Stacey Abrams is confident Georgia will remain blue
After years of close calls, red herrings, and electoral margins that grew closer and closer, Democrats won Georgia in this year’s presidential election for the first time since 1992.
The win broke the Republican lock on Southern states in the Electoral College, but it also vindicated Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Democrat and former state House Minority Leader who has become synonymous with the party’s attempts to win statewide. Abrams, who has helped start organizations to register new voters and combat voter suppression, said the win was a personal relief — a political bounceback after she narrowly lost her race for governor in 2018.
In an interview with the New York Times, she outlined how she believes Presidentelect Joe Biden won and how liberal groups in other Southern states can replicate Georgia’s path. She also weighed in on her future political plans.
These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Q: Georgia turns blue after all these decades of work. How did you feel when that became clear? Was it vindication? Was it relief? What was the emotion?
A: I think it was a combination of relief and excitement about what this means. But also a healthy dose of realism — we’ve got this done, but it was narrowly achieved, which means more work remains to be done.
I wouldn’t say vindication in the sense that there was some sort of chest beating, but I am excited about how it proves the model of building this tapestry of leaders across racial and geographic lines. I’ve been privileged to be part of building the resources and the infrastructure and the narratives, that help pull together different communities, all of us working toward the same goal. Over the course of a decade, and with resources, that brought success to fruition.
Q: What was different about the electorate in the coalition this time? What happened in 2020 that in 2018 or 2016 wasn’t able to get done?
A: Well, I think there’s two pieces to this. One is that demographic changes are ongoing, and every cycle is an opportunity to not only register them but to engage them. So you build the muscle memory of voting, you build the capacity to engage, because people have more information and have a deeper sense of their capacity and their potential as voters.
I would draw a distinction between 2016 and 2020, using 2018 as the marker, because what happened, also, was that we were able to remove remarkable restrictions to voter access.
Voter suppression was very much instrumental in shaping turnout numbers in 2018, and 2016. In 2018, we did much deeper investment in actual voter turnout, but we still ran into the buzz saw of voter purges, exact match closures, old machines that were inaccurately and disparately deployed, broken machines, and then super high rejection rates, comparatively speaking, of Black and brown voters in the absentee or provisional ballots space.
So what we were able to identify — in the concrete ways in 2018 — we were able then to mitigate heading into 2020.
And so I think you see the combination of increased voter engagement through another 800,000 people being registered and staying on the rolls through November 2018 through this election. But you also had the removal and mitigation of a number of barriers that blocked access to the polls.
Q: What were those early years like? Were you believed when you would say that Georgia could be a Democratic state?
A: I became minority leader in November 2010, two weeks after the worst loss suffered by Democrats in Georgia history. We lost every statewide office. We lost the Senate to a supermajority. We lost more members of the state House. And we were heading into a redistricting year where Republicans drew themselves, on paper, 124 seats out of 180.
I traveled around the country raising money for House races and getting people to invest was nearly impossible, people didn’t see the validity of a Georgia victory. They pointed to the 2008 election when the Obama campaign determined that we weren’t viable yet, so there was no investment. In 2012, I couldn’t leverage that there was going to be investment from the campaign as a hook for getting donors to come in. So it was a really small cadre of donors, largely philanthropists that I’d taken myself to meet. I’d say, “I know you don’t believe Georgia is real, but let me tell you what it can look like.”
Each cycle, I would take that same deck and update it and say, “Here’s where we were. And here’s where we going. And while this thing feels incremental, let me tell you what’s different now.”
Q: Looking ahead, how do Democrats hold together the coalition that we saw in November without Donald Trump on the ballot? Obviously the Senate runoffs are the first step.
A: This coalition existed in 2018 in my election. This is a coalition that we’ve been building together for the last decade through groups like Asian American advocacy funds, Black Lives Matter, Coalition for People’s Agenda, Mi Gente, Southerners on New Ground. So this is a group that didn’t just come together out of convenience. We’ve been working together in coalition and that’s why I think we can sustain it.
Q: Are you going to run for governor in 2022?
A: I am focused on Jan. 5, and ensuring that we can send Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to the United States Senate.