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The Most Valuable Democrat – Georgia’s Kingmaker, Stacey Abrams

By Fletcher Word
Sojourner’s Truth Editor

In 2018, Stacey Abrams lost a in close Georgia gubernatorial contest tainted by allegations of voter suppression. She has been making the Georgia Republican establishment pay dearly ever since.

It’s hard to overestimate just how important Stacey Abrams’ contribution has been and is to the Democratic Party’s efforts to turn a Deep South red state blue in the recent presidential election and how important those continued successful contributions have been in the party’s efforts to attain a majority in the United States Senate.
 

Abrams responded to that 2018 loss by founding Fair Fight 2020, which funds and trains voter protection teams in 20 states.

This week, Democrats Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won their senatorial runoff races in Georgia in contests that saw huge turnout in areas Abrams’ Fair fight 2020 targeted – a turnout that was quite unusual in a runoff election in the Peach State.

Abrams is also the founder of the New Georgia Project, a voter registration group that reaches out to new voters in a variety of locations such as churches and college campuses.

The result of those efforts was a Georgia presidential election in which Democrat Joe Biden won what has been previously recognized as a solid red state. No Democratic presidential candidate had won in Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992. Biden garnered more than a half million more votes than Hillary Clinton received four years ago.

 Abrams recognized the state’s growing population and changing demographics. Her narrow loss also led her to write a book about voter suppression and produce an Amazon documentary, “All In: The Fight for Democracy.” She passed on the chance to run for U.S. Senator and used her influence to fight the voter suppression regulations that had been put in place by then Secretary of State Brian Kemp. She helped register, by some estimates, more than 800,000 new voters for the 2020 election cycle.

Abrams, one of Robert and Carolyn Abrams’ six children, was born in Madison, Wisconsin and raised in Gulfport, Mississippi. The family eventually moved to Atlanta so that he parents could pursue graduate degrees at Emory University.

Her political career started early, in high school, when she was hired as a speechwriter for a congressional campaign.

Abrams earned a bachelor’s degree from Spelman College in interdisciplinary studies while working in the youth services department of the office of Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson. She studied public policy at the University of Texas, earning a master’s degree and then a law degree from Yale Law School in 1999.

In 2002, Abrams was named deputy city attorney for the City of Atlanta and, in 2006, made her first run for elected office winning a seat in the Georgia House of Representatives for the 89th district. In 2010 the Democratic caucus elected her minority leader.

During her time in the House, Abrams was instrumental in saving the HOPE Scholarship program, which provides scholarships to Georgia students, stopping the largest tax increase in Georgia history, according to one national magazine. She also worked on criminal justice reform that reduced prison costs without increasing crime and helped put together the state’s largest ever public transportation funding package.

She resigned her seat in 2017 to start her campaign for governor. Abrams won the Democratic Party nominating contest becoming the first black woman to become a major party’s candidate for governor in the U.S. Her Republican opponent was Brian Kemp, then the Secretary of State. Between 2012 and 2018, Kemp’s office had cancelled over 1.4 million voter registrations, most of them after Kemp had stated his intention to seek the governor’s office.

Then, a month before the general election, more than 53,000 voter registration applications were put on hold, of whom more than 75 percent were minorities.

Abrams lost the race to Kemp, who had also overseen the election in his official capacity as Secretary of State but she declined to pursue the matter through legal action. Her high profile campaigned has made her a prominent figure nationally. She was selected by Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer to give the rebuttal to the State of the Union address in January 2019; she decided not to run for the Senate and then founded Fair Fight 2020.

“I had two messages,” she said during an interview with CNN late last year. “One, voter suppression is real and we have to have a plan to fight back. Two, Georgia is real. You’ve got to have a plan to fight there. We were privileged to know that by the time Joe Biden won the nomination, he had Georgia on his mind.”

During the November 3 general election, incumbent Republican Sen. David Perdue failed to hold on to his early majority against Ossoff. Perdue finished with 49.8 percent of the vote.

In the special election, Warnock finished with 32.9 percent of the vote and his two Republican opponents, Senator Kelly Loeffler and Doug Collins, with 25.9 and 20 percent respectively. Warnock, pastor of the famed Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta – Martin Luther King, Jr.’s former church faced Loeffler in the January runoff.

The Senate Democrats will now have 50 total in their caucus and effectively hold the majority position with incoming Vice President Kamala Harris (who will also serve as president of the Senate) present to break ties.

All of which was made possible by Stacey Abrams … kingmaker.

 
 

 

   
   


Copyright © 2019 by [The Sojourner's Truth]. All rights reserved.
Revised: 01/14/21 12:14:33 -0500.


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