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“I remember right before the polls closed, I sat down and I felt good because the one thing I did know was that we left it all out there,” Thompson told me. Woke Vote, the collection of students and church-going activists and voter organizers she founded, had been working to bolster black turnout long before the Senate race gained national attention. As the results she’d hoped for materialized, she said, it took her back to the euphoria in black communities after the election of Barack Obama in 2008. “I started to get somewhat emotional because it was a similar feeling.”

The effort to turn out black voters in Alabama differed from previous campaigns, Thompson said. Unlike traditional get-out-the-vote campaigns implemented by Democrats in key African American communities close to elections, many of the moving pieces in the Alabama election were funded by entities other than the party or the candidate’s campaign, and had been proceeding in stealth for months. Indeed, Woke Vote’s focus was only peripherally about Jones. “This was a completely independent effort that was focused on the idea of what happens when you resource black people with the goal of turning out black people,” Thompson said. “They really connected with this idea that we had black power, and that black power could be shown through the vote.”

Jones’s campaign spent relatively few dollars on actively courting black voters, and often chose not to make explicit racial appeals for fear of alienating rural white voters. Instead, a patchwork of groups like Woke Vote raised funds through a variety of local and national donors, using those funds to canvas black communities in the state for months. They focused not just on single-candidate fliers and door-knocking for one election, but on empowering voters and improving voter literacy in ways that could be sustained through future elections.

Woke Vote centered its efforts on potential sites of latent black political power, including historically black colleges and universities and black churches. Thompson bet that her tiny group of organizers could use those institutions as force-multipliers, turning each potential new voter into an organizer. By installing student organizers in places like Alabama A&M University, Alabama State University, and Tuskegee University and the string of influential churches in black communities, Woke Vote secured pledges from members not only to vote, but to bring people with them to the polls.

One national organization that helped fund groups like Woke Vote early in the Alabama black turnout effort was BlackPAC, an independent organization dedicated both to fostering candidates with ties to black communities and to sustained, meaningful engagement with black voters. BlackPAC’s model of engagement with black voters attracted significant buzz after it poured $1.1 million into Virginia this year—and its investment appeared to increase black turnout, putting more Democrats into the state legislature and Ralph Northam into the governor’s mansion.