It’s good to be Stacey Abrams.
She’s the toast of the entertainment and news industries, and all she had to do was lose an election to a Republican. Rarely has so much praise and honor been awarded to a person so undeserving.
Abrams is a “political visionary,” according to the press. She’s a voting rights champion and pioneer. She’s a savior whose tireless altruism is this country’s best hope for a brighter, more equitable future.
If one relied on her adoring press, one would think Abrams is a centrist Democrat who has revolutionized national politics. One would think she is a legitimate victim of Republican “voter suppression” tactics. One would also think she has genuine, broad appeal outside the cloister of media and political types who are attempting to make her a “thing.”
One would never know her entire political backstory is comically thin. One would never know she is largely unpopular with voters. One would never know Abrams is a radical and a demagogue.
One would never even know the press’s version of Stacey Abrams is pure fiction, one that exists solely to promote the Democratic message that Republican victories are illegitimate.
Abrams is no political prodigy. She’s not middle-of-the-road. She’s not beloved by voters. She wasn’t even a particularly successful legislator. She’s simply a woman who lost a high-profile race and refuses to accept defeat.
Where have we heard this before?
A review of Abrams’s career is brief. In 2008, she ran unopposed for the Georgia House of Representatives. She won her race, which, given the circumstances, was impossible for her not to do. Since then, Abrams’s only other major political “accomplishment” was in 2018 when she lost the Georgia gubernatorial race to her Republican opponent, Gov. Brian Kemp.
After 2018, Abrams turned defeat into a personality trait, to the great delight of the Democratic Party and the corporate press. She founded a get-out-the-vote group, claiming inspiration from her supposed experience losing to “voter suppression.” She also has spent the past several years telling everyone who will listen that she was robbed, that she is the true and rightful governor of the Peach State.
“To be clear,” Abrams told supporters in her post-election speech, “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.”
She then claimed she could prove the Republican Party stole the race. She has yet to deliver on that promise.
Later, in 2019, 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 in an interview with the New York Times Magazine, “I feel comfortable now saying, ‘I won.’”
Just last year, at a rally for failed Democratic Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, Abrams told a crowd, “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.”
In total, Abrams, whose personal website referred to her as “governor” as recently as 2021, claimed at least a dozen times in the six months following her defeat she actually won her election, and that she “lost” only because Republicans cheated.
For the record, Kemp won the election with 50.2% of the vote, compared to Abrams’s 48.8%. He won by roughly 55,000 more votes. Abrams, for her part, maintains Kemp won only because he suppressed the vote. About that: Approximately 3.9 million votes were cast in Georgia during the 2018 midterm election cycle. This is the same number of votes cast in the entire state during the 2012 presidential election and not that far off from the 4.1 million votes cast in the 2016 election, which saw a considerable increase from the 2.5 million votes cast in Georgia during the 2014 midterm elections. In total, the 2018 election saw voter turnout in Georgia increase by an estimated 1.4 million from the previous midterm election cycle. Put simply, whoever was tasked with “suppressing the vote” did an awful job of it.
In the years following her defeat, Abrams’s post-2018 career has mirrored that of former President Donald Trump. It is one filled with bitterness and uncorroborated allegations of electoral foul play.
Yet, unlike Trump, the media adore Abrams. Her get-out-the-vote efforts (despite the fact they’re predicated on a lie). Her willingness to make a career out of losing to a Republican. Her devotion to the conspiracy theory alleging the GOP “stole” the Georgia governor’s race via “voter suppression,” even though there’s no evidence to back this claim.
Indeed, concurrent with corporate media’s effort to promote Abrams as a sort of political and cultural icon are their efforts to legitimize her election trutherism. She’s not a crank like Trump, even though her complaints are nearly identical in flimsiness. Rather, she’s one of the great “defenders of democracy,” according to the press. They’ve ignored her actual electoral record, disregarding the fact she lost the one race in which she ran opposed, and have settled instead on a narrative alleging she’s a “political visionary.” They’ve positioned her as a “moderate,” despite the fact she is anything but. They’ve also played footsie with her conspiracy theories.
The Washington Post editorial board, for example, published an article last October arguing Abrams may have a point, even though the paper itself can’t find any evidence to back her “voter suppression” allegations. Hilariously enough, the same Washington Post article dedicates an enormous amount of energy to attacking Trump’s mirror-image election conspiracy theories.
In 2019, the New Yorker published a glow-up profile giving credence to Abrams’s uncorroborated allegations.
“Georgians, though, still use the terms ‘won’ and ‘lost’ advisedly, not only because the Democrat never technically conceded but also because of the highly irregular nature of the contest,” the profile reads. “Abrams … is focused on addressing the irregularities that her campaign identified.” After all, “many people in and outside Georgia believe that, without the irregularities, Abrams would have won.”
Many people say, indeed.
The New York Times, meanwhile, published an opinion article claiming Kemp “played referee, scorekeeper and contestant so he could tip the scales in his favor in the 2018 election for governor against Stacey Abrams, whose voter protection efforts had begun years earlier.” This is not true. Most of the aforementioned roles were played by county elections boards.
In one segment on MSNBC, Trump-era hotshot reporter Katy Tur asked Abrams point-blank: “Do you think the vote was stolen from you, the election was stolen from you?”
“I think the election was stolen from the people of Georgia,” said Abrams.
Tur let the assertion go unchallenged.
In November 2021, National Public Radio host Meghna Chakrabarti referred to Abrams as one of the “great defenders of democracy,” promoting all the while the failed candidate’s unverified election allegations.
Abrams got her own TED talk. She even got her own Amazon Prime documentary devoted to legitimizing her “voter suppression” claims.
Members of the press have also worked hard to rebrand Abrams’s political philosophy according to whatever makes her more attractive to the shifting proclivities of voters. Now, she’s a reasonable “moderate,” despite being the same person they sold back in 2018. Back then, they called her a “bold progressive” with an “unapologetically left” agenda.
At times, journalists seemingly confuse Abrams’s strategy with their own. The New York Times in January published a profile arguing Abrams is “a leader who has carefully calibrated her positions, making a point to avoid drifting into one Democratic lane or another.”
Abrams’s “pragmatism has encouraged some moderates — including Georgians who served with Ms. Abrams in the State Capitol — to compare her to other center-left national figures who had credibility among the grass-roots base, like Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton,” the article adds.
Earlier, in 2020, Slate praised her for putting together “a platform that successfully balanced the interests of lefties and just-win normies.”
This is in direct opposition to what the same press said of Abrams in 2018.
During the Georgia governor’s race, the New York Times published an opinion article praising her for running as “an outspoken progressive” with a strategy that “emphasized her progressive positions.” Abrams made an appearance in a separate New York Times opinion article that same year on the “rise of black progressives” who are “unapologetically left” and have “rejected the idea that [they need] centrist Democrats to win.”
In 2018, just before the election, Politico published a news report celebrating the “Year of the Black Progressive.” The report included Abrams and other “bold progressive” candidates who won “Democratic nominations not despite being progressive, but precisely because they’re running to the left of their competition to have a shot at winning white liberals.”
Adding to the absurdity of the press’s supposed finger-on-the-pulse rebranding campaign for Abrams is this: She is not particularly popular with voters.
A November 2021 survey of a hypothetical rematch between Abrams and Kemp showed Abrams trailing by 3 points with likely voters in the state. The survey, which was conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, shows Kemp with 47% of the vote, compared to Abrams’s 44%. On the national stage, things look about the same. The most recent data released by YouGov show only 36.2% of voters have a favorable opinion of Abrams. Meanwhile, 35.7% of voters hold an unfavorable opinion, while an alarming 28% say they have no opinion at all.
This is the person corporate media claim is a beloved and powerful political force.
There’s more going on here than simple wish-casting.
As Abrams has made a living litigating her loss to Kemp, Democratic lawmakers have promoted a narrative alleging Republicans win only when they cheat. This isn’t an uncharitable paraphrasing. This is something Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren quite literally stated in 2019.
“Massive voter suppression prevented Stacey Abrams from becoming the rightful governor of Georgia,” Warren said during an appearance at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network Convention. “They know that a durable majority of Americans believe in the promise of America, and they know that if all the votes are counted, we’ll win every time.”
The Democrats have been pushing this message for several years now, and they’ve done it all while using Abrams as the public face of their argument. There’s a reason why Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York chose Abrams to deliver the Democratic Party’s official response to then-President Trump’s 2019 State of the Union address.
“[Abrams] has led the charge for voting rights, which is at the root of just about everything else,” Schumer said.
This is known as saying the quiet part aloud. Democrats have a talking point to sell, and they’ve settled on Abrams as the poster child for the effort. Media have responded not only by legitimizing her election grievances but also by erasing her earlier “progressive” bona fides and recasting her as a much more appealing “moderate.”
On Dec. 1, 2021, Abrams announced she would run again for Georgia governor. She then had the audacity to allege she never disputed the results of the 2018 Georgia governor’s race.
“I did not challenge the outcome of the election, unlike some recent folks did,” she told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, referring to Trump’s own objections regarding the 2020 election. “What I said was that the system was not fair. And leaders challenge systems. Leaders say we can do better. That is what I declared.”
This, of course, is a falsehood. She most absolutely disputed the results of the election in both word and deed, including not one, but two separate lawsuits.
Unsurprisingly, the same media that tell us Abrams is a one-of-a-kind political savant, that she is a real-life martyr of GOP “voter suppression” tactics, have done exactly nothing to correct the record.
The truth matters, corporate media tell us. Yes, but apparently only some of the time.
Becket Adams is a senior commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
