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Politics
I Was Wrong About Stacey Abrams
She is more strategic than I realized.
I don’t normally follow the politics in other states but when Stacey Abrams ran for Governor in Georgia in 2018, I sat up and took notice.
A Black woman running for governor against a White man in a southern state.
This was going to be an exciting matchup. And it was. Her opponent, the Secretary of State of Georgia, Brian Kemp, ran a classic dirty tricks campaign against her. But what ultimately led to her defeat was the wholesale cancellation of voter registrations during 2016 and 2017. As Secretary of State, Kemp was in charge of elections and voter registration. Over half a million registrations were cancelled, most of them minority voters.
Kemp “won” by 50,000 votes. Meaning he stole the election.
But Ms. Abrams won in the court of public opinion. As the saying goes, the world was her oyster. She gave the Democratic response to Trump’s 2019 SOTU. She was invited to run for the Senate in 2020. There was even talk of her running for president in 2020.
She passed on all suggestions of political office in favor of working on voter suppression issues in Georgia and elsewhere under the auspices of Fair Fight Action, an organization that she founded for that…