Stacey Abrams garners praise from Democrats on the verge of achieving a long-held dream: Flipping Georgia

By Vanessa Williams and Reis Thebault
11/6/2020, 8:52:00 p.m.

Stacey Abrams did not deny her anger when Republican Brian Kemp was declared the winner of the Georgia governor’s race two years ago, after a bitter contest marred by widespread irregularities and allegations of voter suppression.

Instead, she channeled that anger into the work she had started years before to organize and mobilize an army of voters to break the Republican Party’s lock on state politics and create a government that looked more like the new Georgia.

That army, anchored in metro Atlanta and in smaller pockets of predominantly Black cities and counties, helped to push former vice president Joe Biden several thousand votes ahead of President Trump in the state this week. Now Democrats are on the verge of achieving a long-held dream: flipping Georgia, which hasn’t voted for a presidential nominee of that party since 1992.

That optimism is giving the party further hope that its Senate candidates have a fighting chance in two runoff elections expected to unfold in January.

Abrams, 46, who was the first Black woman to win a major-party gubernatorial nomination, was roundly applauded by Democratic political leaders and activists on social media and elsewhere Friday after Biden overtook Trump in ballots counted in Georgia. The state is continuing to tally overseas, provisional and military ballots and plans to conduct a recount.

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