Biden surpasses Trump in Georgia, and voter rights leader Stacey Abrams is lauded

Around 3:30 a.m. this morning, electronic tallies placed Biden ahead of Trump in Georgia with 99% of the vote counted. Similar scenarios are playing out in Pennsylvania and Arizona. However, in Georgia, if this trend continues, voters will have flipped the state from Republican red to Democrat blue, likely delivering Biden 16 Electoral College votes and placing him 1 Electoral College vote away from the 270 needed to win the U.S. presidency. The race has not been called yet and a recount is going to take place, with Biden leading slightly by more than 1,000 votes over Trump, less than a percentage point, and within the margin of error. 

In Georgia, a tectonic shift has occurred, which is also represented by the likely runoff between Jon Ossoff (D) and David Perdue (R), and Raphael Warnock (D) and Kelly Loeffler (R) for two U.S. Senate seats. This is a victory for the civil rights movement in Georgia, which has kept its eyes on the prize, as has Stacey Abrams since she was a girl. 

A young Abrams recognized the power of the vote to challenge and counter racial inequities and dedicated herself to enfranchising African Americans. She is attributed with expanding the Democratic base in Georgia through her work as a grassroots activist, as a Georgia house representative leader, and in her skillful run for Governor against Brian Kemp, a race she narrowly lost. Kemp, as Georgia’s Secretary of state, notoriously purged more than half a million registered voters from the rolls eight months before the election.

Abrams founded Fair Fight Action with allies and filed a suit after the 2018 election against the state government elections system and interim secretary of state in Georgia for racially-biased voter suppression. While a variation of this suit and others are still pending, Kemp was compelled by federal court to make public the list of purged voters and Stacey Abram’s Fair Fight Action went about the work of re-registering purged voters. Georgia hasn’t yielded electoral votes for the democratic nominee for president since 1992 for Bill Clinton.

Voting rights activists and Stacey Abrams in Georgia have earned their place in history for their relentless work and dedication to enfranchising people of color and young people in Georgia. They will soon be credited with officially flipping Georgia from red to blue and in the course of this penultimate and pivotal presidential election. Obama campaigning in Georgia this past week may have given Georgians that final push and John Lewis, and countless other voting rights and human rights activists, laid down the foundation which Abrams and her allies have so adroitly built upon and modernized.