Georgia flipped blue for the first time in almost 30 years, in no small part due to Abrams’ years of voter-advocacy work. “I’m kind of relentless,” she says.
Left: MARIETTA, GA - NOVEMBER 15: Democratic U.S. Senate candidates Jon Ossoff (R) and Raphael Warnock (L) of Georgia wave to supporters during a rally on November 15, 2020, in Marietta, Georgia. Ossoff and Warnock face incumbent U.S. Sens. David Purdue (R-GA) and Kelly Loeffler (R-GA), respectively, in a runoff election on January 5.
In 2010, Georgia Democrats hadn’t won a race for statewide office in four years or a presidential contest since 1992. But where others saw a lost cause, Abrams, then the newly elected minority leader in Georgia’s House of Representatives, saw potential in the vast numbers of unengaged voters. She put together a 21-slide Power-Point plotting how Democrats could reclaim power. Methodically, over the course of the next decade, she worked to implement that blueprint, helping to register and educate — and reregister, when they were purged from the voter rolls by then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp — hundreds of thousands of voters in Georgia. A year ago, Fair Fight, the voting-rights organization Abrams founded, filed an emergency motion in court that stopped some 22,000 more voters from being purged. It’s just one example of her determination paying dividends: Biden won the state by 12,670 votes in 2020. “I’m nothing special,” Abrams tells me. “I just — I’m kind of relentless.” 
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