She may have lost the governorship….
But her efforts sure proved fruitful for a Democratic Presidency ….
Biden is ahead in the Southern state by over 10,000 votes as I do this post….
One hopes she is rewarded by Democrats and Joe Biden….
She done good….
As Joe Biden opened a narrow lead in Georgia on Thursday, Democrats across the country couldn’t quite believe it was happening.
But Stacey Abrams and a network of activists had been planning for the moment for nearly a decade.
The people leading the effort to flip the state — a group composed of Black female elected officials, voting rights advocates and community organizers — understood why Democrats had often fallen short in the South the past decade. Topping the list of reasons: the region’s long-running conservative bent, voter suppression tactics by the right and the failure by Democrats to mount a sustained voter outreach program.
But something changed in 2018. Abrams’ razor-thin loss in Georgia’s gubernatorial election made clear to her and other liberals in the state that demographic shifts in the suburbs had reached a tipping point. Their argument to the national party was simple: Democrats could win more races by expanding their coalition to include disengaged voters of color, as opposed to continuing the focus on persuading undecided, moderate, often white voters.
Abrams had come close with the strategy: Her campaign and its allies registered more than 200,000 new voters in the run-up to the 2018 election. When Fair Fight and the New Georgia Project, two organizations founded by Abrams, tried again this year, they quadrupled their gains, registering more than 800,000 new voters.
This vast new coalition of first-time voters, many young and of color, put Joe Biden over the top in the state by more than 7,000 votes as of Saturday….
image…Slate…March 2020….Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Chuck Kennedy—Pool/Getty Images and Jessica McGowan/Getty Images