Yahoo Finance Transcendent 12: LeBron James
Los Angeles Lakers superstar LeBron James won his fourth championship with a third different team inside the NBA’s Walt Disney World bubble during the COVID-19 pandemic, but his greatest achievement this year may have been helping to swing the 2020 presidential election.
His “More Than A Vote” campaign, which enlisted more than 50 athletes and celebrities to help combat voter suppression in Black communities, recruited 40,000 poll workers nationwide and played an instrumental role in transforming 23 of the NBA’s 29 home arenas into voting sites. Per USA Today, roughly 300,000 people voted at 40 professional sports arenas across the U.S.
Among them was State Farm Arena in Atlanta, where an estimated 40,000 people cast early votes — or nearly four time president-elect Joe Biden’s margin of victory. Black voters accounted for a similar percentage of the nation’s electorate in 2020 as they did in 2016, but cities like Atlanta, Detroit and Milwaukee — target demographics for James’ campaign — turned out record numbers, an overwhelming factor in Biden’s ability to swing three key states.
And “More Than A Vote” is far from done. James began his title defense by vowing to continue the work in Georgia, where a pair of runoffs will decide who has the Senate majority in January.
