Stacey Abrams is a liar.
The two-time Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate claimed this week she has not challenged the outcome of the 2018 Georgia governor’s race.
This is a bald-faced lie. She challenged and undermined the election’s legitimacy even before state authorities certified Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s victory.
“I did not challenge the outcome of the election, unlike some recent folks did,” Abrams told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, referring to former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election trutherism.
“What I said was that the system was not fair,” Abrams continued. “And leaders challenge systems. Leaders say we can do better. That is what I declared. I could not in good conscience say that, in order to protect my political future, I’m going to be silent about the political present, which is that we have a system under a leader that sought to keep people from casting their ballot, that threw the ballots out, that said that voter suppression was a viable tactic for winning elections.”
This is historical revisionism of the worst sort. Abrams absolutely has challenged the results of the 2018 election, which she lost by roughly 55,000 votes. She has spent every year since declaring herself the true and rightful governor of Georgia. Let’s rewind the tape.
The 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election was Nov. 6.
Abrams didn’t end her candidacy until Nov. 16. Even then, she ended it only after she filed a lawsuit demanding all rejected absentee ballots and provisional ballots be counted in the race. She also considered taking additional legal challenges, including “one before the state Supreme Court that was precipitated on a provision allowing a losing candidate to challenge results based on ‘misconduct, fraud or irregularities … sufficient to change or place in doubt the results,'” the Associated Press reported at the time.
It wasn’t until Kemp’s win was certified by the state that Abrams finally decided to pull the plug on her campaign.
In her speech announcing the end of her candidacy, she accused her opponent, who she labeled “an architect of suppression” in the days leading up to the election, of stealing the race. She also refused to concede.
“The incompetence and mismanagement we witnessed in this election had been on display months before,” she said. “The mistakes clearly altered the outcome.”
She added, “I acknowledge that former Secretary of State Brian Kemp will be certified as the victor in the 2018 gubernatorial election. But to watch an elected official – who claims to represent the people of this state, baldly pin his hopes for election on the suppression of the people’s democratic right to vote – has been truly appalling. So, to be clear, this is not a speech of concession.
“Concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true or proper. As a woman of conscience and faith, I cannot concede,” Abrams said.
Later, after her nonconcession speech, a group backed by Abrams filed a federal lawsuit claiming the state had “grossly mismanaged” the 2018 election. A judge in April tossed some of the lawsuit’s claims.
Since then, Abrams has played the role of the king in exile, telling anyone who will listen she really won the election and that Kemp is in the governor’s mansion only because he supposedly suppressed the vote. (She has yet to provide any meaningful evidence to back this assertion.)
In 2019, for example, Abrams told an audience at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, “I don’t concede that I lost. I acknowledge that I’m not the governor of Georgia.”
That same year, she also said, “I did win my election. I just didn’t get to have the job.”
Abrams claimed at another event, “I’m going to tell you what I’ve told folks across this state, and this is not a partisan statement, it’s a true statement: We won.”
She said later on MSNBC, “I think the election was stolen from the people of Georgia.”
Abrams said in an interview with New York Magazine, “If you look at the totality of the information, it is sufficient to demonstrate that so many people were disenfranchised and disengaged by the very act of the person who won the election that I feel comfortable now saying, ‘I won.'”
In total, Abrams claimed at least 12 times in the six months following her defeat she actually won her election, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis.
More recently, while campaigning for failed gubernatorial Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe in Virginia, Abrams said, “I’m here to tell you that just because you win doesn’t mean [you’ve] won. I come from a state where I was not entitled to become the governor.”
If this doesn’t amount to challenging the outcome of the 2018 Georgia governor’s race, I’m not sure what does.
