The turnout of the emerging The New American Majority of voters of color will determine whether Democrats continue to control three branches of the federal government—House, Senate, and the Presidency--after the upcoming 2022 midterms. With razor-thin margins in the three entities, Democrats have yet to take the organizational steps to remain in charge.

Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY 18th District), Chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), Chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), have assembled staffs that are not reflective of the New American Majority, Black, Latinx, Asian and Pacific Islander, and Indigenous Americans, who make up more than 50 percent of the Democratic voting base.

Unexpectedly and contrary to robust predictions, the Democrats lost 13 House seats in the 2020 election. Republicans need to flip five seats to regain control of the House in the 2022 midterms, while only needing a net gain of one seat to return the Senate, which is tied 50 to 50, to a Republican majority.

Biden’s appointment of Jamie Harrison, an African American, to chair the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is a positive step, but the DNC does not have direct authority over its DCCC and DSCC counterparts. Although supposedly operating as a team, these three groups are only united in their desire to elect Democrats to office.

Democratic victories in 2020 resulted from deep and systematic, on-the-ground organizing by local-and state-level political workers who delivered a victory for the Biden-Harris Presidential ticket. They began coming together after Biden’s resounding victory in South Carolina’s Democratic presidential primary in February 2020.

Using the victory as a springboard, coupled with the demand that Biden select an African American woman to be his vice-presidential running mate (which he did in choosing Sen. Kamala Harris after earlier promising to appoint a female), the organizers were off and running, and all hands were on deck in the 50 states to ensure a Biden-Harris win.

Multiracial organizers developed meaningful relationships with Democratic base voters by asking them about their priorities for their communities and infusing those priorities into the Biden-Harris campaign. It is no accident that Biden and Harris addressed the rising tide of White police officers shooting and killing unarmed Black citizens during their battle for the presidency.

The House and Senate candidates in the same states were not as attuned to Democratic base concerns as was the national campaign. This lack of connectivity to the citizens who elect Democrats resulted in the loss of 13 House seats, and Senate races in Maine, Iowa, and North Carolina, where Democrats were anticipated to win.

In the House, the 2020 DCCC Chair Cheri Bustos (D-IL 17^th District), was so busy fending off her Republican opponent that she directed her energies and the resources she controlled toward squeezing out a narrow victory in her reelection bid. The 2020 DSCC Chair, Catherine Cortez Masto, fared no better than her DCCC equivalent, Cherie Bustos, she also failed to deliver expected wins.

The U.S. Senate triumphs in Georgia, which provided Democrats the majority, were primarily independent of efforts by national Democrats. The leadership of Stacey Abrams, Lauren Groh Wargo, LaTosha Brown, and Nse’ Ufot working through The New Georgia Project, Fair Fight, Black Voters Matter, and a host of other organizations and activists are responsible for the Georgia successes.

They established a comprehensive and detailed registration and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) strategy that mobilized the state's New American Majority for the November 3, 2020, presidential and U.S. Senate races. After their preferred Senate candidates reached the two January 4, 2021 runoffs, Abrams and her cohorts got out an overwhelming New Majority vote for a second time and elected Georgia's first Black and Jewish Senators to Congress.

These unprecedented, Democratic political achievements sent shock waves across the country but had little impact on the national Democratic leadership who persist in appointing White Democrats to energize a base of voters with whom they have an inadequate political connection and/or understanding. They maintain a political posture that proved ineffective in 2020 and firmly believes that it will lead to a different result in 2022 and 2024. It will not!

This is the peril Democrats are heading into as they attempt to hold on to their majorities in the House and Senate. If they fail, they will relegate the Biden-Harris administration to lame-duck status as it heads into its 2024 reelection bid. Democrats have a brief window to make corrections to an approach that has been futile in the recent past.

Unfortunately for them, there are few effective replicas of Stacey Abrams and her political organizing partners in other states and Congressional districts where they are urgently needed. Republicans’ chief Senate targets in 2022 are Arizona and Georgia where Democrats surprisingly won seats in2020 which had been long held by Republicans.

So far, the open Senate seats in Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina are trending Republican for 2022, with the possibility of a Democratic pick-up in Pennsylvania. Republican control over upcoming redistricting decisions will also place many Democratic House members in jeopardy as they will be running in redrawn districts that favor Republicans.

Nonetheless, Democrats should be mindful of the following:

• Republican-backed, state-level voter suppression legislation is rapidly sweeping the nation and must be countered by Democrats;

• Political leanings and attitudes vary widely among Latinx, AAPI, Indigenous, and some Black voters (African American males) by states and regions and are often pro-Republican;

• The growth among The New American Majority voters is concentrated within AAPI, Latinx, and Indigenous groups.

• Overall, Latinx, AAPI, and Indigenous voter turnout is significantly less than that of Blacks; and

• In addition to The New American Majority support for the Biden-Harris ticket, it also performed better among Whites than did Hillary Clinton in 2016;

Thus, it is imperative that Democrats carefully reflect on the aforementioned issues and aggressively activate all elements of their voting base, if they hope to remain in power.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Dr. Walter C. Farrell, Jr., PhD, MSPH, is a Fellow of the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado-Boulder and has written widely on vouchers, charter schools, and public school privatization. He has served as Professor of Social Work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and as Professor of Educational Policy and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Contact Dr. Farrell and BC.