WaPo’s Cleve R. Wootson Jr. wonders “Does Stacey Abrams’s model for engaging voters die with her election loss?” It’s a weird question that doesn’t become less so with his reporting.
As her star rose over the past four years, Abrams had been hailed as a savior of the Democratic Party who unlocked ways to turn irregular, unmotivated voters into reliable ones, something many believe is key to breaking the stranglehold that Republicans have had on elections in the South and other deeply red places.
Her decade-and-a-half effort has borne fruit in dramatic fashion in the past two years, giving Georgia’s electoral votes to a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in two decades, then sending two Democrats to the U.S. Senate — including Warnock, twice.
Abrams absolutely deserves credit for her efforts to register and mobilize Democratic voters, particularly in the historically low-turnout Black community. But she’s hardly solely responsible for Warnock’s victories. Not only is he an extraordinarily appealing candidate but he was aided tremendously in both instances by Donald Trump. He almost certainly wouldn’t have won the 2020-21 special election absent Trump’s scorched earth campaign against election integrity, which not only motivated Democrats but depressed the Republican vote. Similarly, Warnock would almost have surely lost his re-election bid against even a nominally non-moronic Republican candidate.
Abrams’s ascension paralleled an unprecedented influx of attention and funding to what her supporters see as the best way to engage reluctant voters, said more than a dozen activists, strategists and organizers interviewed for this story. But her defeat is instant ammunition for those who would direct their energy and money to other strategies.
That Abrams is an effective organizer doesn’t mean that she’s an appealing candidate for Governor. Let alone in a staunchly Republican state. Why would her loss to a popular Republican governor make people question the effectiveness of a turnout strategy?
Abrams has not said what her next step will be, but many are equally concerned with what they see as a bigger question: What becomes of her vision?
“That exact question is the single most important question and debate and struggle within the Democratic Party for the next four to six years,” said Steve Phillips, a political activist and the founder of Democracy in Color, a multimedia platform on race and politics. “I think for those of us who subscribe to [her] view, the climb is a little steeper now because Stacey didn’t win. … There’s still too much conclusion that, you know, it’s all about moderating your views or winning over White moderates and that’s how you prevail. So that remains a big fight, and it’s going to be a harder fight.”
If you’re running in a Republican state, you’re going to need a lot of things to go right to win statewide office as a Democrat. That’s just baked into the pie. Turning out as many of your voters as possible is absolutely essential. But, so long as the other side turns out a reasonable number of theirs, they’re going to prevail. Which is actually as it should be.
The consensus, at least in the short term, is that Abrams’s method worked for Warnock in the Senate runoff. Although Republican candidate Herschel Walker was dogged by controversies and questions about his competence and temperament, mobilization efforts aimed at Black voters helped Warnock win by nearly 100,000 votes.
I honestly don’t think you can take much away from a one-off runoff election. Warnock got 1.94 million votes to Walker’s 1.91 million votes in the first round and 1.8 million to Walker’s 1.7 million in the runoff. Republican turnout was clearly depressed in the second round, given that Democrats were going to have the Senate majority regardless of the outcome.
Beyond that, Republican incumbent Brian Kemp got 2.1 million votes compared to Abrams’ 1.8 million votes in the governor’s race. Candidates mattered in a way they usually don’t in these contests.
While data for this year’s runoff isn’t complete, Warnock appears to have been helped by voters in majority-Black precincts who stayed engaged between the midterm elections in November and the runoff in December. Overall turnout in Georgia dropped 10 percentage points between the midterms and the runoff, but turnout in precincts that were at least 95 percent African American fell only by six percentage points, suggesting that Black voters were more likely to stay mobilized for the runoff than other Georgians. Georgia recorded a similar pattern in its January 2021 U.S. Senate runoffs, and many have attributed that enduring engagement to work done by Abrams.
To the extent that’s true, it speaks well for the Abrams strategy. My suspicion, though, is that “Black voters” is serving as a proxy for “Democratic voters” here. Democrats clearly had much more motivation to show up in the second round.
For some people, Abrams is the latest in a long line of people who tried to expand the base of Democratic voters. Those who took on that task include Jesse Jackson, the civil rights activist who twice ran for president; Howard Dean, a former Vermont governor and a former chair of the Democratic National Committee who ran for president in 2004; and former president Barack Obama. Like them, Abrams argued that many voters, including minorities, young people and low-income individuals, had been written off by the political mainstream but that the right strategy could motivate them to enter the voting booth.
And that’s almost certainly true. It’s just hard. And, of course, if the motivation is particularly polarizing candidates, it’ll motivate groups already fairly likely to vote as well.
Her method, however, involved a heavy investment of time and energy. It was aimed not simply at persuading people to vote for one candidate over another, but also at convincing them that government could be a positive force in their lives in the first place. To drive that point home, organizers canvassed in their home communities and stayed in constant contact with potential voters. They focused on rural areas as well as urban and advertised in multiple languages. Some organizers sponsored parties at bars and clubs to connect with voters, and Abrams herself appeared on a Verzuz battle, a digital concert on Instagram Live and Apple TV.
Her strategy was a direct contrast to traditional means of persuasion that organizers say many voters had come to distrust: dueling attack ads, often in the closing weeks of the race, and canvassers from faraway places with little connection to the communities where they knocked on doors.
Again, that’s just incredibly labor-intensive.
The success at expanding the base — in Abrams’s close and controversial first bid for governor, and then in other Georgia races — meant that Democrats in conservative states could run unapologetically liberal campaigns that catered to a wider base, instead of moderating their messages to coax a sliver of moderate voters away from Republicans.
That’s just a dumb strategy. It makes some sense in purple states; it makes none in red states. It takes damn near a perfect storm for Democrats to win statewide in Georgia: an incredibly bad Republican candidate, an especially appealing Democratic opponent, and a zeitgeist that favors Democrats. We saw that happen in the 2020 general election, the 2021 Senate runoffs, and the 2022 Senate runoffs. It’s unreasonable to expect that as the normal state of affairs.
“For Black people and Latino voters and so-called irregular voters, Stacey Abrams treated them all as persuadable voters,” said Symone Sanders, a political strategist and commentator who hosts a show on MSNBC. “The problem is when you feel that you don’t need to communicate with these people because they’re already with us. That’s a flawed strategy.”
Absolutely. It has long been a lament of Black Democrats that the party ignored them—and sometimes actively snubbed them (various “Sister Soulja moments”)—because they had noplace else to go. Abrams did a fantastic job of getting them motivated and mobilized.
In the four years between gubernatorial elections, Abrams didn’t hold an elective office but was still one of the nation’s most popular Democrats, and, to many, the face of the fight against voter suppression. Many suggested that she should be on Joe Biden’s vice-presidential shortlist. Biden once joked that might be aiming too low. Candidates include Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg and Mike Espy sought her counsel, trying to figure out how they could duplicate her mobilization efforts.
For many activists, the past two years have been the first period in which her model has really yielded electoral victories for Democrats. Biden became the first Democrat to win Georgia’s 16 electoral college votes in 18 years. Shortly after he won, Georgians sent Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the U.S. Senate in two runoffs, contributing to Democrats’ control of Congress over the past two years.
That has mirrored voter registration percentages that have consistently been at the top in Southern states. Seven million people are active voters in Georgia, which has automatic voter registration. Still, Abrams and other Georgia activists are credited with adding more than 800,000 voters to the rolls since 2018. In all, 94 percent of the state’s eligible voting-age population is registered, according to data from the Georgia secretary of state and the census.
But this year, Abrams faced greater head winds in her second bid for governor. Black voter turnout in Georgia was down from 2018. Instead of running against a foil in the White House in the person of Donald Trump, she was in the same party as Biden, whom many saw as the face of out-of-control prices and rising crime. And Kemp had gained some credibility with moderate voters by defying Trump’s demand that he overturn the Georgia results in the 2020 presidential election, and he also was credited with keeping the state open during most of the coronavirus pandemic. Between 2018 and 2022, a deficit of 54,000 votes for Abrams ballooned to nearly 300,000. No public or private poll ever showed Abrams ahead in the race.
After her defeat, several commentators compared her to the biblical character Moses, who had led his people to the promised land but never got to go in himself.
“Stacey will get her due,” the civil rights activist Al Sharpton said on MSNBC after Warnock’s victory. “And anytime you see Ossoff and Warnock and Biden in Washington, you’re looking at the work of Stacey Abrams.”
Again, being a great organizer doesn’t necessarily translate into being a great candidate. And, for that matter, presidential and senatorial elections are simply different from gubernatorial ones. It’s quite possible that Abrams would have beaten Walker in a bid for the Senate even though she couldn’t beat Kemp (twice) for governor. People want different things in local leadership than they do in Washington.
