* Served in the Georgia House of Representatives, 2007-17
* Opposes the use of an “exact match” system to verify voter registration records
* Disparages Free-Market Capitalism
* Opposes the Second Amendment
* Supports Non-Citizen Voting
* Supports Reparations for Slavery
* Supports Lowering the Legal Voting Age to 16
* Supports Abolishing the Electoral College
* Condemns America’s “Systemic Racism”
Stacey Yvonne Abrams was born in Madison, Wisconsin on December 9, 1973. She earned a BA in Political Science/Economics/Sociology from Spelman College in 1995, an MPA in Public Policy from the University of Texas in 1998, and a JD from Yale Law School in 1999.
After completing her formal education, Abrams worked as a Special Counsel for the Atlanta-based law firm of Sutherland Asbill & Brennan from 1999-2003. She then served as a Deputy City Attorney for the City of Atlanta Law Department from 2003-06; Chief Executive Officer of Sage Works, a legal consulting firm, from 2003-present; Chief Operating Officer of Insomnia Group, an investment and consulting firm, from 2007-10; Chief Operations Officer of Nourish, a beverage company with a focus on infants and toddlers, from 2007-present; and co-owner/Senior Vice President of the NOW Account Network Corporation, a financial services firm, from 2010-present.
Abrams launched a political career as a Democrat in 2006 when she was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives, where she held a seat from January 2007 until August 2017.
In 2013, Abrams co-founded the New Georgia Project (NGP), a partisan voter-registration organization designed to register hundreds of thousands of new Democrat voters across the state. From 2017 through February 21, 2020, Raphael Warnock served as NGP’s Chief Executive Officer.
In 2018, Abrams ran against Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp in Georgia’s gubernatorial race. Her campaign was endorsed and supported by Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, George Soros, Democracy for America, MoveOn Political Action, the Working Families Party, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Planned Parenthood, Emily’s List, and Our Revolution. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker and California Senator Kamala Harris went to Georgia to campaign for her.
In October 2018, Abrams predicted that the upcoming midterm elections would see a “blue wave” of Democrat victories sweep across the country, and that “undocumented” aliens would be key contributors to it. “The thing of it is,” said Abrams, “the blue wave is African American. It’s white, it’s Latino, it’s Asian-Pacific Islander, it is disabled, it is differently-abled, it is LGBTQ, it is law enforcement, it is veterans. It is made up of those who’ve been told that they are not worthy of being here. It is comprised of those who are documented and undocumented.”
In October 2018, Abrams derided Brian Kemp’s use of an “exact match” system that had placed more than 50,000 Georgia voter registrations on hold because of discrepancies between different sets of government records, or because they were flagged as registrations of potential non-citizens. She charged that “the exact match system has a disproportionate effect on people of color and women,” causing many of them to be “disenfranchised.”
At an October 2018 town hall, Abrams said she was “sick and tired of hearing about the free market being the solution” to problems in the health care system, adding: “I’ve never seen the free market write a prescription in rural Georgia. I’ve never seen the free market show up to give someone Metformin, so they can have a little control over their diabetes before it turns into an amputation of their foot. I’ve never seen the free market say ‘I’m going to replace that stent in your heart next door and not make you go 200 miles to get it done.’ The problem with the free market is the free market needs to make a profit, and there is no profit in doing the right thing.”
A key focus of Abrams’ 2018 campaign was the Second Amendment and gun-ownership rights.
In early November 2018, media mogul Oprah Winfrey traveled to Georgia to campaign for Abrams, holding two town-hall events with her in DeKalb County and Cobb County, and then going door-to-door with her to urge residents to support Abrams at the ballot box. “I am honored to have Oprah join me for uplifting and honest conversations with voters about the clear choice before us in this election and the boundless potential of Georgians,” said Abrams. Winfrey, for her part, said at one campaign event: “I’m here today because of the men and because of the women who were lynched, who were humiliated, who were discriminated against, who were suppressed, who were repressed and oppressed. I refuse to let their sacrifices be in vain.”
Abrams lost the November 2018 gubernatorial election by approximately 58,000 votes, but she disputed the result. On November 11, Abrams also filed a federal lawsuit that aimed to: (a) legally force a runoff election against Kemp; (b) block two counties from rejecting provisional and absentee ballots that contained errors; (c) require county officials to accept provisional ballots from voters who had relocated but had not updated their voter registrations to reflect their new addresses; and (d) extend the deadline by which the state of Georgia was required to certify the election results. In her November 16, 2018 speech announcing the end of her campaign, she also announced the creation of Fair Fight Georgia (a subsidiary of Fair Fight Action), a voting-rights nonprofit organization that Abrams promised would soon file suit in federal court against the Georgia Secretary of State and the Georgia State Election Board for “the gross mismanagement of this election.”
To view a video montage of dozens of instances where Abrams publicly claimed that she was the rightful and legitimate winner of the 2018 election, and that the victory had been “stolen” from her by Republican corruption and deceit, click here.
All told, Abrams publicly denied the results of her 2018 gubernatorial race at least 35 times. To view a comprehensive list of those denial, click here.
On November 18, 2018 on CNN’s State of the Union, host Jake Tapper asked Abrams if she believed that Brian Kemp was the “legitimate” Governor-elect of Georgia. She replied evasively: “The law, as it stands, says that he received an adequate number of votes to become the governor of Georgia, and I acknowledge the law as it stands. I am a lawyer by training and I have taken the Constitutional oath to uphold the law.” When Tapper reiterated his question, Abrams answered: “He is the person who won the adequate number of votes to become the governor.” At that point, Tapper said: “You’re not using the word legitimate. Is he the legitimate governor governor-elect of Georgia?” Abrams responded: “He is the legal governor of Georgia. Words have meaning. I spent my lifetime not only as an attorney but as a writer and I’m careful of the words I choose. When he takes the oath of office he will be the legal governor of the state of Georgia, the legal victor. What you are looking to me to say is that there was no compromise of our democracy and there should be some political compromise in the language I use and that’s not right. What’s not right is saying that something was done properly when it was not.”
On November 27, 2018, Fair Fight Georgia/Fair Fight Action — fulfilling the promise Abrams had made 11 datys earlier — filed a federal lawsuit examining Georgia’s allegedly unfair election system. “The general election for governor is over, but the citizens and voters of Georgia deserve an election system that they can have confidence in,” said Abrams’ campagn manager and Fair Fight Action CEO, Lauren Groh-Wargo. “This lawsuit is going to look broadly at all the ways our secretary of suppression, [then-secretary of state] Brian Kemp, suppressed the vote.”
At an April 2019 convention at Al Sharpton’s Nation Action Network, Abrams asserted that the 2018 gubernatorial election had been “stolen” by her Republican opponent Brian Kemp. “We won,” she said. “… I’m not saying they stole it from me — they stole it from the voters of Georgia.”
The Fair Fight Action lawsuit of November 27, 2018 dragged on for more than three years before finally going to trial in April 2022. The case was decided on September 30, 2022 when U.S. District Judge Steve Jones, an Obama appointee, issued a 288-page ruling which said that: (a) “[a]lthough Georgia’s election system is not perfect, the challenged practices violate neither the Constitution nor the VRA (Voting Rights Act)”; and (b) the “plaintiffs have not provided direct evidence of a voter who was unable to vote, experienced longer wait times, was confused about voter registration status.”
Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, said of the decision, “Stolen election & voter suppression claims by Stacey Abrams were nothing but poll-tested rhetoric not supported by facts & evidence.” In a similar vein, Brian Kemp, who was now the governor of Georgia, said: “From day one, Abrams has used this lawsuit to line her pockets, sow distrust in our democratic institutions, and build her own celebrity” by means of a lawsuit that was nothing more than “a tool wielded by a politician hoping to wrongfully weaponize the legal system to further her own political goals.”
Abrams, however, spun the court ruling as a victory for her side, and as a vindicatoion of the charges she had made. Said Abrams in a series of tweets:
In a January 2019 interview on PBS’s Firing Line, host Margaret Hoover asked Abrams: “What is your view about some municipalities, like San Francisco, who have decided that it’s okay for some non-citizens to vote in local elections?” Abrams replied: “I think … the granularity of what cities decide is so specific, as to, I think, allow for people to be participants in the process without it somehow undermining our larger democratic ethic that says that you should be a citizen to be a part of the conversation.” Hoover then asked: “So, in some cases, you would be supportive of non-citizens voting?” Abrams answered: “I wouldn’t be — I wouldn’t oppose it.”
In April 2019, Abrams said that she saw a “credible [political] path” to the implementation of reparations for African Americans and Native Americans, “the groups that by law had been stripped of their autonomy and their participation in our society.” “I think that reparations make sense,” she added. “[W]e have to acknowledge that in the United States of America it wasn’t simply that we didn’t like a certain group, we’ve built — no. Not we, they. The government built systems designed to exclude and to diminish the capacity of communities to participate in their own economic survival.”
During a May 2019 Ideas Conference at the Center for American Progress, Abrams criticized Democrat presidential hopeful and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, for having cited identity politics as a chief cause of social conflict. Said Abrams: “The notion of identity politics has been peddled for the past 10 years and it’s been used as a dog whistle to say we shouldn’t pay too much attention to the voices coming into progress. I would argue that identity politics is exactly who we are and exactly how we won. When I hear Democratic candidates, progressive candidates, American candidates decrying the identity of their voters, I’m deeply worried for our democracy.”
In May 2019, Abrams told Scholastic News that the legal voting age should be lowered to 16 for school board elections, and perhaps for federal elections as well: “I think we should test it out for local elections. I do believe we need to investigate lowering the voting age for federal elections, but I’m not convinced yet. I remember being 16. I remember how involved and engaged I was. While there certainly is a difference between being 16 and 18, I don’t know that the difference is wide enough to say that you should not be able to participate in federal elections, so I’m willing to be convinced.”
In an August 2019 appearance on ABC’s This Week, Abrams disparaged President Donald Trump as a racist: “I have said many times he is racist. More importantly, he does not value Americans and he does not value humanity. That should be more disturbing to everyone than the title we subscribe [sic] to him.”
In August 2019, MSNBC host Chris Hayes asked Abrams if she was in favor of doing away with the Electoral College. She responded, “Absolutely. The Electoral College was not designed to make certain that people in small states weren’t subject to the tyranny of urban areas. That wasn’t the conversation at the time. It was because those in power did not believe that working people had the intellectual capacity to directly elect the leader of the free world. We have long passed that time, and it’s time for direct election and popular vote.”
During an April 1, 2020 appearance on MSNBC Live, Abrams said that in light of the health risks posed by the coronavirus pandemic, all voters should be permitted and encouraged to vote by mail in the 2020 presidential election: “Vote by mail is the safest way to vote. And right now, I would say almost every state has the capacity to vote by mail. The challenge is that in a lot of states you have to have an excuse.” In an April 21 interview, Abrams told MSNBC’s Morning Joe that President Donald Trump’s concern about possible fraud connected to mail-in voting was unfounded: “Voter fraud is, by and large, a myth.” In a podcast interview two days later with CNN analyst David Axelrod,” Abrams, asserting that President Trump was “illegitimate” and “should not hold office,” accused Mr. Trump of being “afraid” of vote-by-mail “despite the fact that there is no evidence of fraud” associated with it. In yet another interview, Abrams said that “voter fraud is nearly mythological,” adding that “you are more likely to be struck by lightning than for there to be an incident of voting fraud.”
Abrams also advocated the use of ballot harvesting, a process that involves the gathering and submitting of completed absentee or mail-in voter ballots by third-party individuals, as opposed to requiring voters themselves to submit their ballots directly to official collection sites.
In an April 2020 appearance on ABC’s The View, Abrams said that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden should select an African-American woman as his running mate “because women of color, particularly black women, are the strongest part of the Democratic Party, the most loyal.”
In June 2020, Abrams was a guest speaker at Oprah Winfrey’s two-night town hall on racism in America, an event that aired on Winfrey’s cable channel OWN, as well as on the Discovery Channel, TLC, HGTV, and the Science Channel. Other featured speakers included filmmaker Ava DuVernay, New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones (who founded “The 1619 Project”), Selma actor David Oyelowo, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, New York Times columnist Charles Blow, and racism scholar Ibram X. Kendi.
In June 2020, Abrams was deeply angered by a police shooting in Atlanta that killed Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old black man who had a long history of criminal violence dating back 13 years. Shortly after 10:40 PM on June 12, Atlanta officers Garrett Rolfe and Devin Brosnan responded to a complaint stating that Brooks was asleep in a car which was blocking a Wendy’s restaurant drive-through lane. They administered a sobriety test to Brooks and found him to have an alcohol level higher than the legal limit. When the officers tried to arrest him, Brooks instigated a violent fight during which he wrestled Brosnan’s taser away from him, fought his way free, punched Rolfe, and then began to flee on foot. Officer Rolfe at that moment fired his taser at Brooks, but it failed to bring him down. Rolfe then proceeded to chase Brooks, who at one point turned and fired the stolen taser in the officer’s general direction. Rolfe drew his handgun and shot Brooks twice in the back as the suspect turned to run. (Click here for video of the altercation.) Brooks was then rushed to a nearby hospital, where he died after undergoing surgery.
After the incident, Abrams said:
In June 2020 as well, Abrams denounced Republican Senator Tom Cotton’s recent assertion that slavery was, “the Founding Fathers said,… the necessary evil upon which the union was built.” Cotton’s point was that the Southern states would never have agreed to join the union if the institution of slavery were to have been abolished outright.[1] But Abrams said: “There is no such thing as a necessary evil. Evil is evil, and slavery is one of the ultimate evils. If Tom Cotton is sincere in his desire to understand history then he should be celebrating the 1619 Project. He should be celebrating The Voting Rights Act renewal. He should be celebrating Black Lives Matter because the continuity of evil in our country has led us to this moment. We can only extinguish evil by acknowledging that it exists and doing everything in our power to defeat it, not to celebrate it, not to excuse it, and certainly not to use it as a polemic way to justify the racism that runs through the party that is lifting up Tom Cotton and his language as something that’s legitimate as part of the argument about what our children should learn about this country.”
In July 2020, Abrams told The Washington Post:
“[W]rit large, our challenge in America is that justice does not get meted out equally. In fact, it doesn’t even humanize many blacks who are killed, particularly by those who are sworn to protect them. And so I think this racial moment we are having begins with this conversation of extrajudicial killings, but it cannot be divorced from the disproportionate number of deaths by black Americans based on COVID-19, the disproportionate effect of infection rates, and the economic collapse that is hurting black and brown communities at higher rates than anyone else, and the lack of attention being paid to the disproportionate number of people of color who also face voter suppression. The systemic racism that we see in our society is wrapped into everything from our environment to criminal justice to the application of justice, and the moment we try to say that these things are separate, we set ourselves up once again for the kind of protest and demonstrations we see now. But the extent to which we acknowledge that these are interwoven, through systemic racism, systemic inequities, and systemic injustice, then we can begin to start to address them.”
In the fall of 2020, Abrams led an effort to help two Democrats — Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff — win their upcoming runoff elections for U.S. Senate seats in Georgia. Toward that end, Abrams collaborated with a group of Hollywood entertainers to organize “Rock the Runoff,” a “get-out-the-vote” online concert/fundraiser. Among the performers who participated were John Legend, Common, Ben Gibbard (of Death Cab For Cutie), Earthgang, and the Indigo Girls. During the concert, Abrams told viewers that her goal was to use the runoff elections to “change America.”
In a March 14, 2021 interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Abrams characterized Republican efforts to ensure voter integrity in political elections as tactics rooted in racism. Said Tapper: “So Republican state lawmakers in your home state, Georgia, have introduced almost two dozen bills to make it more difficult to vote. They are going to end no-excuse mail-in voting, which has been there since 2005. They will reduce voting on Sundays, ask for stricter ID requirements, take away drop boxes. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in D.C. — he called this effort by Georgia Republicans ‘racist plain and simple.’ Do you agree, and is there any way for Democrats to stop these efforts?”
Abrams replied: “Well, first of all, I do absolutely agree that it’s racist. It is a redux of Jim Crow, in a suit and tie. We know the only thing that precipitated these charges — it’s not that there was a question of security — in fact, the secretary of state and the governor went to great pains to ensure America that Georgia elections were secure. So the only connection that we can find is that more people of color voted, and it changed the outcome of elections in a direction that Republicans do not like.” According to Abrams, Republicans were “using this false predicate of fraud” in order to promote reforms that would effectively “eliminate access to voting” for nonwhites.
In April 2021, Major League Baseball (MLB) commissioner Robert Manfred decided to move that year’s scheduled All-Star Game out of Atlanta — and to Denver, Colorado instead — as a gesture of protest against a newly passed Georgia voting-rights law requiring heightened standards of Voter ID when people cast their ballots in that state. Notably, Colorado’s already-existing Voter ID standards were more stringent than those associated with the new Georgia law. Manfred made his decision to change the All-Star Game’s venue after holding extensive discussions with voting-rights organizations associated with Abrams, Lebron James, and Al Sharpton. Abrams, who falsely portrayed the Georgia law as a voter-suppression measure, wanted Manfred not only to denounce that statute, but also to speak out in favor of the radical For the People Act of 2021, which Congressional Democrats were striving to pass at that time. After Manfred ultimately decided that the easiest way to deal with the matter would be to take the All-Star Game out of Georgia, Abrams tweeted that she was “Disappointed @MLB will move the All-Star Game, but proud of their stance on voting rights. GA GOP traded economic opportunity for suppression.” She later released another statement that said: “Like many Georgians, I am disappointed that the MLB is moving its All-Star Game; however, I commend the players, owners and League Commissioner for speaking out. As I have stated, I respect boycotts, although I don’t want to see Georgia families hurt by lost events and jobs. Georgians targeted by voter suppression will be hurt as opportunities go to other states.”
When Abrams was introduced as a co-chair of the Black Voices for Black Justice Fund (BVBJ) in April 2021, she said in a press release that she was “excited” and “honored” to join the organization because it “puts Black leaders in the driver’s seat – with Black activists on the ground who understand how racism plays out in their community defining both the problem and the solutions.” Specifically, BVBJ has doled out $20,000 awards to dozens of black activists across the United States to “use,” as the organization puts it, “in whatever way they believe, based on their lived experience, will do the most good advancing racial justice in their communities at this pivotal time.” A number of BVBJ award recipients have been supporters of the defunding of police departments. For example:
The BVBJ website listed Abrams as the organization’s co-chair as recently as November 2021. Then, sometime between November 2021 and late March 2022, BVBJ gave Abrams the honorary title of “co-chair emeriti.”
In December 2021, Abrams and illustrator Kitt Thomas, an NAACP Image Award winner, together released Stacey’s Extraordinary Words, a 40-page picture book targeting children. Following the book’s publication, Abrams praised Thomas as a “wildly talented” artist. The pair subsequently collaborated on a second book, Stacey’s Remarkable Books, slated for publication in December 2022.
During the Black Lives Matter riots that had erupted after the May 25, 2020 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Thomas created an Instagram post on June 2 characterizing law-enforcement officers as “pigs.” Said an image shared by Thomas in that post: “Pigs hugging and kneeling with protesters is a counterinsurgency tactic designed to quell and neutralize rebellion. Do not fall for it. They are kneeling and then shooting, beating, and tear gassing people right after the photo op is done. Fuck the police.” In her caption for the post, Thomas wrote: “Times are especially hard for us black folk now so, non-black friends- please keep this in mind…. You [non-blacks] dont see dead white bodies on film like we see ours, please have patience and understanding for your black friends. Your black friends are collectively experiencing TRAUMA. Check up on them but dont be so careless without asking if THEY are comfortable first and foremost. But at the same time, don’t use this as an excuse to remain silent. The black community needs you right now, and we need you to help us create long lasting change. I also encourage brands and companies I’ve worked with to also speak up.” In another slide on the same Instagram post, Thomas shared an image that read: “Your silence is complicit and anti-black.”
During a February 4, 2022 visit to a Decatur, Georgia elementary school for a Black History Month “African-American Read-In,” Abrams — a vocal advocate of state government mask mandates for Georgia children and adults alike — smiled broadly as she posed maskless for a photograph along with dozens of mostly white young kids and at least 11 mostly white adults, all of whom were wearing masks. City Schools of Decatur, of which that particular school was a part, specified on its website that all students and employees were required to wear masks inside the building. According to Breitbart.com: “The photo of Abrams was first shared Friday [February 4] by Glennwood [Elementary School] principal Holly Brookins in a Twitter post, and then retweeted by Abrams, who was subsequently met with a massive wave of criticism for being the only individual in the photo not wearing a mask. Brookins later deleted the Twitter post, as did Abrams, and Brookins also appears to have since deactivated or deleted her entire Twitter account.”
Abrams’ gubernatorial campaign subsequently acknowledged that Abrams had only removed her mask for the photo-op “on the condition that everyone around her” continued to wear a face covering.
On February 6, 2022, Abrams’ gubernatorial campaign released a statement portraying her critics as her critics racists who were guilty of “using a Black History Month reading event for Georgia children as impetus for a false attack.”
On February 8, 2022, Abrams told CNN in an interview: “I went to read to kids at an African-American read-in day. Approached the podium with my mask on, I followed the protocols. I told the kids ‘I’m taking my mask off because I’m reading to kids who are listening remotely, as well.’ We were socially distanced. The kids were socially distanced from me. I told the class what I was doing. And then the excitement after I finished, because it was so much fun working with those kids, I took a picture and that was a mistake.”
But Abrams’ claim that she had posed only for “a [single] picture,” and that she and the others “were socially distanced,” was false. Additional photos soon emerged of an unmasked Abrams posing in immediate proximity to other individuals — children and adults alike — who were wearing masks.
In March 2022, multibillionaire George Soros, through Democracy PAC II — a federal political action committee which was created to promote Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections — donated $1 million to Abrams’ second campaign for Georgia governor. Moreover, Soros and his family members personally contributed approximately $60,000 directly to Abrams’ campaign.
On May 2, 2022, Politico reported that an unidentified individual had leaked an initial draft majority opinion, written by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, in which the Court had decided to strike down the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. “No draft decision in the modern history of the court has been disclosed publicly while a case was still pending,” said Politico. Whereas Roe had guaranteed federal constitutional protections for abortion rights, the new ruling would return responsibility for those rights to each individual state. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito wrote in his opinion, adding: “We hold that Roe and Casey [a 1992 decision that largely reaffirmed the rights set forth in Roe] must be overruled. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” In response to the Court’s decision, an outraged Abrams said: “While abortion rights are at the center of this damned opinion, this is about our civil rights and our human rights. This is about whether this is a nation that will protect who we are. I know that for the LGBTQIA community there is a fear that they are going to be erased in this conversation, and I want you to hear me clearly, and we see you, we embrace you and we know that this is about you, too.”
A July 14, 2022 Axios.com report stated that just over 14 percent of the money — $7 million out of nearly $50 million — which had been donated to Abrams’ gubernatorial campaign, had come from donors inside the state of Georgia. The $43 million in out-of-state contributions included $10 million from California, $3.6 million from New York, $2.5 million from Delaware, and $6.4 million from Washington, D.C. Among the individual out-of-state funders of Abrams’ campaign were such notables as Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and Melinda Gates ($200,000). A key organizational donor was George Soros’ Democracy PAC — based in the District of Columbia — which delivered $2.5 million.
Of the $7 million in donations to Abrams that originated in Georgia, $1.5 million came from Fair Fight, an organization founded by Abrams herself.
In contrast to Abrams, Georgia’s incumbent Republican Governor, Brian Kemp, had raised only $31.5 million thus far, but $26 million — or 83% — of that total came from donors within the state. Kemp’s campaign press secretary, Tate Mitchell, said: “Stacey Abrams’ campaign is bankrolled by out-of-state billionaires in California and New York and far-left radicals who want to bring the failed policies of Washington, DC, to Georgia.”
From the start of her candidacy for Georgia governor in December 2021, through August 2022, Abrams spent over $1.2 million on private security services for herself and her campaign. This sum included payments of: (a) more than $800,000 to an Atlanta-based private security firm called Executive Protection Agencies, LLC, between December 2021 and June 2022, and (b) another $400,000+ to other providers in July and August of 2022. These massive expenditures were noteworthy in light of the fact that Abrams had long been an outspoken enemy of the police and an advocate for the permanent closure of Georgia’s privatized prisons.
During a September 20, 2022 event at the Ray Charles Performing Arts Center in Georgia, Abrams called for the repeal of a 2019 state law barring abortion after a fetal heartbeat could be detected — i.e., between 6-7 weeks’ gestation, according to the American Pregnancy Association. Formally known as HB 481, the statute was commonly referred to as the “Fetal Heartbeat Bill.” But according to Abrams, that colloquial name was “medically false, biologically a lie” because: “There is no such thing as a heartbeat at six weeks. It is a manufactured sound designed to convince people that men have the right to take control of a woman’s body.”
In response to Abrams’ remarks, Dr. Nicole Saphier, a radiologist, said: “I’m going to deliver the truth and point out it is a complete lie, so at about three weeks after gestation – after conception, the heart of the cells of the heart starts to rhythmically contract so really, the heart starts beating at three weeks. Yes, you can start seeing the heartbeat 5-6 weeks after conception on the ultrasound, but that’s only because it’s so small and because of all the other structures in the way but that heart is contracting very easy early on. It is not a conspiracy, it is not anything to do with what she’s talking about, and I think she [Abrams] needs to be held accountable for the lies that are coming out of her mouth.”
During an October 19, 2022 appearance on the MSNBC program Morning Joe, Abrams in essence told newsman Mike Barnicle that an effectiuve way to handle economic difficulties like inflation would be to kill more unborn babies in the womb:
BARNICLE: You’re running for governor of Georgia. I would assume, maybe incorrectly, but while abortion is an issue, it nowhere reaches the level of interest of the voters in terms of the cost of gas, food, bread, milk, things like that. What can a governor — what could you do as governor to alleviate the concerns of Georgia voters about those livability, daily, hourly issues that they’re confronted with?
ABRAMS: But let’s be clear. Having children is why you’re worried about your price for gas. It’s why you’re concerned about how much food costs. For women, this is not a reductive issue — you can’t divorce being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy from the economic realities of having a child. And so these are — it’s important for us to have both/and conversations. We don’t have the luxury of reducing it or separating it out.
On October 24, 2022, Politico.com reported the following:
“The voting rights organization founded by Stacey Abrams spent more than $25 million over two years on legal fees, mostly on a single case, with the largest amount going to the self-described boutique law firm of the candidate’s campaign chairwoman. Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, Abrams’ close friend who chaired her gubernatorial campaign both in 2018 and her current bid to unseat Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, is one of two named partners in Lawrence & Bundy, a small firm of fewer than two dozen attorneys. The firm received $9.4 million from Abrams’ group, Fair Fight Action, in 2019 and 2020, the last years for which federal tax filings are available. Lawrence-Hardy declined to comment on how much her firm has collected from Fair Fight Action in 2021 and 2022 — years in which Fair Fight Action v. Raffensperger, for which Lawrence-Hardy was lead counsel, had most of its courtroom activity….
“Fair Fight Action v. Raffensperger began as a sweeping legal attack on voting issues ranging from long lines at polling places to problems with voter registration to poor training of poll workers. The scope of the case was subsequently narrowed significantly by Federal District Court Judge Steve C. Jones. On Sept. 30, after a bench trial, Jones issued his final order and judgment, ruling against Fair Fight Action.”
In late February 2023, Abrams traveled to Nigeria to serve as an international observer of the presidential election in that country. Though famous for having repeatedly denied that she herself had actually lost her gubernatorial bid a few years earlier, Abrams, during a February 28 interview with Al Jazeera English reporter Mohammed Jamjoom, explained to Nigerian voters that “not every election turns out the way you want, but … the responsibility is to show up and try to shape the future as much as you can.”
In September 2023, Abrams joined the faculty of Howard University as the inaugural Ronald W. Walters Endowed Chair for Race and Black Politics. “The work she [Abrams] has been doing on voter registration and voting irregularities, especially in Georgia but across the country, speaks to a lot of what Ronald Walters embodied,” said Howard President Wayne A.I. Frederick. Abrams, for her part, said: “We are entering an inflection point in American politics where the conversation of race and black politics will be a central facet. And having the chance to help guide part of the conversation for young people who are studying at Howard University is an exceptional opportunity.”
Abrams is a paid board member of the Marguerite Casey Foundation, a left-wing organization that has supported the “Defund the Police” movement. The foundation’s president and CEO, Carmen Rojas, is a strong advocate of police defunding. Rojas also contributed money to Abrams’ 2022 gubernatorial campaign. In early February 2022, the Casey Foundation hosted an event titled “Becoming Abolitionists — A History of Failed Police Reforms & Vision for True Public Safety.”
Further Reading: “Stacey Abrams” (Ballotpedia.org).