Fair Fight founder Stacey Abrams said on Sunday that Democrats feel “great urgency” around Georgia’s two elections on Tuesday, which will determine the balance of power in the Senate once President-elect Joe Biden takes over.
“We did very well in the mail vote, we did very well in the initial vote, but we know that Election Day will be the likely day for the most Republicans to participate, so we need Democrats who didn’t vote to be able to attend,” Abrams said to ABC’s “This Week” program, Martha Raddatz.
Recent polls show fierce disputes between Republican Senator David Perdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff in the second round and between Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler and Reverend Raphael Warnock in the special election. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp appointed Loeffler to replace former Senator Johnny Isakson, who retired in late 2019.
The races drew national attention, with both parties mobilizing their supporters. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will campaign in Savannah, Georgia, on Sunday. Both President Donald Trump and President-elect Joe Biden will perform in the state on Monday, with Biden campaigning in Atlanta and Trump being the headliner of a rally in Dalton.
More than 3 million Georgians voted early, a record for statewide runoff elections in Peach State. And, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 76,000 people signed up to vote between the deadline for the November general election and the deadline for the second round. Abrams said he was “very sure” that most of them are Democrats based on demographics.
“We don’t stop reaching these voters. Millions of contacts have been made, thousands of new records have been made, ”she said. “We know that at least 100,000 people who did not vote in the general election are now voting in this election.”
Raddatz pressured Abrams about Biden’s performance on Democratic Senate candidates during the general election and asked if she thought it was because Biden’s victory was more about dissatisfaction with President Donald Trump. Abrams attributed the difference to voters’ familiarity with Biden.
“Joe Biden has been part of American politics for over 40 years. And so, for a number of new voters, they will vote only when they are confident,” she said. “That’s why we’ve spent that time in the past nine weeks educating voters about Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.”
“They crossed the state and we believe that we have closed that distance and that the voters who are now attending know them absolutely and are at their side and voting for them,” she added.
Abrams also said that recent moves by Republicans, such as Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, by blocking $ 2,000 stimulus checks, are convincing Democratic voters of the importance of this election.
In a break with the Republican Party’s fiscal conservatism, Loeffler and Perdue supported Trump’s call for $ 2,000 stimulus checks, as did most Democrats. Both Democratic opponents criticized us for changing their positions.
“The hypocritical idea that it is normal to support business, but not government business, business serving the people, really galvanized voters. They feel the very real consequences of COVID-19 here in Georgia,” she said.
Since the defeat in the 2018 Kemp governoral election, Abrams launched Fair Fight to combat voter suppression and encourage voter participation. During the 2020 general election, the Fair Fight and The New Georgia project helped register hundreds of thousands of voters in the state.
When Raddatz pressed Abrams in some comparisons between his 2018 refusal to give in to Kemp and Trump’s rhetoric about the 2020 election, Abrams said it was like comparing “apples to bowling balls”.
Abrams alleged suppression of voters after his defeat to Kemp in 2018, who was then Georgia’s secretary of state. She pointed to the aggressive elimination of electoral lists, long lines and faulty machines at polling stations and the state preventing voters from registering as signs of voter suppression in their election.
“I indicated that there were a series of actions taken that prevented voters from voting,” Abrams said on Sunday “This Week”. “And in almost all of these circumstances, the courts agreed, as did the state legislature.”
“In contrast, President Trump has lost all of his challenges in the state of Georgia and has no evidence,” she added. “An audit – the fourth, I think, of this election – found that there was no fraud in our signature matching process. One person accidentally – or inadvertently – signed by her husband against the rules, but otherwise we know that the signatures match and that the process works. “
Raddatz asked whether Trump, continuing to promote unsubstantiated allegations of electoral fraud, could harm Republicans in the runoff elections, for example, by decreasing participation.
“I think it is always dangerous to undermine the integrity of the elections without evidence,” said Abrams. “When we challenged electoral suppression, we were able to prove it.”