Cartoon by Robert Ariail; courtesy of the Charleston City Paper. All rights reserved.
By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
NOV. 22, 2022 | Don’t you know Stacey Abrams is wondering “What happened?”
Emerging from the 2018 governor’s race after a close loss, she was the odds-on favorite to win the 2022 race and flip the governor’s office Democratic.
But something happened along the way.
One element seemed lacking in the 2022 campaign: there was no enthusiasm, or energy, that we saw in 2018. It seemed like she was simply awaiting her crowning as governor.
We wonder if she has figured out what went wrong.
After all, the way the 2022 election turned out nationally, she was the outlier. Though Democrats in many other parts of the nation did much better than anyone thought they would, she did worse than everyone originally thought she would.
Even when the early polls showed her running behind Gov. Brian Kemp, her campaign seemed to pay no attention to the polling. But this was one instance where the polling was right in Georgia, though polls seemed to be wrong for much of the nation.
Governor Kemp won in 2018 with 50.2 percent of the voters, compared to 48.8 percent for Ms. Abrams. Many people were thinking Ms. Abrams had the time to campaign for the 2022 election and increase her vote totals and win the governorship.
Abrams
However, the final outcome shows Ms. Abrams lost in 2022 by 297,898 votes. She lost the 2018 election by a much smaller margin, only 56,723 votes.
What? You can see how that raises big questions. That gives an indication that Georgia Democrats will face a vast uphill struggle to capture the governorship in 2026. From being a party ready to crown its first female Black governor….to having an abysmally bad year in 2022, it increasingly looks like Georgia may remain a “red” state for a while.
Just look down the list: the Republicans took every constitutional office by a 5 to 10 percent margin. Brad Raffensperger for Secretary of State, had the biggest margin, nearly 10 percent more than Bee Nguyen. But the biggest vote getter in 2022 was School Superintendent Richard Woods, who scored 2,115,684 votes, 4,000 more than Governor Kemp.
Interestingly, the Abrams effort was not helped by the relatively low turnout of Black voters. In 2018, 47.8 percent of the total vote was from the Black community. But in 2022, that turnout was 43.2 percent, a loss of 4.6 percent of black voters. Hispanic voter turnout was also lower, by 2.5 percent. Neither low turnouts helped Ms. Abrams.
One element was raised over and over again in the Abrams campaign: much of her campaign money came from out of state. That didn’t set right with many Georgians. You wonder, did the fact that Ms. Abrams seemed to be focusing more nationally, at least in raising millions of dollars, allow Georgia voters to wonder what she was really up to? Was her possible interest in future higher office so obvious that it impeded voters from being all-out for her in 2022?
Stacey Abrams could have been a fresh face as governor, able to make the state a two-party state, and possibly work across the aisle with Republicans and move the state forward as never before. We may never know.
You wonder if Stacey Abrams can regain her footing, and become a viable, contributing factor in Georgia politics again.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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