Abrams, Georgia, And Lies Later Told
On The Peach State
Stacey Abrams is not a good electoral candidate.
I am not saying she would be a bad Governor, if she wins next year’s Governor’s race in Georgia, but there is no evidence to suggest she is a good candidate in terms of her ability to win votes. She has done great work with Fair Fight, and she deserves some of (but not nearly as much as she gets) the credit for the dual Senate victories of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in January. But that is not the same thing as saying she’s a good candidate.
Could she win? Absolutely. Will she win? Fuck if I know, honestly. But if she does, it won’t be because of her excellence as a candidate, and it’s extremely unhelpful that so many Democrats have this twisted.
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Long time readers of mine will know the answer to this bit of electoral trivia, but what county in Georgia swung left the most between Abrams’ 2018 loss and the Ossoff 2021 victory? Whites-Only-Until-The-90s Forsyth, which went from Kemp +43 to Perdue +36. This swing has been often ascribed to the difference between running a Black candidate in 2018 and a white one in 2021, but that fact elides the fact that Warnock still outran Ossoff in Forsyth, only losing it by 35%. Abrams’ result there, in a blood-red, but blue-trending, exurban county typifies her failures – she didn’t do nearly well enough with white voters with a degree. Abrams lost whites with a degree by 32% in 2018, a respectable 9% improvement on Hillary’s result two years earlier, but a decidedly not great one compared to Joe Biden’s 20% loss last year.
Okay, fine – Abrams wasn’t a great candidate for those areas, but what about her performance with rural whites? Here it’s the same story, with Biden losing whites without a degree by 54%, Warnock losing them by 58%, and Abrams losing them by 60%. Look at a county level, and Abrams underperformed Warnock by 4% in Habersham and White counties, a pair of (reasonably populous) rural counties in Northeast Georgia, so that’s not really great. What about Black rurals? Well, Warnock outran Abrams by just over 2% in the Georgia 2nd, the VRA-protected southwestern Georgia seat, so not really any evidence she outperformed there. Oh, and this whole time, she had the benefit of running in a blue wave, which Biden, Warnock, and Ossoff didn’t.
If you think I’m being unduly hard on Abrams, consider that I have openly mocked the notion that Beto O’Rourke is a good candidate for the sin, in my eyes, of essentially matching Hillary’s result, adjusted for the national environment, against Ted Cruz in 2018, and then realize that Abrams didn’t even come close to doing that. Georgia voted 7% right of the nation in 2016, as Hillary lost it by 5 while winning nationally by 2. In a D+8 year two years later, Abrams managed to get the state’s margin down to 1%, a four point improvement on Hillary while the nation swung 6 points left. Two years later, Biden would swing the state nearly 6%, while barely moving the country more than 2%. Abrams managed to take a state with favourable Democratic trends and then do worse than the nation as a whole.
Well, was she running against a popular incumbent? Nope, she was running against the guy who spent his primary talking about how conservative he was, including that he was owned a pickup trick “in case I need to round up criminal illegals”, because there’s a big problem of illegal border crossings with the fucking Florida panhandle. She was unable to get the level of white support required to win, nor was she able to match Kemp’s rural white turnout operation with sufficient levels of Black turnout.
Yes, Kemp getting to run the election system that he was a candidate in is a sign of the institutional failing that is American democracy but lying and claiming that she was robbed of the election is crap. Maybe there were enough votes that were never cast to make a runoff possible, but there’s no guarantee such a runoff would have gone her way, and presuming it would have is a mistake. It’s a lie we tell ourselves because we like Abrams, and we don’t want to have to deal with the very reasonable question of “why did this person I have so much for lose?” We don’t want to believe it’s her fault, so we look for other answers. As a coping mechanism about the past, it’s harmless, but when she is running again, Democrats need to be clear eyed about the quality of the candidate they’re running.
“Tell me lies later, come and see me/I’ll be around for a while” is from the opener of Neil Young’s third album, and it’s a line that I’ve loved for a decade, at least. It’s a plea for honesty, but it’s actually a self-aware plea. It’s a yearning for an honesty instead of performative bullshit, and here it’s very very valuable. Abrams is not a good candidate, and pretending she is will lead Democrats to disaster. She has never shown any willingness to do anything to fix the problems which marred her last campaign – and yes, her awful performance with whites is why she lost. Underrunning Warnock by 8% in Forsyth isn’t about racism, it’s about Abrams not understanding how to win a Georgia election, which Warnock, Ossoff, and Biden did. Abrams’ refusal to concede won’t be a focal point of this race, nor will it move votes, but it is indicative of a candidate looking for others to blame instead of accepting the fact that her campaign should and could have been better.
Maybe Abrams 2.0 will be better than 1.0, in the same way that Ossoff resurrected a dead political career. Maybe she will be the same but win anyways, because whoever wins the Perdue-Kemp primary is going to bloody the other one up. Maybe she loses anyways. Right now, I have no idea what will happen a year from now, and while I concede my record of calling US elections is not the best, I do have form of reading the Peach State well. But what I do know is expecting or hoping Abrams to have an Ossoff-ian second coming misses the point of Ossoff 2.0 – that turnaround was legitimately one of the most shocking things we’ve seen in a long, long time, and to think anyone else could do it misses the point entirely.
I want Stacey Abrams to be the next Governor of Georgia, but I have a ton of doubts if she can run the campaign needed to win. To deny it now will just lead all of us to look for lies later.
interesting. but IMO one thing needs to be note is that if the country as a whole shift like 5% to the dems, you don't inherently expect every state to shift that 5% exactly. the more solid a state is, the less we would expect it to shift regardless of the national environment. the 2018 blue wave got to the level it got because in additional to states known for being a swing state, the blue shift occurred on similar levels in GA, in TX and in AZ. the fact that in 2016 it was unthinkable to call them swing states and now 2 of them has both senate seats as democrats and the 3rd is also being talked as soon-to-might-be a swing one. it's one thing to swing the country as a whole a curtain %, it's a whole different level to do a half of it to a "not you" state (a red one in the democrats' case).
i'm not saying that Abrams is the reason for that (while i do think a lot of things got right to the dems in GA 2020 that made them win it, and the actions she took part of in preventing voter suppression was one of them, but not the sole thing), but i do think that what happened in 2018 is a good shift even in relation to a blue wave because of who deep red those states used to be thought of, and thinking about them as such now is laughable and strategically unhelpful...
hope i succeed delivering my point...