How Stacey Abrams helped turn Georgia blue for Biden

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! The 2020 election comes with notable ‘firsts,’ Greta Thunberg finally responds to an old Trump jab, and Stacey Abrams’s work is coming to fruition. Have a decisive day.

– A Fair Fight over Georgia. I woke up this morning to the news that Joe Biden had pulled ahead in Georgia (and as I write, he’s done the same in Pennsylvania). While we don’t yet know what the final count will be—in this election, there’s no way I’m making any assumptions!—the fact that Democrats’ nominee is leading in Georgia, which last went blue in 1992 for Bill Clinton, is a massive accomplishment. And while it takes a village to shift the political tides, it’s hard to imagine this moment without the work of one woman: Stacey Abrams.

Abrams is, of course, the attorney who ran for Georgia governor in 2018. Had she won, she would have been the first ever Black woman to lead a U.S. state. But she lost by less than 55,000 votes—amid charges of voter suppression against her opponent, now-Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who stalled thousands of voter registrations and purged the rolls of hundreds of thousands of voters.

Rather than retreating to lick her wounds, Abrams got to work. She founded Fair Fight, an organization dedicated to ensuring free and fair elections and has been instrumental in registering about 800,000 Georgia voters—many of whom are people of color—since 2018. Given the slim margins of victory we’re seeing in this election, it’s clear just how monumental a difference those new voters could make.

Abrams has been steadfast in maintaining that her work is part of collective movement, tweeting just this morning to share credit with a number of other activists and nonprofits:

Yet if you were ever looking for an example of how one person can make a difference in the world—and perhaps even shift the course of history—here it is.

Kristen Bellstrom
[email protected]
@kayelbee

Today’s Broadsheet was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.