Kamala Harris volunteer training over the weekend packs Tallahassee nightclub

The pulsating beat of Ram Jam's "Black Betty" penetrated the hall Sunday as 73-year-old Dallas Williams – dressed in the royal purple and old gold of the historic Black Omega Psi Phi fraternity – waited to register for training as a Kamala Harris for president volunteer at a Tallahassee nightclub.

“I just want to keep Donald Trump out of the White House,” said Williams, a retired Tallahassee State College psychology professor, as he waited for the training to begin. “He has thirty-four felony convictions. If you can’t work anywhere in the United States with that record, then he should not be able to work at the White House.”

Williams was among the hundreds of people who attended a training session this weekend, less than three months before Election Day.

While the national Democratic Party watches from afar, contributing neither money nor campaign appearances by Vice President Harris and running mate Tim Walz here, Florida Democrats believe they have the top-of-the-ticket candidate and formula to make the Sunshine State an electoral battleground once again.

The formula to a November victory is to organize volunteers, have them engage potential voters, and then turn out the vote.

Harris' candidacy, historians and voting experts say, created an explosion of energy, excitement and interest in the election, unlike any in recent memory.

Within hours of her elevation, a 2½ million-member network of alumni from historic Black sororities and fraternities like Harris's Alpha Kappa Alpha and William's Omega Psi organized on her behalf, helping raise $1.5 million.

The grassroots response to Harris led famed voting advocate and retired Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho to say, “Not Bill Clinton, not Barack Obama. I have never seen anything like this.”

Sunday, volunteers who showed up to be trained filled The Moon nightclub’s parking lot a half hour before the session was scheduled to begin. Police directed cars to an overflow lot at a nearby shopping plaza.

While Republicans hold a registration advantage of 1 million voters over Democrats, there are another 3.9 million voters not registered with either party.

These voters, according to Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried, broke for Democrats by a two-thirds margin in elections this past year that flipped an Orlando-area Florida House seat and the Jacksonville mayor’s office into the Democratic column.

This led Democrats to conclude if they grow the vote – by increased turnout – they can neutralize the GOP voter registration advantage.

During the next six weeks, 18,000 Harris volunteers will chase after voters with text messages, postcards, emails, flyers, phone calls, and door knocking.

The state party says it will equip the volunteers with lists of people to contact, phone apps that identify who is registered to vote, how they vote, and if they have voted yet. The corps of volunteers will have neighborhood-specific digital maps for canvassing, and scripts to use to begin the conversation when someone answers the door.

In the keynote speech to the volunteers, state Sen. Rosalind Osgood, a Tamarac Democrat, stressed the effectiveness of face-to-face discussions with neighbors, family and friends about the importance of voting, and to remind them to check their voter registration.

She compared voter registration and going door-to-door to remind people to vote to Harriet Tubman’s work guiding runaway slaves along the underground railroad.

“She went back, time and time again and brought others out,” Osgood said. “So Democrats, I need you to act like a Democrat this election season like never before. I need you to register voters. I need you to talk about voting. I need you to stand on Democratic principles unapologetically, until we get every single person to vote.”

Republican Party of Florida chair Evan Power dismissed Sunday's training as Florida Democrats singing the same old song; Ram Jam recorded Black Betty in 1977.

“It’s the same rhetoric we’ve heard time and time again from the Florida Dems. Somehow, this is the year, they are going to challenge us here in Florida,” said Power, who pivoted to the GOP’s million-voter advantage. “While Democrats talk, we deliver verifiable numbers.”

James Call is a member of the USA TODAY NETWORK-Florida Capital Bureau. He can be reached at jcall@tallahassee.com and is on X as @CallTallahassee.

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Kamala Harris volunteers pack training session in Tallahassee