Democrats have Stacey Abrams to thank for hundreds of thousands of new voters

One woman helped expand the electorate so much that the southern state turned blue for the first time in almost half a century, and her actions show what's possible elsewhere

When it became likely on Wednesday that Georgia – a state that has voted for conservative Republicans since 1972 – had voted for president-elect Joe Biden, the media and local leaders rushed to give credit to one person: Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams. 

In 2018, she had nearly won the race for governor of Georgia, and years of tireless organising now seems to have finally paid off. She’s the visionary, organiser, and elected official who believed in the early 2010s that Georgia could vote Democrat when others thought it wasn’t possible. Her perseverance in the face of doubt and derision is the story of many a black woman not only in politics and movement work, but in daily life in the United States.

The daughter of working-class Black parents, a graduate of arts institution Spelman College and Yale Law School, Abrams is a self-described “nerd” whose interest in numbers led her to focus on the demographic change she saw happening in Georgia. After winning the election to the Georgia State Legislature in the early 2000s and then becoming house minority leader for the Democrats in 2013, Abrams started the New Georgia Project. This non-partisan effort focused on the huge number of Georgians who are eligible to vote but had not registered to exercise their right. 

The Project helped more than 100,000 people get registered in its early days and has since grown those numbers along with other partner organisations like Mijente, which organises Latinx and Chicano communities, and Asian Americans Advancing for Justice Atlanta and many more like it.

In 2014, the Democratic nominees for governor of Georgia, state senator Jason Carter and US Senate Michelle Nunn both fell short in their statewide races by about 200,000 votes. Stacey Abrams who planned to run for governor hoped to take the work she had started along with other grassroots organisers to bear in a 2018 gubernatorial race. 

From the beginning, Stacey Abrams’ run for governor was not easy. Not only did many question her candidacy, but her tactics for how the votes needed to win in Georgia as a Democrat. Abrams’ belief in electorate expansion through engaging less-frequent voters and registering black and other voters of colour, as well as white progressives in a broad multi-racial progressive coalition, was not a popular theory for change in Democratic circles. Reaching out to existing active Democratic voters, including white moderate suburban voters, independents and Republicans was considered the only “realistic” way in to win as a Southern Democrat even though it wasn’t always successful. Abrams’ opponent in the gubernatorial primary Stacey Evans, advocated for this traditional approach. Despite a vicious primary, Stacey Abrams prevailed and used her playbook to build a gubernatorial campaign that expanded the electorate by building out the multiracial coalition of a new Georgia that Abrams had pictured years earlier.

Unfortunately for Abrams and Georgia, her opponent was Republican secretary of state Brian Kemp, which meant that he was both the referee of the match as well as one of the contestants. He declined to recuse himself and proceeded to purge hundreds of thousands of voters from the voting rolls while under-investing in election infrastructure in Democratic precincts. This likely robbed Abrams of crucial votes, but she was still vindicated in her race. She not only expanded the electorate of black and other voters of color but gained the highest percentage of the state’s white Democratic voters in a generation with a progressive message and campaign.

What Abrams did next was remarkable. She never conceded the election (for which she got a lot of flack) but almost instantly got back to work organising alongside those she’d worked with in years prior instead of running for the US Senate, as many encouraged her to do. 

After the governor’s election in Georgia, everyone knew about Stacey Abrams, and she was chosen to give the official Democratic response to Donald Trump’s 2019 State of the Union speech – the first black woman to do so. In that speech, Abrams beautifully tied the story of her working-class black family – the types of voters who’ve long been the base of the Democratic Party – to that of the American story. 

She also used her newfound visibility to raise money for her new organisation called Fair Fight Georgia that would encourage voter participation and fight voter suppression. Along with other partner organisations she helped register more than 800,000 voters in the last two years, completely changing the face of Georgia politics in the most consequential election in modern American times

Despite her 2018 election setback, Abrams’ perseverance along with other black and brown organisers and leaders to register, organise and grow an electorate turned Georgia Democratic blue on this year’s election map, and it should serve as a model for what’s possible in other states building a progressive coalition in the face of divisive, xenophobic, racist opposition.