On Stacey Abrams And All Those Hopes

The New York Times reports that Democrats are fretting because it looks like Stacey Abrams is trailing her Republican rival Brian Kemp as he seeks a second term as governor. To make matters worse, Senator Raphael Warnock is doing better than her in his race.

Are there serious problems with racialised and racist voter suppression laws, nearly everywhere in this country but especially in the South? Yes, absolutely. Does the fact that Abrams is a Black woman affect how voters view her? No doubt. But her struggle in this race is perhaps only surprising to Democrats and mostly white voters outside Georgia, who have turned her into a magical token. It seems like loudly voicing support for Abrams is their version of those “Black Lives Matter” lawn signs so pervasive at one time: a nice and mostly meaningless performance of solidarity. Watching people gush over her, I can’t help thinking that this is also their version of, “I have Black friends.”

I’ve long been amused by a generally pervasive desire on the part of (mostly white) liberals and too many lefties to invest so much hope in Abrams. In 2018, she lost to Kemp — 48.8 percent to his 50.2 percent — and this narrow win has somehow been enshrined as a remarkable achievement. But in electoral politics, winning matters: if that’s the game you play, the rule is that you have to win. A lot of what passes for political analysis around Georgia before and after that race has been framed around Abrams’s identity. Several left-leaning commentators insisted at the time that Republicans were determined to defeat Abrams because of who she is — and as I’ve pointed out more than once, here and here, this is a ridiculous point to dwell on. Of course Republicans will deploy racist tactics against a non-white candidate but their primary impulse is to win and they will do whatever it takes. Do they not want a Black woman to win? Of course. But they don’t want anyone in the opposition to win. If Stacey Abrams turns into a glowing, silvery-white alien from outer space who guarantees a million dollars to every household in Georgia (or, better still, free healthcare for life), the Right will find ways to undermine her credibility. If Kemp’s nearest rival were a white, Christian male pastor, they would find ways to paint him as the Son of Satan. The Right’s genius is that it knows how to win. The left’s problem is that it is constantly surprised by the fact that everyone else is obsessed with winning — see, for example, I beg you, again, this constant cooing over Abrams’s narrow loss as if it had not been…an actual loss. I will repeat what I wrote in “Organise Like The Right”: “As long as we focus on the idea that Republicans care about identity in the same way we do, we’re going to keep losing because all of our energy is going to be focused on an aspect of political races that, for the Right, is just one part of the picture.”

There are, of course, complexities to all this — Abrams did, after all, make it to this stage. And there is still time for everything to change dramatically because, well, this is politics. But I will submit that the Georgia gubernatorial race is an odd duck in that it seems — from, admittedly, a very great distance — that half the battle is actually being waged in the state and the other half outside it. Sometimes I wonder: is Stacey Abrams running for governor of Georgia or for Black Woman And Leader everywhere else? She has already won as the latter, but may lose as the former.