Republican strategists launched a new group Monday to thwart Stacey Abrams’ gubernatorial ambitions as the Democratic heroine of the Georgia gears up to run again in 2022.
The group, aptly named “Stop Stacey,” will function independently of the Republican Party to compete with Abrams’s get out the vote operations. She claims they helped tip the state for President Joe Biden in November and ultimately landed Democrats its two Senate seats. Both pick-ups secured a 50-50 split in the upper chamber, controlled by the left-wing party by virtue of the vice president, Kamala Harris, serving as the tie-breaker.
“After losing the White House and United States Senate in 2020, grassroots Republicans across Georgia and America are standing together to stop radical Stacey Abrams,” the group’s senior strategist Jeremy Brand said in a statement. “Thanks to her socialist backers and billionaires like George Soros, Stacey Abrams has raised over $100 million to orchestrate a total takeover in the 2022 election. We will do whatever it takes to expose Stacey Abrams’ radical network, highlight her her dangerous agenda, and ultimately defeat her.”
While Democrats carried Georgia in the presidential and emerged triumphant in its two Senate runoffs, the winning candidates only won by narrow margins, turning a deep-red state into a pivotal battleground for the first time in two decades. Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes, while Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock each ousted Republican incumbents by 1 and 2 percent respectively in January.
Abrams lost the 2018 gubernatorial race by about 55,000 votes, refusing to concede the contest and to this day claiming it was rigged by her opponent, Republican Brian Kemp, who was serving as the state’s secretary of state at the time. Despite the absence of evidence to show widespread voter suppression as Abrams charged, the narrative was adopted by legacy media lionizing Abrams alongside several other failed Democrat candidates from the same cycle.
It served as the catalyst for Abrams to launch her own organization focused on voting rights while asserting herself into the presidential veepstakes. Later reporting would show Abrams was never taken seriously by the Biden campaign last year even as she embarked on a public campaign for a spot on the ticket, breaking tradition in the process.
After claiming credit for the Democratic wins in Georgia this year, despite evidence to the contrary for the general contest in November, Abrams is already gearing up for a re-match with Kemp, whom President Donald Trump pledged to campaign against citing failure to press the president’s claims of voter fraud. Several Republican strategists on the other hand, speaking to Politico, cited Trump as the reason for their losses in the January runoffs through his aggressive pursuit to overturn his own results undermining Republican confidence in the contest.
Abrams has publicly remained quiet on her intentions for 2022, though sources have made clear for months that’s the plan, and Abrams herself has not ruled it out.
