Stacey Abrams spreads rhetoric that wouldn’t sound out of place at #StopTheSteal

[THG]

https://www.twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1450463796636667912
Abrams vs Trump in 2024 is not the matchup we need, but it might be the matchup we deserve. Imagine the sh**t-fest when either side inevitably loses!

[Inmate Trump]

I do think Kemp did some shady things during the 2018 race, but I believe he won and Abrams lost.  She's absolutely wrong to think she won, and her words here are just as deluded as Trump's about 2020.

[Hindsight was 2020]

I’ll take “disingenuous trolling meant to cover up the sleazy way Kemp got elected” for $1,000 Alex

[Woody]

I agree. She ain't entitled to sh*t.

What does she have to do with Virginia again??

[Roll Roons]

If the GOP was so determined to "steal" races in GA, Biden would have gotten 290 Electoral Votes and Mitch McConnell would still be Majority Leader.

In 2018, the state just wasn't there yet for Democrats. That's why Abrams lost. It wasn't some nefarious conspiracy.

[lfromnj]

If the GOP was so determined to "steal" races in GA, Biden would have gotten 290 Electoral Votes and Mitch McConnell would still be Majority Leader.

In 2018, the state just wasn't there yet for Democrats. That's why Abrams lost. It wasn't some nefarious conspiracy.

AVR probably cost Trump and Perdue the race(Small difference but probably enough)

[Roll Roons]

If the GOP was so determined to "steal" races in GA, Biden would have gotten 290 Electoral Votes and Mitch McConnell would still be Majority Leader.

In 2018, the state just wasn't there yet for Democrats. That's why Abrams lost. It wasn't some nefarious conspiracy.

AVR probably cost Trump and Perdue the race(Small difference but probably enough)

I think it was more because of the rapid demographic changes.

[lfromnj]

If the GOP was so determined to "steal" races in GA, Biden would have gotten 290 Electoral Votes and Mitch McConnell would still be Majority Leader.

In 2018, the state just wasn't there yet for Democrats. That's why Abrams lost. It wasn't some nefarious conspiracy.

AVR probably cost Trump and Perdue the race(Small difference but probably enough)

I think it was more because of the rapid demographic changes.

Mostly yeah but the last few thousand votes probably had a boost from AVR as voter registration normally would lag demographical changes by a bit.

[THG]

I agree. She ain't entitled to sh*t.

What does she have to do with Virginia again??

I’ve been hearing that the McAuliffe campaign has been having some issues with energizing AA voters, and this maneuver thus makes sense from a political standpoint.

[GP270watch]

 Stacey Abrams is right though. Many voting rights groups sued Georgia and the Raffensperger personally, some of the lawsuits have already been settled because of their voter suppression tactics.

[DrScholl]

I don't see where she said she won, she's merely talking about voting rights. Even if McAuliffe wins it doesn't mean that voting rights are totally secure and can be ignored.

[progressive85]

That doesn't work in VA, which is not GA.  Any victory for Trumpkin will be legitimate.

[Pres Mike]

Stacy Abrams never claimed more ballots were cast for her than Kemp in 2018

She does claim that Kemp, as a clearly bias SoS, did a lot of shady things. Had those shady things not occured, its possible Abrams might have won

She has every right to claim the election wasn't fair. It wasn't. But she never claimed it was rigged

[GeneralMacArthur]

What a BS false equivalence.

#StopTheSteal is horsesh--t because there's absolutely zero evidence that the election was stolen or otherwise illegitimate.  Despite countless, utterly pointless, audits and lawsuits and investigations and so on.  There was never any evidence.  There was never anything shady.  There was never any reason to believe the election was stolen.  Trump just made it up and a bunch of idiots believed it.

In the case of the 2018 gubernatorial election there's plenty of evidence, and the state has been successfully sued over the voter suppression tactics that cost Abrams the governorship.  Hundreds of thousands of people were simply eliminated from the set of registered voters by Kemp, who I will remind you, ran his own election.  He also systematically closed down hundreds of polling places in Abrams-heavy areas.  One of the counties was ruled to have violated the Civil Rights Act.

To be clear, Stacey Abrams isn't alleging that the election was "stolen" -- that the ballots were fraudulently counted or reported.  She's simply alleging that Kemp strategically utilized the office of secretary of state to prevent tens of thousands of her voters from being able to vote.  Which he undoubtedly did.

[GregTheGreat657]

What a BS false equivalence.

#StopTheSteal is horsesh--t because there's absolutely zero evidence that the election was stolen or otherwise illegitimate.  Despite countless, utterly pointless, audits and lawsuits and investigations and so on.  There was never any evidence.  There was never anything shady.  There was never any reason to believe the election was stolen.  Trump just made it up and a bunch of idiots believed it.

In the case of the 2018 gubernatorial election there's plenty of evidence, and the state has been successfully sued over the voter suppression tactics that cost Abrams the governorship.  Hundreds of thousands of people were simply eliminated from the set of registered voters by Kemp, who I will remind you, ran his own election.  He also systematically closed down hundreds of polling places in Abrams-heavy areas.  One of the counties was ruled to have violated the Civil Rights Act.

To be clear, Stacey Abrams isn't alleging that the election was "stolen" -- that the ballots were fraudulently counted or reported.  She's simply alleging that Kemp strategically utilized the office of secretary of state to prevent tens of thousands of her voters from being able to vote.  Which he undoubtedly did.

Yes, it was a conflict of interest that Kemp was Secretary of State, but he would have won either way. GA simply wasn't "there" yet for Dems at the time.

[Progressive Pessimist]

You can make this equivalency all you like but Abrams never inspired a violent mob of terrorists to descend upon Atlanta when Kemp's victory as certified.

[Badger]

You can make this equivalency all you like but Abrams never inspired a violent mob of terrorists to descend upon Atlanta when Kemp's victory as certified.

[Pericles]

I agree that it is a false equivalence, but Stacey Abrams should be more careful with her rhetoric.

[Alben Barkley]

Yeah I'm not gonna defend this. I've actually been saying for months that she needs to drop this BS because it makes it easy to "both sides" the issue. I understand she dislikes the unfair voting laws GA has adopted, but she herself has come up with a very good response to them. Whether she would have won in 2018 had her own tactics been used before is impossible to say, but what is known is that she simply lost that election. The votes cast for her opponent outnumbered those cast for her. Period. End of story. Whether in a vacuum more votes SHOULD have been cast for her if everyone who wanted to vote that year could have voted is both unknowable and irrelevant. She really, REALLY needs to just drop it. Or else it will not only hurt the image of the party, but possibly hurt her own chances in a rematch.

[Alben Barkley]

What a BS false equivalence.

#StopTheSteal is horsesh--t because there's absolutely zero evidence that the election was stolen or otherwise illegitimate.  Despite countless, utterly pointless, audits and lawsuits and investigations and so on.  There was never any evidence.  There was never anything shady.  There was never any reason to believe the election was stolen.  Trump just made it up and a bunch of idiots believed it.

In the case of the 2018 gubernatorial election there's plenty of evidence, and the state has been successfully sued over the voter suppression tactics that cost Abrams the governorship.  Hundreds of thousands of people were simply eliminated from the set of registered voters by Kemp, who I will remind you, ran his own election.  He also systematically closed down hundreds of polling places in Abrams-heavy areas.  One of the counties was ruled to have violated the Civil Rights Act.

To be clear, Stacey Abrams isn't alleging that the election was "stolen" -- that the ballots were fraudulently counted or reported.  She's simply alleging that Kemp strategically utilized the office of secretary of state to prevent tens of thousands of her voters from being able to vote.  Which he undoubtedly did.

Yes, it was a conflict of interest that Kemp was Secretary of State, but he would have won either way. GA simply wasn't "there" yet for Dems at the time.

Allison Lundergan Grimes was the Kentucky Secretary of State at the time she challenged McConnell in 2014; I don't recall any accusations of a conflict of interest over that, and think they would have been a stretch in any case. It would seem rather absurd if a state's SoS can't run. Yeah maybe it would be better if they recused themselves from the elections they personally run in, but still.

[GP270watch]

Allison Lundergan Grimes didn't engage in voter suppression of her opponents likely voters on the basis of race, or any sort for that matter. You guys don't seem to get it.

[Alben Barkley]

Allison Lundergan Grimes didn't engage in self-dealing voter suppression. You guys don't seem to get it.

I get it. At the time I was concerned about it. However, the fact that Kemp and Raffensperger reported a Biden victory in GA in 2020 and held firm on that despite immense pressure really cut the legs out from any claims GA was outright rigged. It seems like the GA GOP might have taken steps since then to try to help themselves in future elections, and no doubt they tried to stack things in their favor even before. But Biden's victory showed it was possible for Dems to win even despite that. And at the end of the day, even if there are unfair institutional barriers that make it harder for you to win, you have to work within the rules of the system and if you don't win, you don't win, simple as that. It is completely unprovable and frankly a real stretch to think that Abrams would have won that race even without those barriers; she lost GA by significantly more than Trump did. That's why she really needs to let it go, especially at this point. It can do no good, only harm, to still harp on about it.

[GM Team Member and Senator WB]

I agree that it is a false equivalence, but Stacey Abrams should be more careful with her rhetoric.

[Virginiá]

In addition to this from MacArthur's post above:

In the case of the 2018 gubernatorial election there's plenty of evidence, and the state has been successfully sued over the voter suppression tactics that cost Abrams the governorship.  Hundreds of thousands of people were simply eliminated from the set of registered voters by Kemp, who I will remind you, ran his own election.  He also systematically closed down hundreds of polling places in Abrams-heavy areas.  One of the counties was ruled to have violated the Civil Rights Act.

I would add that Kemp also has abused his authority numerous times to threaten his political opponents with law enforcement:

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/05/politics/stacey-abrams-investigation-witch-hunt-cnntv/index.html

Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams said Monday her Republican opponent, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, was abusing his power by investigating the Georgia Democratic Party over what his office describes as an attempt to hack the state’s voter registration system.

Georgia Democrats have vehemently denied the claim. A series of email chains obtained by CNN late Sunday indicate that, rather than taking part in any alleged “hack,” the Georgia Democrats had simply passed along information about security concerns from a voter to a private cybersecurity firm, which in turn shared the issue with Kemp’s office.

This is pretty much like Missouri's governor threatening people over clicking View Source in their browser. Kemp did this because just like Brian Kemp investigating & having Democratic school board election winners arrested for the crime of winning an election, he sought to use law enforcement to try and hurt Abrams' in the 2018 election. Not to mention the Georgia case of the server containing election-related data being irreversibly wiped after a lawsuit was filed regarding gross data security violations reported by security analysts, or the "investigation" into New Georgia Project's voter registration efforts years ago, which probably helped encourage Abrams to run in the first place. Kemp has a long sordid history of this scummy behavior.

I'm not going to say I think Abrams "truly" won, because I don't think that she did, but I also won't say that Kemp & the GOP's voter suppression and other shady methods didn't have a negative effect on the election, either.

Georgia Republicans and people like Brian Kemp represent the worst of politics, and they are exactly the kinds of people Democrats are referring to when they say "New Jim Crow." These shady and corrupt tactics are just that, and it's disgusting that America has elections that are run this way. The fact that Kemp could do all of this and not be indicted is a testament to normalized corruption has become and how our many states have too much control over how elections are run.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

In addition to this from MacArthur's post above:

In the case of the 2018 gubernatorial election there's plenty of evidence, and the state has been successfully sued over the voter suppression tactics that cost Abrams the governorship.  Hundreds of thousands of people were simply eliminated from the set of registered voters by Kemp, who I will remind you, ran his own election.  He also systematically closed down hundreds of polling places in Abrams-heavy areas.  One of the counties was ruled to have violated the Civil Rights Act.

I would add that Kemp also has abused his authority numerous times to threaten his political opponents with law enforcement:

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/05/politics/stacey-abrams-investigation-witch-hunt-cnntv/index.html

Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams said Monday her Republican opponent, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, was abusing his power by investigating the Georgia Democratic Party over what his office describes as an attempt to hack the state’s voter registration system.

Georgia Democrats have vehemently denied the claim. A series of email chains obtained by CNN late Sunday indicate that, rather than taking part in any alleged “hack,” the Georgia Democrats had simply passed along information about security concerns from a voter to a private cybersecurity firm, which in turn shared the issue with Kemp’s office.

This is pretty much like Missouri's governor threatening people over clicking View Source in their browser. Kemp did this because just like Brian Kemp investigating & having Democratic school board election winners arrested for the crime of winning an election, he sought to use law enforcement to try and hurt Abrams' in the 2018 election. Not to mention the Georgia case of the server containing election-related data being irreversibly wiped after a lawsuit was filed regarding gross data security violations reported by security analysts.

I'm not going to say I think Abrams "truly" won, because I don't think that she did, but I also won't say that Kemp & the GOP's voter suppression and other shady methods didn't have a negative effect on the election, either.

Georgia Republicans and people like Brian Kemp represent the worst of politics, and they are exactly the kinds of people Democrats are referring to when they say "New Jim Crow." These shady and corrupt tactics are just that, and it's disgusting that America has elections that are run this way. The fact that Kemp could do all of this and not be indicted is a testament to normalized corruption has become and how our many states have too much control over how elections are run.

As recently as late last year, the joke on discord was that "Kempreich" would steal GA for Trump.