Sabrina Friday scanned the room at Mother’s Nest, an organization in Macon that provides baby supplies, training, food and housing to mothers in need, and she asked how many planned to vote. Of the 30, mostly women, six raised their hands, indicating a need to encourage low-income mothers to vote.

Friday, the group’s executive director, said she tries to stress civic duty and encourage low-income mothers to vote, an often difficult proposition given the circumstances of her clients.

“When a mom is in a hotel room and there’s six or seven people in two beds and her kids are hungry and she just lost the car, she doesn’t want to hear too much about elections,” Friday said. “She wants to hear how you can help.”

The Potential Impacts of Encouraging Low-Income Mothers to Vote in Georgia

Macon is the largest city in Bibb County, where the majority of residents are Black and one in four of its population lives in poverty. When Joe Biden became president four years ago, he promised to tackle the pernicious gap in racial equity — and in few places is the stubbornness of that challenge as politically significant in this state that could swing the presidential election. Encouraging low-income mothers to vote could be key.

Located about 80 miles (130 kilometers) south of Atlanta, Bibb County is the kind of place where Vice President Kamala Harris would need to run up her margin in order to defeat Donald Trump in this year’s election, a strategy that helped Biden win the state four years ago as he promised to lift up Black Americans. It won’t be easy: Bibb County never recovered all the jobs lost during the pandemic, and Labor Department data show it had more jobs in 2019 under Trump than it does now.

Trump, the former president, sees himself as having an opportunity with Black voters, particularly men. But he and Harris have one thing in common: Each will have a difficult time persuading people to turn out who typically sit out elections. More than 47,000 people in Bibb County were eligible to vote in 2020 and didn’t, a figure roughly four times Biden’s margin of victory across the entire state. Eligible voters are defined as legal residents who are 18 or older, according to Census figures.

Read the full article about encouraging low-income mothers to vote at PBS.