When Stacey Abrams lost the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election by 54,723 votes — in a contest overseen by her opponent, then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp, whose office had purged roughly 340,000 Georgians from the voter rolls during the campaign — she declined to concede in the conventional sense. "Concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true, or proper," she said. "As a woman of conscience and faith, I cannot concede that."
What she did instead was found Fair Fight Action, a voter-protection and voter-registration organization, and turn the next two years into the most sustained voter-mobilization effort in modern American politics. Fair Fight, along with allied organizations including the New Georgia Project (which Abrams had founded in 2013), the Black Voters Matter Fund, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, collectively registered more than eight hundred thousand new Georgia voters between 2018 and 2021.
The results were historic. In November 2020, Georgia voted for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 1992 — by 11,779 votes. In the January 2021 Senate runoffs, Raphael Warnock became Georgia's first Black senator, and Jon Ossoff its first Jewish senator; their paired victories gave Democrats control of the United States Senate.
Abrams ran for governor again in 2022 and lost. She has continued to write and to organize. Her voter-registration model has been replicated, with varying degrees of success, in Arizona, North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin. What Georgia 2020 demonstrated, and what the subsequent attempts have confirmed, is that there is no substitute for the institutional work — decade-long, relational, ground-up — that converts demographic presence into political power. Abrams did not "flip" Georgia. She organized it.
