. She believes that “a multiparty system that centers all the issues is the only way forward for democracy” and that to get to a new system, you first have to master the old one.