Abrams responded to that
2018 loss by founding Fair Fight 2020, which funds and
trains voter protection teams in 20 states.
This week, Democrats Rev.
Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won their senatorial runoff
races in Georgia in contests that saw huge turnout in areas
Abrams’ Fair fight 2020 targeted – a turnout that was quite
unusual in a runoff election in the Peach State.
Abrams is also the founder
of the New Georgia Project, a voter registration group that
reaches out to new voters in a variety of locations such as
churches and college campuses.
The result of those
efforts was a Georgia presidential election in which
Democrat Joe Biden won what has been previously recognized
as a solid red state. No Democratic presidential candidate
had won in Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992. Biden
garnered more than a half million more votes than Hillary
Clinton received four years ago.
Abrams recognized the
state’s growing population and changing demographics. Her
narrow loss also led her to write a book about voter
suppression and produce an Amazon documentary, “All In: The
Fight for Democracy.” She passed on the chance to run for
U.S. Senator and used her influence to fight the voter
suppression regulations that had been put in place by then
Secretary of State Brian Kemp. She helped register, by some
estimates, more than 800,000 new voters for the 2020
election cycle.
Abrams, one of Robert and
Carolyn Abrams’ six children, was born in Madison, Wisconsin
and raised in Gulfport, Mississippi. The family eventually
moved to Atlanta so that he parents could pursue graduate
degrees at Emory University.
Her political career
started early, in high school, when she was hired as a
speechwriter for a congressional campaign.
Abrams earned a bachelor’s
degree from Spelman College in interdisciplinary studies
while working in the youth services department of the office
of Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson. She studied public policy
at the University of Texas, earning a master’s degree and
then a law degree from Yale Law School in 1999.
In 2002, Abrams was named
deputy city attorney for the City of Atlanta and, in 2006,
made her first run for elected office winning a seat in the
Georgia House of Representatives for the 89th
district. In 2010 the Democratic caucus elected her minority
leader.
During her time in the
House, Abrams was instrumental in saving the HOPE
Scholarship program, which provides scholarships to Georgia
students, stopping the largest tax increase in Georgia
history, according to one national magazine. She also worked
on criminal justice reform that reduced prison costs without
increasing crime and helped put together the state’s largest
ever public transportation funding package.
She resigned her seat in
2017 to start her campaign for governor. Abrams won the
Democratic Party nominating contest becoming the first black
woman to become a major party’s candidate for governor in
the U.S. Her Republican opponent was Brian Kemp, then the
Secretary of State. Between 2012 and 2018, Kemp’s office had
cancelled over 1.4 million voter registrations, most of them
after Kemp had stated his intention to seek the governor’s
office.
Then, a month before the
general election, more than 53,000 voter registration
applications were put on hold, of whom more than 75 percent
were minorities.
Abrams lost the race to
Kemp, who had also overseen the election in his official
capacity as Secretary of State but she declined to pursue
the matter through legal action. Her high profile campaigned
has made her a prominent figure nationally. She was selected
by Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer to give the rebuttal
to the State of the Union address in January 2019; she
decided not to run for the Senate and then founded Fair
Fight 2020.
“I had two messages,” she
said during an interview with CNN late last year. “One,
voter suppression is real and we have to have a plan to
fight back. Two, Georgia is real. You’ve got to have a plan
to fight there. We were privileged to know that by the time
Joe Biden won the nomination, he had Georgia on his mind.”
During the November 3
general election, incumbent Republican Sen. David Perdue
failed to hold on to his early majority against Ossoff.
Perdue finished with 49.8 percent of the vote.
In the special election,
Warnock finished with 32.9 percent of the vote and his two
Republican opponents, Senator Kelly Loeffler and Doug
Collins, with 25.9 and 20 percent respectively. Warnock,
pastor of the famed Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta –
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s former church faced Loeffler in
the January runoff.
The Senate Democrats will
now have 50 total in their caucus and effectively hold the
majority position with incoming Vice President Kamala Harris
(who will also serve as president of the Senate) present to
break ties.
All of which was made
possible by Stacey Abrams … kingmaker.
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