There's No Democrat Alive Who Makes Republicans More Nervous Than Stacey Abrams Does

Authored by esquire.com and submitted by alabasterheart
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They’re having a right fine primary election down in Georgia Tuesday. The vote-suppressing state legislature has arranged that two effective Democratic members of Congress, Carolyn Bourdeaux and Lucy McBath, are running against each other, so the gerrymander’s slithered a destructive path through the 7th congressional district. From NPR:

Just a few years ago, Atlanta's suburbs were congressional battlegrounds. In 2020, policy professor Bourdeaux defeated a Republican. In the district next door, prominent gun control advocate McBath did the same in 2018. But when Republican lawmakers redrew the maps last year, they made McBath's 6th Congressional District a lot more friendly to Republicans by squeezing as many Democrats as possible into the 7th District, which is represented by Bourdeaux. Two competitive districts became one very red district and one very blue district.

"She made her choice and we just have to go with it," says Laura Raymond, who's voting for Bourdeaux and is working the sign-in table. Raymond thinks McBath could have mounted a competitive race in her original district, rather than taking on Bourdeaux. "I have found more Democrats who thought they were the only ones in their neighborhood and they're not," Raymond says.

Which is just the kind of polite ill-feeling that the gerrymander leaves behind like slime as it passes. But the real action is in the race for governor, in which we are rediscovering the fact that presumptive Democratic nominee Stacey Abrams pretty much scares the SansaBelts off every Republican in the country, but especially the Republicans in Georgia. Over the weekend, addressing a local fundraiser, Abrams said the following, as reported by NBC News:

“I am tired of hearing about being the best state in the country to do business when we are the worst state in the country to live. “Now, somebody’s going to try to Politifact me on this—let me contextualize,” Abrams continued. “When you’re No. 48 for mental health, when you’re No. 1 for maternal mortality, when you have an incarceration rate that’s on the rise and wages that are on the decline, then you are not the No. 1 place to live in the United States. But we can get there. You see, Georgia is capable of greatness. We just need greatness to be in our governor’s office.”

These remarks, of course, were nothing unusual. I literally never have covered a presidential or gubernatorial race in which a challenger didn’t bad-mouth the state or the country, usually blaming it on the incumbent. In 1980 Ronald Reagan couldn’t go five minutes without running the country down while blaming Jimmy Carter. Abrams didn’t pin the conditions she cited on any individual, but I give her credit for her pre-emptive strike against the Gaffe Police, who already were cranking up the sirens. Fortunately, Abrams got saved from an idiot news cycle by one of her putative opponents. From the Washington Post:

Former senator David Perdue, who is trailing in the polls for Georgia’s GOP gubernatorial nomination, on Monday attacked Stacey Abrams, the Democrat running unopposed in her primary, by claiming she’s “demeaning her own race.” During a campaign stop in Dunwoody, Ga., Perdue asked the crowd whether they had seen “what Stacey said this weekend.” “She said that Georgia is the worst place in the country to live,” Perdue said. “Hey, she ain’t from here. Let her go back where she came from if she doesn’t like it here.”

Presto-change-o. Thanks to the intervention of a guy who was likely to lose the Republican primary by fat double-digits to incumbent Brian Kemp, the story shifts from Abrams Gaffe Roils Race to Perdue makes racist remark about Abrams: She’s ‘demeaning her own race.’ And that was the actual headline the Post ran on its story. Well-struck, former senator Perdue. Hard to believe that you lost your Senate seat and now will get run over by the whole train in the race for governor. There is absolutely no Democrat alive who makes Republicans more nervous than Stacey Abrams does. She makes them dance like Gregory Hines all over their own dicks.

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Senor_Wah on May 25th, 2022 at 02:08 UTC »

I don’t know, if I was the Republican leadership I’d be pretty damn scared of John Fetterman, too

kaos567 on May 24th, 2022 at 23:52 UTC »

Good I’m glad I can vote for her. I’d do it twice but I’m democrat.

alabasterheart on May 24th, 2022 at 23:39 UTC »

And she has just been declared the winner of Georgia's Democratic primary for governor (not really surprising, given she was unopposed in the primary). Georgia hasn't had a Democratic governor since 2003. I hope she wins in November and becomes America's first ever black woman governor. Georgia deserves so much better than Kemp.