1 day Ago By Isaac Schorr
Democrats created a monster in Stacey Abrams — and years after she first burst into the national political spotlight, she continues to punish them for doing so. Abrams, the perennial Georgia gubernatorial candidate, is reportedly mulling yet another campaign for the office in 2026, when the term-limited Republican Gov. Brian Kemp must depart.
She’s teased such a run for months, declaring that “all options are on the table,” insisting she’d “look at all the opportunities” and “evaluate” how she could “best serve.” Now, as she continues to drop hints, Peach State Democrats worry that yet another Abrams attempt at the governor’s mansion would consign them to yet another defeat. “She’s run twice, and that’s enough to convince me she won’t win” a general election, Jimmy Johnson, former chair of the Appling County Democratic Committee, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week.
“Can some other Democrat win? Yes.” “Abrams is great, but she missed the train,” said Marilyn Langford, another Democratic district official. The Journal-Constitution itself piled on, as top political reporter Greg Bluestein editorialized that Abrams’ “unabashed liberal platform and relentless GOP attacks have taken a toll on the swing voters who help decide Georgia races.
” “Her rematch against Kemp in 2022 ended in a resounding defeat, thanks partly to split-ticket voters who backed [Sen. Raphael] Warnock but rejected her,” Bluestein noted. Put it all together and you can’t miss the painful — or, for Republicans, painfully delicious — truth: Abrams can’t lose a Democratic primary, but can’t win a general election.
“Every Georgia Democrat is scared to death Abrams runs again because they know they can’t beat her in the primary,” said Cody Hall, an adviser to Kemp. “But she’s also probably their worst candidate in the general.” One might pity the Democrats and their media allies, were this quandary not entirely of their own making.
After all, while they may quietly be acknowledging the readily apparent truth that Abrams is political fool’s gold, the product of a years-long crusade to make a mendacious mediocrity out to be something more, they’re the ones who embarked upon it. First, there was her high-profile 2018 campaign, during which a bevy of prominent Democrats — including Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and then-Sen. Kamala Harris — all interceded on her behalf.
The Washington Post christened her “Democrats’ newest Southern hope,” and The New York Times insisted there was “more to” Abrams “than meets partisan eyes.” Then, after she fell short by a 1.4% margin, her boosters all parroted Abrams’ meritless charge that the election had been stolen from her.
Just hours after the polls closed, the Times published a guest essay by a voter-suppression expert alleging that Abrams had faced “the rising swamp of Neo-Jim Crow” in her loss. A full year later, the Post produced a “fact check” defending Pete Buttigieg’s claim that “racially motivated patterns of voter suppression are responsible for Stacey Abrams not being governor of Georgia right now.” The charade went on.
There were over-the-top photo shoots (she wore a cape!). There was a “Star Trek” cameo (she wore a cape and played the president of Earth!). There were glowing profiles (including one, in 2020, that that compared her to “a runway supermodel”).
There was speculation she might be Joe Biden’s vice president (a fire she helped fuel). But while there’s been plenty of evidence of Abrams’ supreme skill at self-promotion , what we have never seen is any demonstration of the political talent ascribed to her. In 2022, she ran for governor again — only to be embarrassed by Kemp , who beat her by a punishing 7.
5 percentage points. And these days, Abrams is haunted not only by the ghosts of her electoral failures past, but by scandal. In January, the Georgia Ethics Commission unanimously slapped Abrams’ New Georgia Project nonprofit with a $300,000 campaign-finance fine — the largest in state history — for illegally doing election work on behalf of her 2018 campaign.
You know, the same one in which she claimed Republicans were up to no good. Projection remains the surest sign of guilt. Then there’s the shady $2 billion-with-a-b federal grant the Biden administration gave to an environmental group that Abrams played a “pivotal” role in securing — a grant that’s now under investigation by President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, and from which Abrams in recent days has tried desperately to distance herself.
Among elite Democrats in the know, patience with Abrams — for her losses, her excuses, her campaign-finance shenanigans and her pork-barrel grifting — may at long last be running thin. But the bells they have pealed for her cannot be un-rung — and the extensive energy they’ve expended to turn Abrams into a progressive folk hero seems poised to backfire, again. Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite.
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