PHILADELPHIA—In words that she could easily apply to the entire country, Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams declared her state “is in a state of emergency” from the wide-ranging rightist threat to democracy.
And she told AFSCME Convention delegates meeting in Philadelphia that the cure for that right-wing disease is massive turnout of workers and fellow progressives at the polls this year.
“We have to tell people their power is real. We’ve got to go and vote,” she said. “We’ve got to labor together” to beat back the anti-democracy forces.
Abrams and Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro were the only two gubernatorial hopefuls who spoke to AFSCME. Their presence heightened the importance to workers of the 36 governorships up for grabs this year.
Abrams, making her second run for Georgia’s top job, faces incumbent Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. He narrowly beat her in 2018 after, in his prior post as Secretary of State, Kemp purged 860,000 voters from the state’s rolls, including half a million on one day in July 2017.
An estimated 80% of them were Black.
That was an inkling of the Republican threat to democracy which Abrams discussed in her July 12 address. She’s spent the intervening four years running a massive registration drive and GOTV organizations in Georgia.
Still, “I live in a state that is in a state of emergency,” Abrams said.
“We’ve been convinced that we’re OK…I’m running because they are trying to create a false choice about who we are and what we can be,” she said of the rightists and white supremacists who now form the backbone of the Republican Party.
“We know who is in charge and what’s at stake…I am an American and as an American, it is my responsibility to do what I can for the people of this country. I’m here to say thank you for what you’ve done but I’m here to ask you to do a little more.
“Voting is not magic. Voting is medicine…Voting is how we treat the ills of our society. It is medicine we have to take again and again. When we take it, we get better.”
“A little more” is what Abrams’s groups, aided by armies of union volunteers, did in 2020. They were credited with turning the deep-red state purple, narrowly carrying Georgia for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in 2020 and for Democratic senatorial candidates Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock in the Jan. 5, 2021 runoff.
“It wasn’t so long ago that we couldn’t have dreamed of competing politically in the state of Georgia. But that’s changing. Georgia is changing,” union President Lee Saunders added.
The senatorial victories produced the current 50-50 U.S. Senate split, which Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris breaks when needed, giving pro-worker forces control.
The two were sworn in on January 6—and their wins, though key ever since, were overshadowed by the Trumpite-Republican invasion of the U.S. Capitol that day. Had that insurrection succeeded in preventing certification of Biden’s electoral vote victory—including in Georgia–it would have been the ultimate in voter suppression.
“Democracy isn’t destiny, but it is opportunity,” Abrams told the AFSCME crowd. But people must take advantage of it. That’s where AFSCME and the rest of organized labor come in, she said, by getting everyone to do so.
“When I thought about who could invest in the future of Georgia, labor came first, not because they were the strongest not because they were the biggest, not because they were the fastest, but because they were the truest,” Abrams added. “The boots on the ground were green,” AFSCME’s color.
“I live in a state that is in a state of emergency. We’ve been convinced that we’re OK… I’m running because they are trying to create a false choice about who we are and what we can be,” she said of the rightists and white supremacists who now form the backbone of the Republican Party.
“We know who is in charge and what’s at stake…I am an American and as an American, it is my responsibility to do what I can for the people of this country,” Abrams vowed. “I’m here to say thank you for what you’ve done but I’m here to ask you to do a little more.
“To get there we’ve got to push past what they’ve done to us,” Abrams said of the white supremacists, the Republicans, and special interests who craft legislation—which GOP-run governments enact—curbing or eliminating voting rights for women, people of color, the lesser-abled, LGBTQ people and workers.
On specific issues, Abrams said “we gotta give access to health insurance and protect a woman’s right to choose” abortion—a right the Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court just jettisoned. That same majority has also blessed state voter suppression laws.
And Abrams supported both better law enforcement and more justice for people of color whom the police, white supremacists, or both often oppress. She also backed “access to health insurance” and “a woman’s right to choose” abortion.
“Georgia had a particularly evil case, where three white men were later convicted of murdering Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery in cold blood in February 2020. At least one, Greg McMichael, was a former law enforcement officer. All three received life terms.
“We need to make sure we are investing in law enforcement so they can do their job,” Abrams told the AFSCME crowd. “But the other part of it is we can’t ignore the noxious and racist and terrible history of law enforcement in the United States. We cannot lie to ourselves about what we see when racial violence is visited on us, when over-policing hurts us, when trust falls, then we’ve got to call it out.”
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