Stacey Abrams: A ‘Rising Star’ Flames Out
She’s about to lose her second gubernatorial race in four years, despite having been the darling of the mainstream media and their fellow Democrats.
In 2018, Stacey Abrams ran for governor of Georgia, thus becoming the first black woman to do so in any state on a major-party ticket. On Election Day of that year, she notched two more history-making distinctions: She became the first black woman to lose a governor’s race and the first black woman to deny that she’d lost a governor’s race. And in less than a week, she’ll notch a fourth: She’ll become the first black woman to lose two governor’s races.
Say what you will about Stacey Abrams: She’s nothing if not historic.
And yet, despite her obvious shortcomings as a statewide candidate, the Democrats and the mainstream media have always swooned. Abrams was heralded by the Democrats as a fresh new leader. As FiveThirtyEight writes: “There was speculation about whether she’d be chosen as Joe Biden’s running mate during his 2020 bid for the presidency (a prospect Abrams welcomed), and she was largely credited for pioneering a new playbook focused on turning out black voters in Georgia, especially after Biden flipped the state in 2020.”
That wasn’t the half of it, though. Get a load of this passage from a Washington Post — yes, Washington Post — profile from May 2020:
Pandemonium ensues as she walks to the far left of the stage, like a runway supermodel, stops on a dime, poses, tilts her head slightly and smiles. Camera flashes explode. She next pivots and walks slowly to the center of the stage, freezes there and repeats the pose. Again, the flashes explode. Abrams is summoning her inner actress, and she is both enjoying the moment and getting through it to get to the conversation. She then pivots and walks to the far right of the stage, same. You wonder whether she has done this before…
Those were the days.
Since then, Supermodel Stacey has come back to earth. Hard. Among her missteps was forcing the city of Atlanta into the social-justice wars, and in so doing costing the city a cool $100 million in revenue when Major League Baseball decided to take its All-Star Game elsewhere. Then word trickled out that the gun-grabbing cop-defunder’s political action committee had spent a whopping $1.2 million on private security in 2021.
More recently, she demonstrated her medical and scientific illiteracy by saying: “There is no such thing as a heartbeat at six weeks. It is a manufactured sound designed to convince people that men have the right to take control of a woman’s body.”
And on Sunday, during her debate with incumbent Republican Governor Brian Kemp, she really stepped in it. In a campaign season in which crime is running behind only inflation and the economy in terms of importance to voters, Abrams said this in response to Kemp’s remark that he has the endorsement of 107 sheriffs around the state:
I’m not a member of the good ol’ boys club. So, no. I don’t have 107 sheriffs who want to be able to take black people off the streets, who want to be able to go without accountability. I don’t believe every sheriff wants that, but I do know that we need a governor who believes in both defending law enforcement but also defending the people of Georgia.
Stacey Abrams smears 107 Georgia sheriffs who are opposing her candidacy:
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 30, 2022
“So no I don’t have 107 sheriffs who want to be able to take Black people off the streets.” pic.twitter.com/IPXN4391St
Nothing reassures voters that you’re serious about crime quite like smearing 107 of your state’s sheriffs.
As for the governor, he left no doubt where he comes down when the topic is law enforcement: “Stacey Abrams’ comments about Georgia sheriffs in Sunday night’s debate are exactly the type of false, demoralizing, and offensive accusations that have driven good men and women away from the law enforcement profession. The Kemps will always have GA law enforcement’s back.”
No wonder she’s down double digits in her gubernatorial rematch with Kemp.
What happened to Stacey Abrams? Perhaps nothing at all. It might be as simple as her having a lower ceiling than the pundit class had imagined. Think about it: She lost the governor’s race in 2018 during a cycle that was very fruitful for Democrats, and now she’s running for the same job against an incumbent with a record of accomplishments in a cycle that’s very challenging for Democrats.
So we’ll bid Stacey an early adieu, and we’d only ask that she take Raphael Warnock with her.
