DEMOCRATIC VISIONARY
STACEY ABRAMS
When Abrams announced on December 14 that Georgia’s 16 electoral votes had been cast for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, applause erupted for the first Democratic presidential win in the state since 1992 — and for Abrams, the 2018 gubernatorial candidate who had argued all along that voter mobilization could flip swing states against Donald Trump. With her group Fair Fight, Abrams championed voter registration and mobilization drives in Georgia, Wisconsin, and other battleground states. They figured out how to draw new Black, Latinx, and Asian American voters to the polls, circumvent voter suppression, and navigate the challenges of a pandemic election, with a savvy emphasis on mail-in voting, early voting, and safe in-person voting on Election Day that will be a national model going forward. That merits applause. And the cheering will be even louder in 2022 if, as many suspect, Abrams runs for (and wins) Georgia’s governorship.
As the representative from the Minneapolis district where George Floyd’s death during a brutal arrest in May sparked nationwide protests, Omar immediately recognized that this police killing of a Black man was part of a broader crisis. “We are not merely fighting to tear down the systems of oppression in the criminal justice system,” she announced. “We are fighting to tear down systems of oppression that exist in housing, in education, in health care, in employment, in the air we breathe.” Trump staked his bid to win Minnesota on a campaign that viciously attacked Omar’s challenge to systemic racism. The congresswoman responded with a turnout drive that boosted Democratic numbers in her district and helped Biden sweep the state.
Read more on this story here; https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/2020-progressive-leaders/