After losing the election for Georgia governor in 2018, Stacey Abrams has boosted her national profile as a voting rights advocate, combatting a wave of Republican-led efforts to restrict ballot access across the US.
But closer to home, as she makes a second bid for the governor’s office, the Democratic candidate has struggled to close the gap between her campaign and her GOP opponent Brian Kemp, who is making his pitch for another four years in office, as they head to a rematch this November.
On the final day of early voting in their governor’s race, Ms Abrams and Mr Kemp faced off on the debate stage for the first time since their 2018 challenge.
While Mr Kemp characterised his administration as a success and outlined his vision for an optimistic second term, Ms Abrams pointed to what she called the “state of fear” for many Georgians that has dominated the last four years since they faced off in 2018 – gun violence, threats to abortion rights and rising housing and medical costs.
The state’s affordability crisis was top of mind for nearly 20 per cent of respondents in a September survey from University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and the second-most important issue for 15 per cent of respondents.
Threats to democracy is a priority for 17 per cent.
“This is a governor who for the last four years beat his chest and delivered very little for most Georgians,” Ms Abrams said, adding that Mr Kemp “has weakened our privacy rights and women’s rights” and “denied women the access to reproductive care.”
“The most dangerous thing facing Georgia is four more years of Brian Kemp,” she said.
Despite polls showing her trailing behind Mr Kemp, Ms Abrams said she is “on the right side of history and on the right side of the issues.”
Voters by and large align with Ms Abrams on issues central to her campaign, including gun reform and abortion rights. But Ms Abrams has argued that polling fails to capture key parts of the electorate: new voters and voters who sat out previous elections.
“But we also know that polls are a snapshot,” she said. “The question is: Who are they taking a picture of?”
The shadow of a 2018 election and new threats to voting rights
Ms Abrams ended her campaign but did not concede after losing the 2018 race for governor, alleging unfair election practises, voter suppression and mass purging of Georgia voters while Mr Kemp was then Georgia’s secretary of state.
In office as governor, Mr Kemp signed a sweeping restrictive elections bill into law, joining a nationwide Republican-led campaign to roll back ballot access.
During Monday’s debate, Ms Abrams defended her response at the time, listing out her complaints and the complaints of other Georgia voters laid out in legal challenges over the following years.
“I will always acknowledge the outcome of elections,” Ms Abrams said. “But I will never deny access to every voter, because that is the responsibility of every American: to defend the right to vote.”
In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, as Republican state lawmakers and governors pushed restrictive voting bills in the wake of Donald Trump’s baseless narrative that the outcome was “stolen” from him and marred by fraud, Governor Kemp signed Senate Bill 202 into law, among the first in the still-ongoing wave of similar legislation.
The 98-page law made dozens of changes to election policy, including limiting the time to request a mail-in ballot, rolling back pandemic-era ballot drop box availability and reducing early voting periods before runoff elections.
The measure made it a crime to hand out food and water within 150 feet of a polling place or within 25 feet of a person standing in line to vote, which a federal judge upheld this summer after voting rights advocates argued that the law will be used to suppress votes in areas where voters are more likely to endure longer lines on Election Day.
Ms Abrams called voter suppression the “hallmark of Brian Kemp’s leadership”.
“For someone to say that we have been suppressive in our state when we have seen turnout increase over the years, including with minorities ... it’s simply not true,” Mr Kemp said.
Mr Kemp said the bill makes it “easy to vote and hard to cheat” in the state, a familiar GOP refrain in support of restrictive voting laws.
The fight for Medicaid and abortion care
Fair Fight, the voting rights organisation founded by Ms Abrams after her loss in the 2018 gubernatorial election, has expanded its efforts to cover medical debt in recent years, canceling more than $212m for more than 108,000 people across the South.
The effort comes as Georgia faces more than a dozen hospital closures, including eight within the last decade, six of which happened under Governor Kemp.
Georgia is also among 12 states that have refused to expand Medicaid coverage under Affordable Care Act provisions, which would grant health coverage for low-income residents to people up to 138 per cent of the federal poverty level, or roughly $19,000 in annual income.
Half-a-million Georgians would gain Medicaid coverage under that expansion, which is supported by a majority of the state’s residents, including most Republicans.
Mr Kemp has rejected the idea. During the debate, he called it a “broken” programme.
Eligible Georgians have had access to care under coronavirus aid provisions that are due to expire, which would leave tens of thousands of Georgia residents without coverage in a state where more than 38,000 people have died of Covid-19.
Ms Abrams accused Mr Kemp’s administration of sending a figurative “Brinks truck” of $3.5bn to other states “because this governor will not accept the money” for Medicaid expansion.
“We need a governor who can do the math but can also do the morality,” she said.
Ms Abrams also warned voters that the governor has “denied women the access to reproductive care” referencing a state law outlawing abortion at roughly six weeks of pregnancy, before many people know they are pregnant.
Mr Kemp said he does not intend to introduce more abortion restrictions.
Gun reform, public safety and racial justice
In one of his first questions to Ms Abrams, Mr Kemp asked whether she was endorsed by any law enforcement agencies so that he can tout his. Ms Abrams – who is Black – pointed to her own family members’ interactions with the police.
“Unlike you, I don’t have the luxury of relying on slogans to describe my position on public safety,” she said. “I believe we need safety and justice … Like most Georgians, I lead a complicated life where we need access to help but we also need to know we are safe from racial violence.”
As governor, Mr Kemp also signed a measure into law allowing permitless concealed carrying of handguns in public.
During the debate, he falsely claimed that all gun purchases go through background checks; that is not the case for firearms bought at gun shows or during private sales, or from non-federally licensed dealers.
Mr Kemp said his plan for tackling gun violence is to “take the bad people doing the shootings and lock them up,” largely putting the blame on the rise of “street gangs”.
Ms Abrams fired back, pointing to high-profile acts of violent hate crimes and mass shootings that have plagued the state, none of which were committed by “street gangs”.
“We can protect the Second Amendment and second graders,” Ms Abrams said. “That means that, yes, more people are buying guns, but that’s because they think that’s the only way to protect themselves because guns have flooded our streets. These are communities that want to be safe. They don’t want to have to carry weapons.”
She said Mr Kemp’s gun measures make the state “less safe”.
Long-shot libertarian candidate Shane Hazel said Ms Abrams’ position on gun reform will be her “undoing” in Georgia.
In another segment, Ms Abrams explained why she burned a state flag – which at the time contained a Confederate battle flag – during a 1992 protest.
As a college freshman, she said she was “deeply disturbed by the racial divisiveness” that the symbol inflamed and represented.
“I took an action of peaceful protest,” she said. “I said that was wrong, and 10 years later my opponent Brian Kemp voted to remove that symbol.”
Later, Ms Abrams addressed the fact that the state has introduced efforts to restrict classrooms from teaching the full breadth of histories, while Mr Kemp claimed that students are “being indoctrinated in the classroom” – echoing right-wing rhetoric around eliminating honest lessons on race and gender after he signed a measure into law to remove so-called “divisive concepts” from schools.
