Keir Starmer could learn a lot from Stacey Abrams

Labour should have Georgia on its mind when canvassing for votes ahead of the next election

Stacey Abrams mobilised the democratic vote in Georgia by engaging disenfranchised voters (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

Even with America dealing with the after effects of an armed insurrection by gun toting Maga yahoos who overran the US Congress, Stacey Abrams is everywhere.

Vogue magazine said she’s already the most influential woman of 2021, and she’s made the sports pages through the efforts of a meat-headed (former) coach of the University of Tennessee Chatanooga American football team. His spectacularly nasty, mean-spirited tweet aimed at her got him fired.

But her biggest splash has been on the news pages. It’s all down to the politician and voting rights activist’s wildly successful project aimed at turning the Republican red state of Georgia Democrat blue.

First, it delivered its electoral college votes to Joe Biden. It is the first time a Democrat has carried the state for 28 years. Then it elected two Democratic senators in run offs.

Are you paying attention Keir Starmer? If not, go get a subscription to Vogue, or better still pay attention to any major US news outlet (maybe not Fox) because there’s a lot for you to chew on.

Abrams led voter registration and get out and vote drives that made Georgia a glaring anomaly in the US electoral map. Take a look. You’ll see it as a lonely blue island surrounded by a sea of red.

Her achievement is all the more remarkable given the fondness for Brian Kemp, to whom she narrowly lost the governor’s race a couple of years back, who was accused of voter suppression when he was serving as Georgia’s secretary of state.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Georgia has removed around 1.4 million people from voting rolls since 2012, with low-income and minority Georgians most likely to have been removed. When they vote, guess which party is more likely to get the nod? (Clue: it’s not the Republicans.)

More than 50,000 registrations were also held up, thanks to a ridiculous state law requiring the name on the application to exactly match the name on the applicant’s government ID. Even a missing hyphen can get you stuck in the mud.

It should be said that Kemp has pushed back against the argument that these measures are aimed at suppressing votes. It’s also fair to say that he’s recently been the recipient of a series of brickbats from a Donald Trump (who once endorsed him) infuriated by the state’s certification of the results of the 2020 US General Election. Kemp’s successor as secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, suffered worse still. Trump allegedly threatened him with prosecution after he refused to “find” him the votes he needed. In standing up to the president and his thuggish supporters, Raffensperger helped to prove that the phrase “principled Republican” is not an oxymoron.

But it’s still considerably harder to vote in the Peach State than it is in, say, California.

Abrams played a leading role in the Democrats overcoming that and the other challenges it faces in a still conservative-leaning part of America.

Georgia was not supposed to be the state that delivered the Senate, which is now tied 50-50 but will be under Democratic control thanks to vice president-elect Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote.

They had more promising targets. Maine, for example, which was retained by Republican moderate Susan Collins; Montana, where the party had high hopes that popular Democrat governor Steve Bullock could flip what’s normally a deep red state; and the increasingly purple-looking North Carolina among them.

Turning the Senate blue is a tribute to the high-profile Democrat, who is expected to take another crack at Kemp and may win given the baleful influence Trump retains over the Republican party and his penchant for acts of petty spite against those with whom he holds a grudge.

So to Sir Keir. The Tories have been increasingly using the same language adopted by the Republicans when it comes to voting, despite the UK’s Electoral Commission stating in 2019 that there remains no evidence of large-scale electoral fraud.

For the record, there were more than 32 million votes cast in the UK General Election that year, but just 161 cases of fraud reported to the police and only a single conviction.

As in the US, enforcing voter ID in Britain looks very much like a solution in search of a problem that doesn’t exist. But if it can swing you a few constituencies – and it might do that because poorer, and younger, voters who are less likely to have ID are typically more likely to vote Labour – then hey, why not.

Even if Sir Keir doesn’t have that to contend with, he’s still got a mountain to climb in trying to overturn an 80-seat Tory majority combined with upcoming Boundary Commission changes that could deliver another 10 seats to Boris Johnson (or his successor).

If I were him, I’d have one of my staff look up Abrams’ number.

I spoke to outgoing Unison boss Dave Prentis earlier this week, who highlighted his experience of knocking on doors in a poor London estate, when he was told people hadn’t seen someone from Labour in 10 years. In other words? The party needs to up its ground game.

Prentis is keen on a role with Labour after his term of office expires. Perhaps Sir Keir should put Georgia on his mind and see what lessons could be learned from the turnout champion. He could do a lot worse.