A Marist Poll found that 11% of Georgians who voted for Biden in 2020 plan to back Kemp for governor, while just 5% of Trump voters favor Abrams. Supporters say it is not surprising, after four years of being vilified by conservatives as a far-left extremist who views the governorship only as a stepping stone to the presidency.īut it may be making it harder for Abrams to attract the vanishingly thin slice of independent and moderate Republican voters whose discomfort with Trump pushed them toward Democrats in recent elections. “Now is the time to double down, not to second guess ourselves,” she said.ĭespite a deeply loyal base, surveys suggest Abrams has become a more polarizing figure since her last campaign. Though some Democrats have expressed doubts about Abrams’ expansion strategy, Ufot said it has already proven effective by paving the way for Biden’s victory in 2020 and the election of two Democratic senators in 2021, which delivered the party control of the chamber. Their goal is to knock on at least 2m doors by election day.

Photograph: Erik S Lesser/EPAĬanvassers with the New Georgia Project are pounding the pavement to register and turn out voters this cycle. Republican Brian Kemp at a rally in Alpharetta, Georgia last week, as an Abrams supporter holds up a sign. “And it’s 100% going to be determined by who shows up to vote and whose votes get counted.” “This is 100% the battle of the bases,” said Nsé Ufot, leader of the New Georgia Project, a group founded by Abrams to register and engage young people and voters of color. While Kemp, a staunch conservative who easily defeated a Trump-backed primary challenge earlier this year, draws overwhelming support from white voters in the rural and exurban parts of the state. Abrams, a former state house minority leader and prominent voting rights advocate, is working to mobilize Black, Latino and Asian American voters along with young people in Atlanta and its sprawling suburbs. Georgia is nearly evenly divided between the parties, and in many ways, Abrams and Kemp embody the dueling factions of the state’s polarized electorate. “Every success I’ve ever had in politics has been about building the electorate I need – building the electorate we should have, which is an electorate that’s much more reflective of the state,” Abrams said during an interview at a coffee shop in Atlanta. In the fast-growing and diversifying battleground state, she notes that as many as 1.6 million new voters have been added to the rolls since 2018, many times Kemp’s margin of victory that year.

A Yale-educated tax attorney, she says she trusts her math better than the polls. And while Abrams has stronger support among her base than Kemp, according to a Monmouth University survey, it concluded that her path to victory was “much narrower”.īut Abrams is refusing to be counted out. The latest Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) poll found that the governor had significantly expanded his lead over Abrams, 50% to 42%. Polls consistently show the 48-year-old Democrat trailing Kemp, now a relatively popular governor with the advantage of incumbency. Yet Abrams, hailed by Democrats as the architect of Georgia’s political transformation, enters the final weeks of her rematch with Kemp an underdog. I can get this job if you all do what you did in 2018 Stacey Abrams I can’t get this job if you all don’t show up. But she always kept her sights on the governor’s mansion, declining pleas to run for the Senate. Successive Democratic wins in the years that followed validated her work expanding the electorate, a decade-long project aimed at mobilizing the disillusioned and the marginalized.Ībrams was even considered a potential running mate for Joe Biden in 2020, a prospect she welcomed. In her near-miss, national Democrats saw a promising leader – and the potential to reclaim the southern state that had long ago slipped away. She lost the Georgia governorship to Republican Brian Kemp by fewer than 55,000 votes, in a race dominated by allegations of voter suppression, which Kemp, then the secretary of state overseeing the election, denied. With their help this November, she promises, they will “open those gates wide” and “win the future for Georgia”.įour years ago, Abrams came within a hair of it. I don’t remember meeting my fellow valedictorians from 180 school districts … All I remember is a man standing in front of the most powerful place in Georgia, looking at me, telling me I don’t belong.”īut the story doesn’t have to end there, Abrams tells supporters as she campaigns to become the first Black female governor in American history. “The thing of it is,” Abrams said at a recent campaign stop in Atlanta, “I don’t remember meeting the governor of Georgia. A terse exchange ensued between her father and the guard, who grudgingly checked the guest list and let them in.

Governor race dominate ad wars