Opinion by Jennifer Rubin Columnist
Dec. 13, 2020 at 7:45 a.m. EST
Stacey Abrams, more than any single Democrat, showed her party that winning in a red state does not require finding the right candidate to fit the electorate. It requires doing the hard work of changing the electorate so the right Democratic candidate can win.
Abrams, who narrowly lost Georgia’s gubernatorial race in 2018 amid replete evidence of voter suppression, wrote in a post on Friday that “the transformation to the now-Georgia of Democratic presidential victories and competitive Senate races did not happen overnight.” It did not even start in 2018. It began in 2014 when she founded the New Georgia Project and, along with other civil rights groups, began a massive effort that “added hundreds of thousands of Georgians of color to the voter rolls and at the polls.”
She lost in 2018, but she kept going. “Together, Democratic and progressive Georgians focused on the successes revealed in 2018 and redoubled our commitment to dismantling the barriers of voter suppression,” she explained. “We raised even more funds, reengaged allies, and filed new lawsuits to mitigate the suppressive techniques that had been on obvious display in Georgia since 2010. I founded Fair Fight to energize, engage, and mobilize voters through advocacy and organizing. In partnership with voter defenders in Georgia and across the country, elections changed in 2020.”
The effort included litigation against voter suppression techniques, grass-roots organization, training for outreach volunteers and efforts to overcome hurdles ranging from Republicans’ voter roll purges to covid-19. It took six years for the New Georgia Project and its progeny to put together the multiracial coalition that produced President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential race. But Biden was not the only winner, as Abrams wrote:
In a tough down-ballot year for Democrats, Georgia was the only state in the country in which Democrats picked up seats in both chambers of our state legislature. In addition to re-electing heavily targeted Lucy McBath, Georgia earned the only Democratic Congressional pickup in the country in which district lines had not changed, with Carolyn Bourdeaux being elected to represent Gwinnett and Forsyth counties. We won district attorney races in some of our largest counties and just elected the first Latina District Attorney in Georgia’s history.
The “fast take” on the election was that suburban Whites delivered Georgia for Biden. They were part of the winning coalition, but just as critically, newly diverse suburbs lifted Biden to victory. (“[A]ccording to a post-election analysis by TargetSmart, turnout among black voters increased by about 20%; Hispanic voter participation soared by 72%; Asian-American turnout nearly doubled when compared to the 2016 election; and turnout among voters under the age of 30 also increased sharply, growing from about 14% of ballots cast to about 16%.”)
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/13/distinguished-pol-week-she-showed-democrats-how-win/
