, Abrams talked about coalition-building in the South, removing restrictions to voter access, and her decade-long fight to prove that Georgia could go blue.“Voter suppression was very much instrumental in shaping turnout numbers in 2018, and 2016.
So what we were able to identify — in the concrete ways in 2018 — we were able then to mitigate heading into 2020. And so I think you see the combination of increased voter engagement through another 800,000 people being registered and staying on the rolls through November 2018 through this election. But you also had the removal and mitigation of a number of barriers that blocked access to the polls.”On the most difficult part of her fight to show that Georgia could be a Democratic state:
“The end of the redistricting in 2011. Republicans passed maps that gave them a disproportionate share everywhere. It packed Black communities, it cracked Latino communities. It put the only Latino legislator in a majority white district. And the maps were approved. It was December of 2011, when Republicans were given permission to racially gerrymander in the state of Georgia and that to me was heart wrenching. It meant the only salvation we had coming was to crawl back our way.
There would be no new map. There would be no litigation. We were going to have to do this by finding every voter we could and that was going to take a lot longer than I’d hoped, but not longer than I’d imagined.”
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