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ATLANTA (AP) – Stacey Abrams has spent years working to convince those in political power that Georgia is a true bipartisan battleground, a Deep South state where the left could compete if it organized black voters, other voters sporadically and stopped apologizing for being Democrats.
She was right.
President-elect Joe Biden is set to become the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state in nearly three decades. Both seats in the state’s US Senate are heading for a run-off after Democratic candidates throw up strong challenges to incumbent Republican officials, and the outcome is likely to determine which party controls the chamber.
Abrams, the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate who may have become the country’s leading voice on voting rights, is credited with leading the way. She raised millions of dollars to organize and register hundreds of thousands of voters and used her notoriety to keep the party focused on the state.
“There’s a lot of work to be done in this area, but Stacey is truly the architect of what has been built in Georgia,” said Dubose Porter, former Georgia Democratic Party chairman and Abrams mentor.
This week’s election is the culmination of a political change that has been going on for decades. The GOP’s advantage has slowly eroded as Atlanta and its surrounding suburbs experience explosive population growth.
Abrams said she saw that moment coming in many election cycles.
“Georgia has had potential for years,” she said in an interview shortly before the election. “It didn’t just start this cycle. This work has been underway for almost a decade, and I am just proud to see it come to fruition and finally see it receive the level of investment it deserves.
This success is fueling speculation about its future prospects. Some of her cheerleaders see her as chairman of the Democratic National Committee or holding a prominent position in the Biden administration. Those close to Abrams suggest his next most likely move is a rematch with Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in 2022.
She ended her 2018 campaign without explicitly conceding defeat to Kemp. She alleged the systemic suppression of voters by state election officials, including Kemp, who was then Georgia’s secretary of state overseeing her fight against Abrams.
Kemp has firmly denied any wrongdoing, but the dispute resulted in a sharper focus on the state’s electoral system and intensified Democrats’ attention to voter registration, education and turnout. After his loss, Abrams formed Fair Fight to raise funds to organize voters.
The 2018 campaign marked a notable change in the overall approach of Georgia Democrats.
In 2014, when Porter first urged the National Party to have his state funded as an emerging battleground, Democrats nominated candidates with a centrist identity. Jason Carter, grandson of former governor and former president Jimmy Carter, challenged an incumbent Republican governor. Michelle Nunn, daughter of former Senator Sam Nunn, was nominated for an open Senate seat.
It was a play for white voters who had drifted into Republicans in the decades since Elder Carter and Elder Nunn were dominant political figures in Georgia. This failed miserably, with Republicans winning by the same wide margins they had previously achieved to take complete control of Georgia state and federal offices.
Amid the fallout, Abrams asserted herself. Democrats, she said, would not bridge a divide measured by the hundreds of thousands by changing the minds of eternal white voters. They would do so by reshaping the electorate, by exciting the expanding universe of potentially Democratic voters: younger white Georgians; whites from beyond Georgia; Black voters who vote sporadically; Black voters from other regions in Georgia; and a growing Latin American and Asian population.
“Stacey had the vision to reach out to new voters, register them, talk to them – and then give them a reason to vote,” Porter said.
Glynda Carr, chief executive officer of Higher Heights, an organization focused on electing black women, said Democratic success in Georgia was the result of work led by black female organizers whose efforts were impactful but vastly underprivileged. previously funded.
“Change doesn’t happen overnight,” Carr said. “We are ready to dig deeper and invest more in the political possibilities of black women’s leadership.”
In a sign of Abrams’ growing stature, she is becoming a frequent target of Republican attacks.
As GOP Senator Kelly Loeffler and US Representative Doug Collins fought for a second round of the Senate, each grappled with the other for previous associations with Abrams. And when Republicans gathered at GOP headquarters on Friday to falsely insist Democrats were stealing President Donald Trump’s election, Abrams’ name was invoked.
“We’re going to fight,” yelled Vernon Jones, a black state lawmaker who supported the president’s re-election. “We will face Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Fair Fight, Stacey Abrams and all of them.”
Trump himself has been an accelerator of Georgia’s change, pushing some white commuters towards Democrats.
In 2018, even as Abrams lost, Democrat Lucy McBath won a congressional seat in the Atlanta area once occupied by Republican Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House. McBath was re-elected on Tuesday. Democrat Carolyn Bourdeaux toppled the neighboring suburban district of Congress on Tuesday after a narrow loss two years ago.
Notably, whatever damage Trump did to the Republican brand in the suburbs, he maximized GOP participation beyond urban footprints. It remains to be seen whether this spike of no-metro for Republicans or the slide from suburban whites to Democrats can last beyond Trump.
But Democrats like Celeste Hackett, a 44-year-old Atlanta resident of Ohio, see the rest of their coalition as a new and hardening baseline.
“We’ve been coming for 10 years now,” Hackett said on Saturday, as she joined hundreds of others celebrating Biden’s victory in Freedom Park in Atlanta, near the Carter Presidential Library. “Stacey was the signal that this could happen. Well, it happened. And we’re going to make it happen again in January.
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Stafford reported from Detroit.
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