90,000 Americans are dead.1,400,000 confirmed U.S. cases.36,000,000+ unemployment claims filed. Trump had plenty of warning, but he failed to act to slow the spread of the pandemic.@StaceyAbrams takes us back in time to explain Trump’s failed coronavirus response: pic.twitter.com/wbOODu1vB9 — CAP Action (@CAPAction) May 18, 2020 The Washington Post did an anodyne and extremely predictable …
Election Year Open Thread: Stacey Abrams Knows Her WorthPost + Comments (115)
From the NYTimes, Stacey Abrams Wants More Than the Vice Presidency:
… Traditionally, Democrats have sought a vice-presidential pick that appeals to swing voters, those suburban whites whose operative variable is not whether they show up to the polls, but whether they go blue or red upon arrival. Such a priority this year would elevate the appeal of a running mate like Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota or Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.
But there is another, oft-overlooked slice of the electorate that Ms. Abrams argues is equally crucial to the party’s success, voters who grapple with a different binary: voting Democratic, or not voting at all.
“The focus on persuasion has often been trying to persuade someone to shift from their conservative ideology to a more moderate or liberal ideology,” Ms. Abrams said in an interview. “But for voters of color, it isn’t about shifting ideology — it’s persuading them that voting actually will have an effect.”
These other swing voters, oscillating between voting Democratic or not at all, are the Americans — largely racial minorities and young people — whom Ms. Abrams has devoted her career to reaching. As she explains it, there are overt voter suppression tactics, and then there is this more insidious thread, often unwittingly perpetuated by her own party, that tells this segment of swing voters that they are less worthy of courting…
Since 2018, Fair Fight, along with its nonprofit arm, Fair Fight Action, has raised millions of dollars and funded teams at state Democratic parties across the country. In 2019, for example, Fair Fight helped Kentucky Democrats file a lawsuit that restored to the rolls some 175,000 voters who had been purged by the Republican governor. And amid the pandemic, the organization has shifted its focus to the expansion of voting by mail.
Ms. Abrams stressed that these efforts can matter little if citizens do not buy into the act of voting itself — in other words, if the barrier to participation is not so much a law or policy but a belief that the system has never valued one’s voice to begin with…
And a coda, from Georgia native Ed Kilgore, at NYMag — If 2020 Doesn’t Make Stacey Abrams Veep, It Could Propel Her to the Governorship of Her State:
… Kemp, whose coronavirus policies have been nearly as ignorantly erratic as the president’s, is presently in the midst of an extremely perilous gamble wherein he is risking a fresh wave of coronavirus infections and deaths due to premature reopening of Georgia businesses that managed to earn a rebuke from Trump. A recent Cygnal survey of Georgians commissioned by a Republican rival showed Kemp with an approval/disapproval rating of 43/52; 54 percent of respondents gave a thumbs-down to his handling of the pandemic. Kemp’s appointee as U.S. senator, Kelly Loeffler, appointed in no small part to fund Republican-coordinated campaigns this year and in 2022 (when Loeffler, in the unlikely case she wins the November special election, would be up for a full term), has been a human dumpster fire politically, generating constant negative media coverage (fanned by Republican as well as Democratic opponents) for apparent conflicts of interest involving her and her husband’s vast wealth and stock holdings.
It’s a long way until 2022, but you have to say Brian Kemp, who ran an abrasive, borderline-racist campaign in 2018 as a “politically incorrect conservative” who enjoyed offending people, doesn’t have the sort of personality that would lift him to a second term absent a strong performance as governor. And his dubious handling of COVID-19 has given Abrams all sorts of opportunities to gain local and national attention, completely aside from her veep aspirations. She’s taken advantage of it, too…
The political landscape in 2022 will certainly depend on what happens this November; if Abrams’s party loses, with or without her on the ticket, she’ll have the consolation of the midterm advantage the “out party” normally enjoys. She’ll also have had some more time to joust with Kemp and other Georgia Republicans over voter-registration rolls and other familiar issues, and figure out how to improve on her excellent 2018 turnout operation.
Any way you look at it, the immediate future looks challenging for Georgia, and promising for the politician who may become the first woman and African-American to serve as its governor — unless she happens to be otherwise occupied in Washington.