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FORSYTH, Georgia – Stacey Abrams, the Georgian Democratic government candidate who hopes to make history next month, began her state-wide bus tour on Monday with a vow.
Abrams has gathered a host of animated supporters at the St. James Baptist Church, thus fulfilling the dream of a member of the city council who had repeatedly asked him to make a stopover in this small town often ignored by candidates who ran for senior positions in Georgia.
John Howard, whose efforts to bring Abrams to visit Forsyth was A recent Washington Post column said before presenting it, "If I do nothing else, it's the only thing I'll ever forget." Several people congratulated him before and after the event .
It's just that kind of place, away from the busy roads and brilliant towers of Atlanta, on which Abrams relies to help her become the first black governor in US history. Monday also marked the first day of early voting in Georgia, where Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp are tied in the polls. Abrams told the assembled people that she needed them to vote and then for others to vote.
Abrams quotes an excerpt from the Bible: "Faith without works is dead. I trust all of you, but I need you all to work. We have to volunteer every day … I need you to make phone calls, knock on doors. I need you to reach out to those you love and those who make you angry. "
Abrams, a 44-year-old former Democratic leader of Georgia, led the campaign by registering and mobilizing tens of thousands of new voters, focusing on people of color and youth, low-voter turnout groups, and virtually no voters. mid-term elections.
Kemp, the Georgian secretary of state, was recently a victim of her election campaign. The Associated Press reported that the registration of 53,000 Georgians on the electoral lists had been frozen because the information on their applications did not exactly match the information in the motor vehicle and social security registers. Some inconsistencies are as simple as a deleted hyphen in a name or number transposed into an address. Kemp has also been criticized for aggressively serving Georgia's electoral roll, having removed more than 1.4 million names since 2012.
Kemp, who defended the practices needed to eliminate the fraud, fought back against Abrams. He blamed the voter education group that she created several years ago, the New Georgia Project, for submitting problematic registration requests. He added that Abrams was using this issue to annoy his supporters, noting that people on the waiting list could still vote if they could prove their identity during the polls.
Kemp spent Monday in southern Georgia assessing the damage caused by Hurricane Michael and meeting with state and federal officials about the recovery efforts after a storm, announced his campaign spokesman Ryan Mahoney.
Abrams said Kemp's "was given a mission to create voter suppression architecture, but we will not let it win." When Kemp decided to run for the governorship, Abrams said he should have left his secretary position. as it has done since its seat in the legislature.
She promised to "do everything in her power to get the 53,000 voters whose status is outstanding to go to the polls and try to vote. In the meantime, she told the audience, "I need you to find all 53,000 additional votes just in case. This election concerns history. We are talking about our votes and our votes because that is our time. "
Many people in the church, the first of half a dozen stops, were older and most were women. The audience was predominantly black, but whites wearing t-shirts, caps and campaign buttons were not hard to spot.
Black women were the largest contingent of Abrams supporters at most events. Evelyn Mann, who repeatedly shouted "We love you!" In Abrams' church address, later said she was preparing to bring people together to take them to an advance polling site. Lois Allen, a retired teacher, said that she was also going to vote after the rally, and then "on the street to solicit!
According to Allen, she is particularly drawn to Abrams' promise to expand Medicaid's expansion into Georgia, where hundreds of thousands of residents do not have access to health care. Many rural hospitals have closed or are on the verge of collapse.
At a public meeting at Fort Valley State University, Abrams' proposal to increase funding for public education attracted the attention of Joseph Cornick, a senior and a political scientist. He was also interested in Abrams' criminal justice plan, including community policing and the reduction of the prison population.
Cornick said the group of political science students at the school had organized "dormitories" by calling students to register before the October 9th deadline. Now, students plan to visit an early voting site next week.
A new poll by the Atlanta Journal Constitution and Atlanta Channel 2 revealed that the race was a dead end statistic. Kemp received support from 47.7% of likely voters, compared with 46.3% for Abrams. The 1,232 survey has a margin of error of 2.8 percentage points.
"We have to surrender because if we do, we will win this election," Abrams told the public at several stops on Monday. "It's not a mile fight, it's a thumbs fight, and we're close to the goal."
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