As our nation waits for Georgia to complete its second recount of ballots cast in the 2020 presidential election, it’s worth reviewing what previously happened in the same state where General William Tecumseh Sherman destructively marched to the sea after the 1864 presidential election.
In the 2018 race for governor of Georgia, the Republican candidate, then secretary of state Brian Kemp, defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams by about 50,000 votes, or 1.4 percent of the 3.9 million votes cast. But Abrams did not concede on election night, or the next day, or the day after that.
Instead, Stacey Abrams pursued every possible avenue to overturn governor-elect Brian Kemp’s apparent victory. Her campaign examined absentee and provisional ballots in search of additional votes, and even filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Georgia’s election procedures.
After that election Stacey Abrams called a news conference in which she announced: “to be clear, this is not a speech of concession. ... As a woman of conscience and faith, I cannot concede.”
Her non-concession was supported by other Democrats such as Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who said, “I think that Stacey Abrams’s election is being stolen from her, using what I think are insidious measures to disenfranchise certain groups of people.”
Five months later, in April 2019, Senator Elizabeth Warren insisted that “massive voter suppression prevented Stacey Abrams from becoming the rightful governor of Georgia.” Later, in August, Stacey told an audience, “I will say something that seems to anger people when I say it: We won. We won that election.”
Liberal publications and cable networks indulged Stacey’s claim that she really won the election, or would have won if the vote had been fair. She was not censored by Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube for spreading disinformation, and her posts were not slapped with a label warning that her claims were disputed.
The 2018 election in Georgia is worth revisiting because of the new approach that Stacey Abrams brought to politics. Her efforts sought to outnumber traditional Georgia voters with a new, more progressive electorate.
Her New Georgia Project, which she co-founded in 2014, targeted the “New American Majority – people of color, those 18 to 29 years of age, and unmarried women.” The group, which raised over $10 million from undisclosed donors, claims it registered 500,000 new voters from groups more likely to vote for progressive candidates.
Stacey’s strategy was revealed by a New York Times columnist named Michelle Goldberg, whose column entitled “We can replace them” caused a stir just before the 2018 election. Goldberg’s column depicted Georgia as a state in which “an embittered white conservative minority clings to power, terrified at being swamped by a new multiracial polyglot majority.”
Immediately after she lost, Stacey Abrams and her campaign manager started a new group to continue the fight against “voter suppression.” The new group, Fair Fight (with Fair Fight Action and Fair Fight PAC), filed a lawsuit against the secretary of state, claiming defects in Georgia’s voting machines.
Georgia’s new secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, then capitulated by replacing all the old voting equipment with new machines from Dominion Voting System at a cost of $100 million. Dominion voting machines are suspected of using Venezuelan software that enabled system administrators to switch thousands of ballots from Trump to Biden.
If Joe Biden ends up winning Georgia’s 16 electoral votes for president, he will owe a large debt to Stacey Abrams for inducing hapless Republican state leaders to purchase and install insecure voting machines, and otherwise rolling over for the Left.
But Stacey is not done. She has now focused her well-honed efforts toward replacing Georgia’s two Republican U.S. Senators with radical leftist challengers. Both contests will be decided in a runoff election to be held on January 5.
If Stacey succeeds in this political hat trick while Georgia Republican officials sit idly by, then the Senate in addition to the White House could fall into the hands of the radical Left. The GOP-majority Georgia legislature should exercise its responsibilities under the Constitution, Article II, section 1, to choose Electors based on the in-person voting, but instead they have cowered in fear of Stacey.
The Georgia legislature should also restore integrity to elections there by limiting mail-in voting to those who solicited ballots and have verified signatures on them. Better yet, the Georgia legislature should eliminate most mail-in voting altogether to stop the travesty of ballot harvesting, by which ballots are cast in the names of people who did not genuinely vote by secret ballot.
Stacey will be the leading candidate for the next vacancy on the Supreme Court if Joe Biden is sworn into office, and he promised to name a black female to the high court. How does Justice Abrams sound?
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.