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Stacey Abrams will run for governor of Georgia in 2022, she said in an announcement on Wednesday. The Democrat narrowly lost the 2018 governor’s race to Republican Brian Kemp.
She declared her gubernatorial bid in a video posted to Twitter.
In 2018, Abrams founded Fair Fight, a nonprofit that says it’s dedicated to fighting voter suppression while encouraging voter participation and education. Some have even credited her with helping President Joe Biden win in Georgia in 2020, and helping Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock win their respective U.S. Senate runoff elections in 2021.
Abrams lost her 2018 race by a mere 1.4 percentage points. She refused to concede the loss and has even suggested the election was rigged against her.
“I make my claims based on empirical evidence, on a demonstrated pattern of behavior that began with the fact that the person I was dealing with was running the election,” she told New York Times Magazine in 2019. “If you look at my immediate reaction after the election, I refused to concede.
In 2018, Kemp was Georgia’s secretary of state. As such, his office was in charge of running the election. During his eight years in that position, Kemp canceled more than 1.4 million voter registrations. Such removals aren’t uncommon across the country, as states seek to maintain updated voter rolls that do not include dead residents or former residents who moved out of state.
Kemp did, however, close more than 200 polling locations during his time as secretary of state.
He has declared that he will seek reelection, though it remains to be seen if he will be able to survive a GOP primary in Georgia. Former president Donald Trump has ridiculed him for certifying the 2020 presidential election results in the state and would likely back a primary challenger who supported his baseless election fraud claims.
Earlier this year, Kemp was booed at the state Republican convention.