by Jason Hopkins
Failed Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams suggested that voter suppression is more “insidious” today than it was in the 1960s, and she reiterated her claim that she “won” her 2018 election.
“We have always struggled with voter suppression,” Abrams said to ABC’s Lindsey Davis on Sunday. “But what’s happened in the last 20 years, is that it’s gone underground. It’s no longer hoses and laws that say you cannot vote, it is this insidious nature that says it’s race neutral, that we’re just putting in these laws in place for everyone, but we know it has a disproportionate effect on the communities that have long been marginalized.”
Abrams said that that there has been a “constriction” over the past two decades on who has the right to vote, repeating her long-held claims that voter ID laws and other election regulations are “rigging the game” against people of color.
“You have said as recently as this past Tuesday, in front of the crowd in Las Vegas, that ‘We won,’” Davis asked of Abrams, who lost her election to Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp by nearly 55,000 votes last November. “Why continue to use that language ‘We won’?”
“What I wanted, what the thousands of people who joined me wanted, what the 1.9 million people who voted wanted, they wanted to be seen and heard in ways they hadn’t been before. And they were,” Abrams answered, speaking of the 1.9 million Georgians who voted for her in the 2018 election. “And I don’t ever want to diminish that, because one of the other parts of voter suppression that is so pervasive is that it starts to depress your sense of possibility.”
Abrams touched on a few other subjects during her interview. She confirmed her decision not to be a candidate in the 2020 Democratic presidential election, but she left the door wide open to being selected as a vice presidential running mate to whomever wins the nomination.
The Georgia Democrat also reiterated her belief that President Donald Trump is a racist.
“I have said many times he’s a racist,” she said of the Republican president. “But, more importantly, he does not value Americans, and he does not value humanity. And that should be more disturbing to everyone than the title that we prescribe to him.”
Despite losing by a substantial margin, Abrams has maintained that her 2018 election defeat was “stolen” from her. She has refused to call Kemp the legitimate governor of Georgia and still has never formally conceded the race. The former Georgia House minority leader and romance novelist claims, without evidence, that Kemp used his former position as Georgia Secretary of State to knock black and Democratic voters off the rolls, tilting the election in his favor.
Abrams has channeled her complaints into forming a voting rights initiative. Earlier this month, she launched Fair Fight 2020, a program that will employ Democratic operatives in 20 battleground states to monitor irregularities during the 2020 election.
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Jason Hopkins is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
