Stacey Abrams: Fighting voter suppression ‘changed the trajectory of the nation’

Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams said Tuesday that fighting voter suppression nationally impacted the outcome of the election.

Abrams, who delivered the Democratic response to Trump’s State of the Union Address in 2019, worked with her voting rights nonprofit group Fair Fight to combat voter suppression during this year’s presidential race.

Their efforts focused on 20 states, including Georgia, which Abrams says not only made a difference in the election outcome in the Peach State but nationwide.

“Voter suppression happens anywhere,” she said, according to CBS News. “We changed not only the trajectory of Georgia, we changed the trajectory of the nation. Because our combined power show that progress is not only possible, it is inevitable.”

The former candidate’s comments come after the U.S. saw record voter turnout surpassing the number of people who voted in the 2008 election, according to The Associated Press. The news wire reported that 62 percent of the eligible voting-age population cast their vote, up 0.4 percent from 2008.   

Abrams founded Fair Fight after she lost her 2018 Georgia gubernatorial bid to now-Gov. Brian Kemp (R). At the time, she said the election was affected by voter suppression, and Kemp, who served as Georgia’s secretary of State at the time, did not recuse himself from oversight of the race. 

Democrats believe that Abrams would’ve beaten Kemp if more than 500,000 Georgians had not been purged from the state’s voter rolls. 

Abrams, along with other Georgia voters rights groups, worked to register over 300,000 people who had been purged from the state’s voting rolls in 2019. 

The results of this work yielded both an increase in voter participation in general as well as increased turnout among African Americans in the state. 

Political types and celebrities alike, from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Viola Davis, are hailing Abrams for her recent advocacy work, which includes raising $6 million for Georgia Democrats in the Georgia Senate runoff elections.

The presidential race in Georgia has not been called yet, but President-elect Joe Biden leads in the state over President Trump by a margin of over 12,000 votes.

The state has not broken for a Democrat since former President Clinton in 1992.