Stacey Abrams Spotlight

Tempe Quinton, Assistant Copy Editor|November 20, 2020

As we all know the presidential elections were about 2 weeks ago, and all eyes were on Georgia as it was one of the few states that held the most importance in this election. This is because in the final stages of the presidential election, candidates had to win Pennsylvania or win two of the following four states: Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada, and Georgia. Biden was able to flip Georgia because of the instrumental role Stacey Abrams played in helping to increase voter turnout.

Stacey Abrams is a politician, a lawyer, an activist, an author, an entrepreneur, and a CEO of a nonprofit. She served in the Georgia House of Representatives and was the House Minority Leader for the Georgia General Assembly from 2011 to 2017. She then left to make history as the first African-American woman gubernatorial nominee when she ran in the 2018 governor’s election. Stacey Abrams lost the governor’s election, but that same year, she founded Fair Fight. Her organization was founded in order to help in the fight against voter suppression in the U.S, but specifically Georgia and Texas. After her loss, Abrams decided to go to the courts in order to challenge the dysfunctional voting system in Georgia which allowed for voter suppression to happen. Over the past two years, Stacey Abrams has been tirelessly working to change the voter demographic of Georgia and to make sure that every vote gets counted.

The last time that Georgia was a blue state was in 1992, when the state voted in favor of the democratic candidate, Bill Clinton. Almost three decades later, Georgia has flipped and turned blue for this year’s presidential election mainly because of the work that Stacey Abrams has done. In an interview with Stephen Colbert, Stacey Abrams talks about how she started to build an infrastructure that “focused on registration, on recruiting and training staff, on making certain that we were in every single county.” Additionally, Abrams’ strategy included focusing on the Democratic party’s outreach to young voters, especially voters of color. All of these combined efforts ultimately helped Biden win Georgia. Abrams’ get out the vote efforts have also proven effective as Georgia has two state senate races that are now in a run-off election.

Here’s the interview with Stephen Colbert: