Make Georgia Democratic. Georgia Is Blue

What the Democratic Party Can Learn From Stacey Abrams’ Success in Georgia

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.”