ATLANTA — Sen. Raphael G. Warnock gazed at the cheering people gathered at his victory party Tuesday night and lauded the “multiracial, multireligious coalition of conscience” that he credited with helping him win five elections in two years, despite what he said were baked-in hurdles in Georgia’s elections system designed to blunt minority power.
But unheralded in the celebration was the person many said was the chief architect of that coalition, Stacey Abrams, who had spent years trying to turn out voters on whom many politicians and strategists had given up and who, 28 days earlier, had conceded the governor’s race.
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’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. 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
Sanders said that Abrams has changed the way the political establishment views Georgia and that her strategies could be applied in other Southern states with large minority populations.
“Georgia is not looked at as a top five early-voting [primary] state without Stacey Abrams,” Sanders said.
Abrams did not respond to a request for comment for this story. She has not said what her next move will be, but in her concession speech last month, her voice cracked at times as she spoke of an enduring effort to engage reluctant voters.
“Over the last year across this great state, countless Georgians were ready to come off the sidelines and fight for that Georgia,” she said. “ … From the moment I got into politics, I have always promised to level with the people of Georgia. And I am here to tell you that what we have architected in this state does not end today.”
Abrams had been investing in the infrastructure needed to turn Georgia blue for more than a decade before she emerged on the national stage.
In 2018, she lost to then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp by fewer than two percentage points. She acknowledged that Kemp was governor but refused to concede, saying widespread voter disenfranchisement had tilted the race in Kemp’s favor.
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.”
Congratulations to my friend @ReverendWarnock on his re-election to the U.S. Senate, and a special thank you to Georgia voters and organizers who worked tirelessly to make this victory possible.
— Stacey Abrams (@staceyabrams) December 7, 2022
LaTosha Brown, a founder of Black Voters Matter, said that while Abrams’s tactics have been used since the civil rights movement and Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, Abrams legitimized the tactics in the eyes of people holding the purse strings in Washington and donors across the nation.
“She was a candidate that trusted the model and the theory and literally brought all her skills to bear to actually help it be resourced, and so she was extremely instrumental,” Brown said. “She made sure that as a candidate, that funders and donors outside the state — Democratic donors — didn’t just stick with [a traditional] model that many of us have been frustrated with for years. We never could get national Democratic donors or even the Democratic Party to actually invest in early voting and peer-to-peer organizing.”
If nothing else, Abrams has provided an effective — and enduring — counter to conventional thinking about how to influence voter behavior, said Adrianne Shropshire, who leads BlackPAC, a political action committee focused on mobilizing and engaging with African American voters.
“All of these races for the foreseeable future will be won in the margins,” she said. “And you are not going to win in the margins because you do one more negative ad. You can win the margins because you invest in the infrastructure that can actually mobilize the base to show up in numbers that are unexpected.
“Those voters who are infrequent voters actually need an argument made to them for why they should show up, and not just because they’re apathetic but because they actually want someone to tell them why this matters in their lives. And if you can’t do that, then people will sit home.”
Lenny Bronner contributed to this report.