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Category: stacey abrams

  • Kemp Refuses to Say Where He Stands on Future Abortion Restrictions in Georgia

    In the final gubernatorial debate between Republican Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams, Kemp refused to discuss whether he would sign further abortion restrictions into law should voters grant him a second term in office.

    During the debate on Sunday, Kemp said it was not his “desire” to go “any further” on abortion restrictions, but added that he would “look into” the possibility of adding restrictions “when the time comes.”

    “I’m not going to say yes or no to any specific piece of legislation without seeing exactly what it is doing,” he said.

    During the previous debate, however, Kemp claimed he wouldn’t back anything beyond the state’s current restrictions, which ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy — so early on in a pregnancy that many people don’t yet know they are pregnant.

    That ban, which Kemp signed into law in 2019, is one of the most restrictive in the country, making exceptions only when a person’s life is at risk or in cases of rape or incest. In the latter case, a person is required to file a police report before they are allowed to undergo the procedure.

    Abrams, who lost to Kemp by only a small margin in the 2018 gubernatorial race, blasted the governor for his response.

    “Let’s be clear, he did not say he wouldn’t” enact further abortion restrictions, Abrams said during the debate.

    She then reminded viewers that “under the law that [Kemp] signed women can be investigated for miscarriages.”

    Kemp has also signaled that he would be open to banning birth control in Georgia if given the chance as governor. In comments that were caught on a hot mic in September, the Republican governor said it would “[depend] on where the legislatures are” during the next session.

    “You could take up pretty much anything but you got to be in the legislative session to do that,” Kemp went on. “I think, I’d have to check and see because there are a lot of legalities.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The First 2 Days of Early Voting in Georgia Midterms Have Been Record Breaking

    The first two days of early voting in Georgia have been record-breaking, according to numbers released by the state.

    On the first day of early voting for the 2022 midterm races in the state, roughly 134,045 people cast their ballots, nearly double the amount that voted early in the 2018 midterms, when 70,849 people voted on the first day of early voting. The number is also close to how many voted on day one of early voting in Georgia for the 2020 presidential race, when 136,739 ballots were cast.

    Tuesday saw a nearly identical number of people voting early. According to government figures, 134,005 people voted on the second day of early voting — just 40 votes shy of day one’s numbers.

    The 268,050 ballots cast so far represent the first time in Georgia’s history that more than 100,000 ballots were cast on each of the first two days of early voting.

    The high turnout has come with long lines, which are compounded by the fact that Georgia has consolidated many of its voting areas, most notably in large cities, and has enacted stricter voting measures since the last election, making it harder for people to take time out of their day to wait in line to cast a ballot.

    As a result, government officials and voting rights groups have urged voters to plan well in advance.

    “We strongly encourage voters to make a plan to cast their ballots and to double check advanced voting and Election Day polling locations before heading to vote,” a spokesperson for the DeKalb County Board of Registration and Elections said.

    Making a plan to vote “involves knowing what day they want to vote and how they want to vote, whether early in-person or absentee,” Stephanie Ali, policy director at New Georgia Project, said to The Guardian. “And then, knowing things like if they need a ride or finding out if they know the candidates on their ballot.”

    Two critical races are likely driving the high turnout. In the gubernatorial race, Democrat Stacey Abrams is hoping to upset incumbent Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in a rematch of their race from four years ago. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D), meanwhile, is hoping to retain his seat in a closely watched Senate race against Republican Herschel Walker, in a contest that will undoubtedly have national implications.

    Much of the high turnout is from counties that are Democratic strongholds. Indeed, the six counties with the highest numbers of early voting so far all went for President Joe Biden in the presidential election two years ago, and represent more than 114,000 votes — or roughly 4 in 10 voters who have cast ballots in the first two days.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Poll Shows Warnock Leading Walker, Abrams Tied With Kemp, in Georgia Races

    A Quinnipiac University poll published on Wednesday suggests that Democratic candidates running for Senate and governor in Georgia are faring much better than they were just a few months ago — and are on possible paths to victory come November.

    The poll asked voters which candidates they’d prefer to vote for if the election were being held today. In the governor’s race, Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams tied with Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, in a rematch of their 2018 gubernatorial race in which Abrams narrowly (and controversially) lost.

    Both candidates received 48 percent support from respondents in the poll. When it came to favorability ratings, however, Abrams did better — Kemp garnered a net honesty rating of +6 points among Georgia voters, while Abrams’s rating was +10 points, for example. When asked whether each candidate cares about the average Georgian, Abrams again did better, attaining a net +16 points on the question, compared to Kemp’s rating of +9 points.

    Meanwhile, in the Senate race, incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock — who won a close race in a special election in 2020 — is breaking away from his Republican opponent, former NFL player Herschel Walker. In Quinnipiac University’s January poll, the two candidates were in a statistical tie, with Walker leading Warnock by 1 point. Now, however, Warnock leads Walker by double-digits.

    If the election were held today, 54 percent of Georgia voters would opt to reelect Warnock, while 44 percent would prefer Walker, the poll found.

    Walker’s support is likely dwindling due to a number of controversies he has been involved in over the past several weeks, including falsely claiming that he once worked in law enforcement and claiming to have never heard former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election being stolen in Georgia. It was also discovered in the run-up to the Quinnipiac poll that Walker, who has frequently criticized fathers who are absent in their children’s lives, is himself the father of three children that he has not previously acknowledged, beyond the one son he has spoken about from a past marriage.

    The poll also asked about Georgians’ opinions on President Joe Biden. According to the survey, Biden has an approval rating of only 33 percent among residents in the state, with 60 percent of voters saying that they currently have a negative view of his job performance.

    Those low numbers are typically a bad sign for an incumbent president’s political party in midterm races, but as the Quinnipiac poll shows, Biden’s low approval is not necessarily affecting other Democratic candidates.

    Indeed, in a nationwide NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released earlier this week, Biden also fared poorly, attaining a 40 percent approval rating and a 53 percent disapproval grade. Still, when asked who they would vote for in a generic congressional vote, respondents were more likely to say that they’d vote for a Democratic candidate (48 percent) than a Republican one (41 percent).

    Democrats are hopeful that polls like these mean they’ll be able to retain control of both houses of Congress, in spite of it being a midterm election year that conventional wisdom says Republicans will likely win. Many experts have said that in order to win elections, Democrats should embrace more progressive ideas than Biden, as both Warnock and Abrams have done in their Georgia races.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump’s “Big Lie” Lost Big in Georgia on Tuesday

    Donald Trump lost big in Georgia on Tuesday as primary voters rejected three Republican candidates endorsed by Trump in favor of Republicans who refused to perpetuate the former president’s “Big Lie” about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

    Incumbents Gov. Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Attorney General Chris Carr won their primary elections decisively, with about 74 percent, 52 percent and 74 percent of the vote, respectively. All three candidates are rank-and-file Republicans — with the major distinguishing feature that none of them acquiesced to Trump’s demands to overturn President Joe Biden’s Georgia win in November 2020.

    The three politicians had drawn particular ire from Trump, who blamed them for his loss — though Georgia’s 16 electoral votes still wouldn’t have been enough to hand him the election. Still, Trump sought to exercise his influence in the state and, like members of his party have done, to oust politicians who wouldn’t stand by him as he attempted to overthrow the government over his 2020 election loss.

    Georgia Republican voters’ decision to send the incumbent politicians to the general election is a sign that Trump’s influence may be waning among his base. While his endorsees have been triumphing in some elections, the Georgia losses are a major blow to his grip on his followers — or at least a blow to his strategy of directing all of the party’s attention toward the 2020 election.

    Raffensperger’s win over Rep. Jody Hice (R-Texas) was a particularly surprising result. Raffensperger was on the receiving end of Trump’s infamous call demanding that Georgia election officials find him more votes to win the election. The secretary of state rejected Trump’s demands, and an internal GOP poll found that he would lose handily because of it. Hice, on the other hand, was hand-picked by the former president to oust Raffensperger.

    “The people of Georgia must replace the [Republicans In Name Only] and weak Republicans who made it all possible,” Trump said at a Georgia rally last year, speaking about Raffensperger. “In particular, your incompetent and strange — eh, there’s something wrong with this guy — your Secretary of State Raffensperger.”

    Congressional Republicans’ and other GOP members’ continued obsession with so-called RINOs over the past year makes Trump’s loss even more of a blow; experts say that the loss shows that messaging about the 2020 election just isn’t energizing Republican voters anymore, and that attacks from Trump aren’t enough to sink a candidate.

    To be clear, Raffensperger is far from a friend to voting rights. He has taken moves that would impede upon voting rights in the past, including forming a group to root out and criminalize absentee ballot-related voting fraud and allying with conservative voter suppression group True the Vote. Kemp, who signed Georgia Republicans’ sweeping voter suppression bill after the election, and Carr, who supported the law, aren’t civil rights heroes either.

    Wins for Carr, who faced Trump’s pick John Gordon, and Kemp, who beat Trump-recruited David Perdue, are less surprising to election experts, but still a show of voters’ priorities. Even as they sought to make it easier for their party to openly bias or even overturn election results in the future, both politicians had rejected Trump’s coup attempts.

    “[E]verybody and their dog down in Georgia knows exactly what this means: total, abject humiliation for the former president,” wrote Truthout’s William Rivers Pitt on Monday, before the primary. “If it happens like it seems it will, this one will leave a big, broad mark.”

    Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Stacey Abrams won her uncontested primary election for governor. Abrams, a longtime voting rights advocate, stands in sharp contrast to the Republican candidates. Though she lost to Kemp in her 2018 gubernatorial campaign, the run launched her to Democratic fame, granting her national name recognition — and, perhaps, a better chance at breaking Republicans’ nearly decade-long grip on the governor’s office.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Judge Denies Stacey Abrams the Ability to Raise Funds the Way Brian Kemp Can

    A federal judge has declared that Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams cannot raise unlimited campaign funds, despite a state fundraising law that allows her likely opponent, current Gov. Brian Kemp (R), to do so.

    State law allows incumbent governors and their challengers from the opposing major political party to form “leadership committees” to raise unlimited funds from supporters in the state. But while incumbents are allowed to set up a committee for such purposes right away, the statute bars Abrams from doing so until after she becomes the Democratic Party’s official nominee, following the state’s primary elections.

    Kemp established his leadership committee in July of last year, after signing into law the bill that created the rule in the first place. Abrams will not be allowed to create a similar committee until late May at the earliest.

    Lawyers for Abrams had argued in their lawsuit that the elections law gave incumbents an unfair advantage, and that Abrams — who doesn’t have any challengers in the Democratic primary — should be allowed to set up her own leadership committee now as the presumptive nominee, with the same rules applied to it that Kemp has.

    Judge Mark Cohen, a federal judge in the Northern District of Georgia, disagreed with those assertions, writing in his order that any ruling in favor of Abrams would amount to rewriting state law.

    “Granting plaintiffs’ requested relief … would require this court to effectively rewrite the statute to recognize Abrams as the Democratic Party nominee before she has been selected in a primary,” Cohen said.

    In response to the ruling, Abrams’s campaign manager, Lauren Groh-Wargo, said that it was imperative that her supporters “give whatever they can” to her election campaign.

    While the order from Cohen gives the Republican incumbent governor a significant advantage, the federal judge has placed some limits on how Kemp can use funds he raises for his leadership committee, ruling earlier this year that Kemp can’t access those funds until he, too, wins his primary contest. Still, Kemp’s ability to raise funds through the committee for months longer than Abrams is allowed to will give him a significant advantage once the general election campaign begins.

    Kemp, who is running against former U.S. Sen. David Perdue (R-Georgia), is expected to win the primary, possibly without the need for a runoff race beyond the initial May 24 election.

    Recent polling shows that Kemp is presently ahead of Abrams by a 7-point margin. However, the race, which is a rematch of Kemp’s and Abrams’s highly contentious 2018 gubernatorial election, could be much closer than that poll suggests, depending on each candidate’s ability to turn out their supporters in the general election this fall.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Stacey Abrams “Wows” as Earth’s President on “Star Trek”

    Sonequa Martin-Green and Stacey Abrams in the season 4 finale of Star Trek: Discovery.

    Democratic Party activist and Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams recently served in a different role — as president of the United Earth, on the CBS television series “Star Trek: Discovery.”

    Abrams, an avid Star Trek fan, was invited to cameo as the leader of the planet in the season four finale of the show. In her role as president, Abrams’s character, several centuries into the future, helps reintegrate the United Earth into the Federation of Planets.

    “United Earth is ready right now to rejoin the Federation, and nothing could make me happier than to say those words,” Abrams says in one of her lines.

    It’s unclear who was more excited about Abrams’s appearance on the program — Abrams herself, or the cast and crew of the show, some of whom have worked with her previously.

    “Honestly, the number of times I’ve seen the episode, every time I see her face, I’m like, ‘Wow, that really happened. That’s awesome,’” showrunner Michelle Paradise said.

    Although it’s unlikely that Abrams will become president of Earth in her lifetime, she has previously discussed the possibility of running for president of the United States, saying in past interviews that she “absolutely” has the ambition to do so sometime in the future.

    Abrams is currently running to unseat incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp (R), whom she lost to in a close election in 2018. That race was not without controversy — weeks before Election Day, Kemp, who was Georgia secretary of state at the time, purged over half a million voters from the voting rolls, leading many to question whether or not his win was legitimate.

    Since that race, Abrams has been instrumental in helping to elect Democrats — including current Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, whom she campaigned for in December 2020 during their separate runoff races, alongside other Star Trek cast members at the time.

    In a campaign video announcing her run for governor this past December, Abrams championed “leadership that understands the true pain folks are feeling, and has real plans.”

    “That’s the job of governor, to fight for one Georgia, our Georgia,” she added. “And now, it’s time to get the job done.”

    If Kemp can stave off a primary challenge from former Republican Sen. David Perdue, it’s likely that a rematch between him and Abrams will once again be close. A Quinnipiac University poll from January found that 49 percent of respondents wanted Kemp to remain in office, while 47 percent said that they planned to vote for Abrams — a split that was within the poll’s 2.4 percent margin of error, effectively marking a statistical tie.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Abrams Has Out-Fundraised Kemp by $2 Million Since December in GA Governor Race

    New data shows that Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for Georgia governor, is currently raking in more fundraising dollars than incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp (R) for their impending electoral contest later this year.

    By all measures, the race is set to be a close one. When Abrams and Kemp previously faced off in 2018, the latter won by a margin of 54,723 votes — or a difference of 1.5 percent of the electorate. Abrams contended that there were many improprieties in the election that led to her loss; notably, Kemp, who was constitutionally charged with managing the election as Georgia’s secretary of state at the time, refused to recuse himself from overseeing his own election.

    Abrams has raised $9.2 million since she entered the race in December of last year, outraising Kemp by about 27 percent. Kemp has received around $7.2 million from donors since last December, reporting from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows.

    Kemp is also facing a Republican primary opponent in former Sen. David Perdue, who announced that he would run for governor in December, nearly a year after losing his seat in the United States Senate to current Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia). Fundraising numbers for Perdue have not yet been released.

    No matter who wins the Republican primary, the general election for governor will likely be close, just as it was four years ago.

    According to a Quinnipiac University poll published last week, Kemp currently leads Abrams by a margin of two points (49 percent to 47 percent, respectively). That difference is within the poll’s margin of error, which means the two candidates are statistically tied.

    If Abrams faces off against Perdue instead of Kemp, the race gets even tighter, with both candidates securing 48 percent of the vote, the poll shows.

    Between Kemp and Perdue, it appears that the incumbent governor has a significant lead, according to the poll, with Kemp getting support from 43 percent of Republican-leaning voters while Perdue gets support from 36 percent.

    However, an internal poll commissioned by Perdue’s campaign shows that Perdue leads Kemp in the race by 3 percent when all other primary candidates are excluded from consideration. Notably, the poll also asked voters which candidate they would choose if they knew Trump endorsed Perdue; that endorsement increased Perdue’s lead over Kemp with Republican respondents by 22 percent.

    If that endorsement helps Perdue overcome Kemp in the primary, this might end up giving Abrams an advantage in the general election. Indeed, numbers from an Atlanta Journal-Constitution survey last month found that a Trump endorsement could have the opposite effect in Georgia’s upcoming general election, as 49 percent of voters overall said that they would be less likely to vote for a candidate backed by Trump, while only 20 percent of voters said that a Trump endorsement would increase their support of a candidate.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump’s Revenge Against Georgia Republicans Could End Up Boosting Stacey Abrams

    Sen. David Perdue gestures as he speaks next to President Donald Trump during a rally to support Republican Senate candidates at Valdosta Regional Airport in Valdosta, Georgia, on December 5, 2020.

    Earlier this week, Donald Trump unleashed a civil war within the Republican Party in Georgia.

    The war was a long time coming. Last year, Trump tried to pressure officials to change Georgia’s presidential election result. Remember the infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which the cornered and defeated Trump urged his interlocutor to “find” just enough votes to allow him to claim victory?

    Raffensperger, a Republican, not only refused to find the necessary number of votes, but he also recorded the conversation and let the world’s media know about it. Republican Gov. Brian Kemp — whose campaign against Stacey Abrams two years earlier was about as Trumpian as one could get — also refused Trump’s appeals not to sign off on the Georgia results. There were, apparently, anti-democratic lines that, in 2020, even a deeply opportunistic and hyper-conservative politician such as Kemp couldn’t cross.

    Now Trump is attempting to orchestrate revenge from Mar-a-Lago. Partly, he seems to be doing so as a matter of strategy, to attempt to gain control over all levels of the GOP in as many states as possible heading into the 2024 presidential election cycle. That effort to take over the entire machinery of a political party and bend it to the will of a single individual is straight out of the authoritarian playbook. Partly, however, this seems to be Trump’s unrestrained schoolyard bully persona lashing out at — and seeking ways to humiliate — anyone who stands in his way or refuses to fully, unquestioningly, embrace his conspiratorial understanding of the world.

    In March, he endorsed a “Stop-the-Steal”-believing primary challenger to Raffensperger. It was, pure and simple, payback for Raffensperger showing some integrity and spine last autumn and winter by not throwing his weight behind Trump’s vacuous claims of election fraud.

    Soon afterwards, as part of a nationwide effort to buck nonpartisan or bipartisan control over the elections process, GOP legislators in Georgia, moving in lockstep with the ex-president, voted to make it easier to take down local elections officials whose work they dislike. In practice, what that means is that, in the future, were a GOP candidate — for instance, one Donald J. Trump — to refuse to accept an election loss, the candidate would have a strong chance of bringing legislators along for the ride who would be willing and now able to subvert election monitoring systems for their candidate’s own partisan advantage.

    Now, as the midterm elections near, Trump, the puppeteer, has begun pulling even more strings, making his minions dance and jerk at his every command. Seeking to destroy Kemp’s governorship, former Sen. David Purdue has jumped into the ring as a primary challenger to the governor. Remember, Purdue was part of that sorry duo of defeated senators whose unwavering and fanatical fealty to Trump cost the GOP both Georgia Senate seats, and, thus, control of the U.S. Senate. Immediately after Purdue’s announcement, Trump endorsed him, calling him a “conservative fighter.”

    Purdue may indeed be conservative — certainly he is reactionary — but let’s be clear: That’s not why Trump is supporting him. This isn’t about ideology, it’s about Trump’s vision of “loyalty.” The ex-president, wounded to the quick by what he saw as Kemp’s personal betrayal in late 2020, is seeking vengeance, and he doesn’t care who he takes down in this quest to ensure that, politically speaking, the governor is soon sleeping with the fishes.

    Now, personally, I don’t have a dog in the Kemp-Purdue fight. They are, to my mind, each as unpleasant as the other. In 2018, Kemp ran a nasty, ugly campaign, filled with racist messaging, against Abrams; aired a bizarre pro-gun ad in which he was seen practically fondling a semiautomatic rifle; and used and abused his position as secretary of state to back massive purges of the voter rolls. In one particularly extraordinary purge alone, roughly half a million people had their names removed from the voter rolls. If Purdue — who consistently had one of the most right-wing voting records in the Senate, and who ran campaign ads that falsely claimed Democratic rival Jon Ossoff had been endorsed by the American Communist Party — wants to get down and dirty against Kemp, that’s fine with me.

    What makes it all a hell of a lot more interesting, however, is that Abrams has also announced she is running, once more, to be governor. Abrams lost to Kemp in 2018 by 1.4 percent, a result impacted at least in part by the scale of voter disenfranchisement that Georgia had unleashed in the run-up to that election. Since then, Abrams has created two organizations to encourage voter participation, including, most recently Fair Fight Action. The result has been a huge upsurge in voter participation, not only in presidential votes, but in down-ballot elections as well. Roughly 1 million more Georgians voted in the 2020 presidential elections than was the case four years earlier. And even in the 2020 Senate runoff elections, 260,000 more Georgians cast votes than voted in the 2016 presidential election.

    Despite Georgia’s accelerated efforts to suppress the vote, Abrams’s group will, at the very least, act as a counterweight to this in the next election cycle. In fact, there’s no red state in the country where progressives are better positioned to defeat efforts to ensure continued conservative dominance achieved via voter suppression. And there’s arguably no progressive candidate in a key swing state more able to ride this wave of newfound voter engagement than is Abrams.

    The Purdue-Kemp fissure, and Trump’s stirring of the GOP rage-pot, could end up boosting Abrams, even if the Democratic Party nationally takes a beating. After all, if Kemp and Purdue spend the next six months sparring against each other in a war of attrition, as seems likely, Abrams could end up the last candidate still in the ring.

    An Abrams victory would be huge nationally, making it that much harder for a Trumpified GOP to overturn election results in 2024. It would be a sweet irony indeed if the twice-impeached ex-president’s sparking of a GOP civil war in Georgia cost the party a key governorship, and if Raffensberger — who, regardless of whether he is successfully primaried, will still be secretary of state in November 2022 — is, to the horror of Donald Trump, once more tasked with the job of certifying a Democratic win.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Dems Hopeful Stacey Abrams Will Win Governor’s Seat After Georgia’s Blue Wave

    Former Representative and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams is introduced before speaking at a Souls to the Polls rally on October 17, 2021, in Norfolk, Virginia.

    Voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams has officially launched her campaign to run for governor of Georgia, challenging Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who has led voter suppression initiatives in the state over the past year.

    As a high-profile Democrat, Abrams is a leading candidate in the race. She previously served as the party’s minority leader in the Georgia House of Representatives and has, in recent months, strongly condemned Republicans’ efforts to suppress voting as a backlash to the 2020 election. If elected, she would be the first Black female governor ever to be elected and the first Democrat to hold the governor’s office in the state since 2003.

    “Leadership that understands the true pain folks are feeling, and has real plans — that’s the job of governor, to fight for one Georgia, our Georgia,” Abrams said in a video announcing her run. “And now, it’s time to get the job done.”

    If Kemp clinches the Republican primary next year, this will be Abram’s second time running against him. In 2018, she lost by a margin of only 1.4 points. Shortly before the election, however, Kemp purged over half a million voters from voter rolls, leading voters and voting rights advocates to call the results into question.

    Thanks to voter suppression efforts by conservatives in the state, access to voting seems like it will be restricted again in 2022. Concerningly, voters have already been affected by Georgia Republicans’ voter suppression bill passed earlier this year, with election officials rejecting absentee ballot applications for this year’s municipal elections at a rate four times higher than in 2020.

    This is a manifestation of Republicans ending no-excuse absentee voting in the state; because of this, only 26 percent of people whose applications were rejected ended up casting their vote in person on Election Day.

    Abrams has spent the years after her initial run for governor advocating for voting rights. After her run, she launched Fair Fight Action and Fair Count, organizations aimed at combating voter suppression and giving communities of color accurate representation in the 2020 census.

    Abrams has specifically rejected Georgia Republicans’ voter suppression laws, saying that the hundreds of voter suppression bills filed in states across the country are “a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie.”

    Georgia had record voter turnout in the 2020 election, leading to the state voting blue in the presidential election for the first time since 1992. “The only connection that we can find is that more people of color voted, and it changed the outcome of elections in a direction that Republicans do not like,” Abrams said in March. “Instead of celebrating better access and more participation, their response is to try to eliminate access to voting for, primarily, communities of color.”

    Still, Georgia’s blue flip could represent hope for Democrats. The presidential election results and the state’s rejection of both Republican senators up for election in January have signalled, to some Democrats, that the state’s demographic and political shifts could lead to changes in the state at large.

    The Republican stronghold over the governorship may still prove a challenge. Kemp enjoys a 44 percent approval rating in the state as of September, with 34 percent disapproval, despite the state’s Republicans gaining national attention earlier this year for their voter suppression efforts. But it’s not clear if Kemp is a shoo-in for the party’s primary, as he lacks the support of former President Donald Trump. Instead, Trump may back a candidate like former Sen. David Perdue, who has had ethics concerns railed against him and who Trump likely views as more loyal to him than Kemp is.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Georgia Republicans Just Passed a Law to Make It Easier to Overturn Elections

    A voter is seen at the Metropolitan Library polling place on Election Day in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 3, 2020.

    Over the past 10 days, Georgia Republicans rushed a voter suppression omnibus bill that will make it much easier for the state legislature to overturn elections in the future.

    The bill removes the Georgia secretary of state as the head of the state election board and directs the legislature to appoint the board’s leader. Two of the other four members of the election board are already chosen by the legislature, so this would give the legislature a voting majority on the body, which has wide and deep oversight over election administration in the state.

    “This is extraordinarily dangerous,” Sara Tindall Ghazal, former election protection director for the Georgia Democratic Party, told Mother Jones. “When you’re appointing the majority of the body that you’re responsible to, it’s self-dealing.” Georgia’s legislature is controlled by Republicans due to strong conservative gerrymandering over the state.

    The bill also gives the state election board sweeping powers over county election boards, including the authority to dismantle those they view as unfit and to replace them with their own appointed superintendents, who have full control over how elections operate in their counties.

    “It’s looking at total control of the election process by elected officials,” Democratic county election board member Helen Butler told The New York Times. “It’s all about turnout and trying to retain power.” The elections board serves more of an executive function in the process, but the new bill gives legislators majority power over the agency.

    The county election officials were, as The New York Times described it, “one of the last lines of defense” against attacks on elections and the will of the voters during the 2020 election. The vast majority of county officials fended off a coordinated effort by conservative Texas-based True the Vote to challenge the eligibility of 364,000 voters in Georgia. That move was “one of the oldest tricks in the voter suppression playbook,” American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia attorney Sean Young told AJC.

    Not only would the new legislation likely lead to the appointment of county officials who are more sympathetic to such partisan moves, but it would also see voter eligibility challenges taken more seriously, even if they’re essentially spurious. The bill allows unlimited challenges to voters’ eligibility and forces local election boards to hear them within 10 days, which could lead to hastily thrown out ballots or voter roll purges.

    Georgia’s voter suppression bill also includes provisions to limit the number of ballot drop-offs, add voter ID requirements for mail-in ballots, and outlaw passing out food and water in voting lines.

    Voting rights experts say that former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party may have had more success in the many election challenges if these laws had been in place during November’s election. “Republicans are brazenly trying to seize local and state election authority in an unprecedented power grab,” former Georgia state representative and voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams told The New York Times. “Had their grand plan been law in 2020, the numerous attempts by state legislatures to overturn the will of the voters would have succeeded.”

    “It will make what we all lived through in 2020 child’s play,” said Lauren Groh-Wargo, head of Fair Fight Action, earlier this week in a press call. “Donald Trump won’t have to strong-arm our election administrators. The most radical fringes of the Republican Party sitting in the state legislature will be able to wipe out boards of elections, challenge voters because they don’t have the right name according to them or they don’t look the way they think they should look. This is Jim Crow 2.0.”

    It’s not just happening in Georgia. Republicans are considering similar power-grabbing maneuvers in at least seven other states — in other words, the same officials who claimed that the 2020 election was fraudulent are now launching attacks on those who stopped Trump from committing election fraud.

    Now that they’ve passed a sweeping bill in Georgia, Republicans are likely emboldened to seek similar changes elsewhere. Over the past months, the GOP has been looking into exporting similar bills in Georgia and Arizona to other states — and, with a win in hand, they might succeed.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Coca-Cola Stays Silent as Georgia Republicans Bid to Restrict Rights

    ‘The hypocrisy is astounding’: the Georgia company says it’s determined to combat racism – so why isn’t it speaking out? Continue reading

    The post Coca-Cola Stays Silent as Georgia Republicans Bid to Restrict Rights appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

    This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

  • Stacey Abrams Calls GOP Voter Suppression Effort “Jim Crow in a Suit and Tie”

    Former gubernatorial candidate for Georgia Stacey Abrams speaks at University of New England's Portland campus on January 22, 2020.

    On Sunday, Stacey Abrams panned the slate of voter suppression laws being pushed by Republicans in Georgia, saying that the “racist” laws are “a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie.”

    “We know that the only thing that precipitated these changes — it’s not that there was a question of security. In fact, the secretary of state and the governor went to great pains to assure America that Georgia’s elections were secure,” Abrams told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday.

    Following their losses in the 2020 election in Georgia and across the country, Republicans in state legislatures have introduced hundreds of bills aimed at making it harder to vote. The bills introduced in Georgia are particularly far-reaching, and, if signed into law, would severely restrict early and absentee voting in the state.

    Democrats won big in Georgia in recent elections, due partially to the work of voting rights activists like Abrams who helped turn out more voters in the state, especially Black voters and voters of color. Black voters especially turned out in droves to vote early or by mail this election, and reporting found that some were even driven by what they viewed as previous voter suppression efforts in the state.

    Now, following record voter turnout, Republicans are trying to suppress voting in the state, and many of the attacks on voting seem to be aimed squarely at getting fewer Black voters to vote. One of the provisions they’ve proposed and passed is a bill restricting early voting to only one Sunday prior to election day, perhaps due to the fact that Sundays are big for Black voter turnout thanks to “souls to the polls” events.

    “And so the only connection that we can find is that more people of color voted, and it changed the outcome of elections in a direction that Republicans do not like,” Abrams said. “Instead of celebrating better access and more participation, their response is to try to eliminate access to voting for, primarily, communities of color.”

    “There’s a direct correlation between the usage of dropboxes, the usage of in-person early voting, especially on Sundays, and the use of vote-by-mail and a direct increase in the number of people of color voting,” Abrams continued.

    Republicans last week voted to end Georgia’s no-excuse absentee voting, which they’ve had in place since 2005 and was originally a Republican proposal that they now view as having turned against them politically. The state Senate had also moved forward with a Republican proposal to end automatic voter registration, which led to record voter turnout after it was implemented in 2016, but the senators ended up tabling that proposal.

    Voter suppression has a long, racist and violent history in the U.S., and scholars say that the Jim Crow era of racist laws still has an effect on voter suppression today. Even before this year’s wave of state laws, voter suppression efforts ahead of the 2020 election — like Donald Trump’s sabotaging of the United States Postal Service’s ability to deliver mail-in ballots — were so similar to Jim Crow era laws that some activists have taken to calling them “Jim Crow 2.0.”

    Republicans’ push to limit the windows for early voting in the state, for instance, is a law that appears to affect everyone equally but in reality would likely further subjugate voters in nonwhite communities. Nonwhite voters in Georgia already have to wait for hours in line to vote as the number of polling locations were decreased precipitously in places like Atlanta, which has a majority Black population.

    The measures to narrow the period for early voting would likely increase the already long lines in certain areas. Republicans have further proposed outlawing the handing out of water and food to people waiting in line to vote, making it a misdemeanor crime to do so.

    These bills in Georgia are part of Republicans’ efforts nationwide to suppress voting — and Republicans have basically admitted as such. Last week, a Republican in Arizona offered his reasoning for the efforts within his state to pass similar voter restrictions. “Everybody shouldn’t be voting,” he said in explaining why Republicans are working so hard to suppress the vote. “Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes, as well.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Stacey Abrams Has a Plan to Dismantle the Filibuster and Protect Voting Rights

    Voting rights activist, Stacey Abrams, sees an ever more pressing need to reform the filibuster in the US Senate. And she has a plan for how to do it — get support from reluctant centrist Democrats. Continue reading

    The post Stacey Abrams Has a Plan to Dismantle the Filibuster and Protect Voting Rights appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

    This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

  • Georgia Republicans Pass the Most Restrictive Voting Laws Since Jim Crow

    Republicans are smarting over Democratic wins in Georgia and are heading to the state senate to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Republicans have introduced 253 bills in 43 states in the first two months of this year to make it harder to vote. Continue reading

    The post Georgia Republicans Pass the Most Restrictive Voting Laws Since Jim Crow appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

    This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.