Georgia on Her Mind
Can Stacey Abrams Turn the Senate Blue?
In the weeks leading up to election day, the focus was on Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes as the potential fulcrum of victory in a tight race. As anticipated, the Keystone State did indeed put Joe Biden over the top. But in the end, the most consequential state of the 2020 race may turn out to be Georgia, one that most Democrats had written off. And the party largely has one person to thank for that: Stacey Abrams.
The former gubernatorial candidate turned voting rights activist was a pivotal force in pushing Biden to apparent victory in Georgia, albeit by the slimmest of margins—just 14,000 votes or three-tenths of a percentage point—marking the first time since 1992 that the state has voted for a Democrat for president. (The race is so tight that Georgia is conducting a hand recount of the vote but that’s not expected to change the result.) Even more important, Abrams is likely to play a major role in the fight for control of the U.S. Senate: Her get-out-the-vote efforts helped push the state’s two Senate races into a runoff this January and she has already helped raise $6 million to fund campaigns to get the Democrats elected.
“We have seen what is possible when we work hard and when we work together,” Abrams said after the election in a video statement that has already garnered 5.6 million views on Twitter. “We know we can win Georgia. Now let’s get it done, again.”
Key to Abrams’ success has been her recognition of a key shift in the Peach State: Although Georgia has been a quintessentially red state for decades, its tendencies in recent years have been to shade more blue. Barack Obama lost Georgia by eight percentage points in 2012, Hillary Clinton fell short by five percentage points in 2016 and Abrams lost her 2018 bid for governor by just over one percentage point. In that race, Republican candidate Brian Kemp eked out a narrow 50,000-vote victory over Abrams, the Democratic candidate. Abrams maintains that a purging of voter rolls in 2017 by Kemp, then secretary of state, amounted to voter suppression and was the key to her loss.
Abrams responded to the defeat with steely defiance. She refused to concede. She got to work on a registration campaign that helped add more than 800,000 voters, by some estimates, to the rolls in Georgia in time for the election on November 3. Those additional voters appear to have gone decisively for Biden and could be the difference in the upcoming Senate runoffs between Reverend Raphael Warnock,
a Democrat, and Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler and Republican Senator David Perdue and his Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff.
The odds are long that both Democrats will win, and dual victory is what’s needed to tip the Senate to an even 50-50 split (the two Independent senators caucus with the Democrats), with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote. But the fact that it’s now a possibility is a testament to Abrams’ grit and political instincts.
The rise of Georgia as a purple state overall has elevated Abrams’ reputation as a politician to reckon with. She had been short-listed as a vice-president pick and is now being discussed as a potential member of a Biden cabinet, possibly even Attorney General. If Senator Mitch Mcconnell retains his Majority-leader status, a cabinet appointment for Abrams would be in doubt. She’s also rumored to be considering another run for governor in 2022. The only certainty: However the political chips fall in coming weeks, Abrams is likely to be in the mix.
Abrams’ Beginnings
georgia Is abrams’ adopted home. She was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1973 and raised in Mississippi. She graduated magna cum laude from Spelman College. When a boyfriend broke up with her, Abrams channeled her hurt by sitting in the computer lab one evening and mapping out the next 40 years of her life in a spreadsheet. Her goals: become a best-selling author of romantic novels by age 24, a millionaire corporate executive by 30 and mayor of Atlanta by 35.
Abrams, 46, has hewed remarkably close to that path. She went on to get a masters degree in public affairs from the University of Texas at Austin and a law degree from Yale, where she specialized in tax law.
In her third year at Yale, she wrote Rules of Engagement, described on Amazon as “a sizzling, challenging romance,” under the pen name Selena Montgomery, fulfilling a spreadsheet goal. She went on to write eight books under that pen name, the last being Deception in 2009. She also wrote a best-selling political memoir in 2018 and will publish a political thriller, While Justice Sleeps, in May 2021.
Abrams was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 2006 and served for 10 years, representing District 89 in the Atlanta area. She became the first Black woman candidate for governor from a major party when she won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 2018, and had she defeated Kemp, she would have been the first Black woman governor in the nation.
But Kemp, who was secretary of state, prepared the ground for his run for governor. Kemp was an advocate of strict voting laws—georgia law at the time held that voters could be purged from the rolls if they’d been inactive for three years. One night in July 2017, his office sifted through a list of 6.6 million registered voters, eliminating more than 300,000, according to the Atlanta Journal-constitution. After the election, Abrams formed a group to enlist new voters called Fair Fight 2020, which sued the state, claming that more than 120,000 people who hadn’t voted since 2012 or responded to mailings from the state were purged from the rolls.
Fight for Georgia
In 2019, abrams and Fair Fight 2020 released a document called The Abrams Playbook, outlining her plan for delivering Georgia to the Democrats in 2020. She began with a plea to take the state as a serious contender. “When analyzing next year’s political landscape and electoral opportunities, any less than full investment in Georgia would amount to strategic malpractice,” she wrote.
In the eight months after the 2018 election, the manifesto pointed out, nearly 200,000 Georgians, mostly Democrats, had registered to vote, and Abrams anticipated another 300,000, of which 200,000 were African Americans, by the fall of 2020. Many, though, were college-educated white voters in the suburbs who were dissatisfied with Trump.
Abrams urged Democrats not to look just at likely voters but rather to envision the larger potential of Georgia’s electorate. She called for “unprecedented investment” to turn Georgia’s large African American population—30.5 percent of the state— into Democrats. In her gubernatorial
race, her campaign had calculated that swing voters comprised a small portion of the electorate—150,000 voters out of a total of 4 million. By contrast, her Fair Fight initiative identified 1.9 million potential new voters who could be enlisted.
The success of her gubernatorial campaign was a function of investment in recruiting new voters—and the potential to keep doing so for 2020 would pay off, Abrams argued. She advocated improving access to voting to capture the estimated 80,000 votes in 2018 lost through long lines, rejected ballots or people who had just decided not to vote. She pushed for grassroots get-out-the-vote drives. “In Georgia, Democrats can take the presidency, U.S. Senate races, the 6th and 7th Congressional districts and the state house majority,” she wrote.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer pressed her to enter the Senate race, but she preferred to focus on her voter-enlistment drive. Abrams took her message to Democratic leaders. “Back in 2019, I met with every major candidate who was running for president and I had two messages,” she told Politico. “One, voter suppression is real, and it’s one of the reasons that we lost across the country. But two, Georgia is a competitive state, and it would be malpractice to not pay attention. Luckily both messages broke through.”
The surge in voters who turned out on November 3 seemed to help Biden and the Democratic Senate candidates. The rise was due partly to Georgia’s policy of automatically registering people when they apply for driver’s licenses as well as to the voter registration drives of Fair Fight 2020. Even the competition was impressed. “What you did for the citizens of Georgia is a testament to empowerment, organization and leadership,” tweeted former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele. “It is a model for the country.”
Abrams can’t afford to rest. According to the Atlanta Journal-constitution, the conservative Heritage Action plans to spend $1 million on the two Senate races and an anti-abortion group has pledged another $4 million.
Even before the presidential race had been called, Abrams was already campaigning for the runoff elections in January that she had helped make happen. She tweeted, “Georgia, thank you. Together, we have changed the course of our state for the better. But our work is not done.”
“We have seen what is possible when we work hard and when we work together. We know we can win Georgia. Now let’s get it done, again.”