ALL eyes were on Georgia on Tuesday night as votes were being tallied in the runoff election to determine whether Democrats or Republicans would control the Senate. Democratic nominee Raphael Warnock beat incumbent Sen. Kelly Loeffler, and Democrat Jon Ossoff had a razor-thin lead over Republican David Perdue. But one hero emerged from the political theater: Stacey Abrams. Abrams has been praised for her organizing work in getting out the vote for the runoff election and building a Democratic infrastructure in her state, which has leaned Republican in the last several elections. On Wednesday, former President Barack Obama issued a statement congratulating Rev. Warnock for his win, writing that Democrats’ performance in Georgia was due in large part to Abrams. President-elect Joe Biden also thanked Abrams for her work increasing turnout in the state, saying that she and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms “laid the difficult groundwork necessary to encourage turnout and protect the vote over these last years.” For years, Abrams told the national Democratic Party that Georgia was the key to its electoral future. “Georgia is a state Democrats can and must win,” she wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece less than two years ago. Republicans have long controlled the levers of power in the Peach State. Democrats haven’t occupied the Governor’s Mansion since 2003 and the GOP has had unified control of the state legislature since 2005. Population growth, while robust in the Democratic-leaning Atlanta metropolitan area, never seemed like it wasn’t enough to overcome the state’s deeply conservative rural areas, which consistently deliver huge vote margins to Republican candidates. This perception of Republican control over the state was shattered Nov. 3, when President Donald Trump’s initial lead over Biden diminished throughout the night as Atlanta and its populous suburbs reported their vote totals. By Nov. 6, Biden had pulled ahead of Trump in the longtime Republican state, and on Nov. 14, Decision Desk HQ and Insider called the race for Biden. The president-elect won Georgia by a 49.5 percent-49.3 percent margin over Trump, with nearly 12,000 votes separating the two men out of almost 5 million votes cast, becoming the first Democratic presidential nominee to carry the state since Bill Clinton in 1992. Warnock and Ossoff both performed strongly in the November election, keeping Republicans from exceeding 50 percent of the both races, denying them outright wins and triggering the runoff elections. Abrams has spent the last decade working to flip Georgia via her New Georgia Project and Fair Fight, a voting rights organization she founded after losing her bid for Georgia governor in 2018. In 2014, Abrams co-founded the New Georgia Project, a nonpartisan group that aimed to register voters and get them more civically engaged. Abrams in 2018 founded another voting rights organization, Fair Fight, which worked to fight challenges to voting that disproportionately affect minority voters including purged voter rolls and long lines. Abrams’ voter mobilization efforts were largely credited for Biden’s narrow victory in the state. Her long-term vision has finally taken hold, and she has been widely praised for steering the Biden campaign and the Democratic Party to this pivotal moment in Southern politics. Abrams, 47, was born in Wisconsin, but spent her childhood in Gulfport, Mississippi and Atlanta. In an interview with The Washington Post, she spoke about her life in Mississippi and vividly recalled how her parents, Robert and Carolyn Abrams, picked a home on a particular street so that their six children could attend higher-performing public schools. Abrams was the first Black female valedictorian at DeKalb County’s Avondale High School in 1991. She then went to Spelman College, a renowned historically Black college in Atlanta, where she distinguished herself as a Harry S. Truman Scholar and graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in interdisciplinary studies (political science, economics, and sociology). After college, Abrams received a master’s degree in public affairs from the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin and a law degree from Yale. She began her professional career as a tax attorney. In 2006, Abrams ran for a state House seat that included parts of Atlanta and suburban DeKalb, winning the Democratic primary and the general election. She began her first term as a state legislator in 2007. During her tenure, Abrams aimed for bipartisanship, working successfully with Republican legislators, while also scrutinizing the policies of the majority party. She led the House Democratic caucus as Minority Leader from 2011 to 2017, until resigning from the chamber to run for governor. In 2018, Abrams became the first Black female nominee from a major political party to run for governor in U.S. history. This represented a groundbreaking moment not only for Black women, but for Georgia, which was still defined by a largely conservative electorate. Abrams and her opponent, then Georgia’s Secretary of State Brian Kemp, were close in the polls throughout the entire race, and both sides aimed to boost their support from their strongest groups — Abrams focused on energizing minority and suburban voters, while Kemp relied heavily on his GOP base in rural and exurban areas. In the end, Kemp narrowly defeated Abrams by a 50.2 percent-48.8 percent margin, or 1.4 percentage points. The race represented the smallest margin in a Georgia governor’s race since 1966. Kemp, who had oversight of the election process, refused to step down during the race, despite numerous calls to do so. While secretary of state, he “oversaw purges of the voting rolls and supported a tightening of registration rules,” according to The New York Times. Abrams, who ended her campaign but wouldn’t formally concede to Kemp, said that voter suppression clouded the legitimacy of the election. “More than 200 years into Georgia’s democratic experiment, the state failed its voters,” she said at the time. “Eight years of systemic disenfranchisement, disinvestment and incompetence had its desired effect on the electoral process in Georgia.” Earlier last year, she reminisced about her passion for voting rights with a group of college students while discussing youth engagement, according to The Washington Post. “I started my voting rights activism at Spelman College,” she told the students. “I started a voter-registration drive even before I was old enough to vote. I was probably the only person who turned 18 in college and got excited to go register and nothing else. But for me, the issue of voter registration is the beginning of the conversation because it is a conversation about power.” After Reconstruction, poll taxes and literacy tests were used to silence the votes of Black citizens for generations, and the runoff election system was put into place to reduce the influence of the Black vote. In Georgia, the legacy of discriminatory Jim Crow-era voter suppression, which Abrams has fought against, long created a sense of resignation among many Black citizens. Atlanta generally dominates conversations about the state’s voting patterns, but a third of voters in rural Georgia are from minority groups and one in four voters outside of the city are Black, and they have now emerged as a powerful voting bloc that for decades had been largely marginalized and ignored. Following Tuesday’s race, Abrams went on Twitter to praise those who “built this victory,” including volunteers and staffers at Fair Fight. Abrams is expected to run for office again in the future, with rumors circulating about a 2022 gubernatorial run, though some have suggested her influence on American politics is great enough that she deserves a spot in the incoming administration. (SD-Agencies) | 