In the days and weeks ahead, we’ll see many analyses of how Stacey Abrams managed to win the Georgia Democratic primary and what that means for the political future of the state and how this victory could affect politics in the South as well as the rest of the nation.
Abrams was endorsed by Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, John Lewis, Our Revolution, Democracy for America, Democracy in Color, MoveOn.org, EMILY’s List, NARAL, and the Working Families Party. As Daily Kos readers obviously know, these groups and individuals often don’t see eye to eye, so the analyses of what has happened and what needs to happen going forward in this race won’t always agree with one another either.
Here is one of those points of view from Steve Philips, a civil-rights lawyer, author, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and the founder of Democracy in Color, a media organization dedicated to race, politics and the New American Majority. At The Nation, he writes—The Revolutionary Implications of Stacey Abrams’s Victory:
“The Rainbow Coalition is like a quilt—many patches, many pieces, many colors, bound by a common thread.” I was in Atlanta, Georgia for the 1988 Democratic National Convention listening to Jesse Jackson describe his vision for how a multiracial and explicitly progressive coalition of people of color and progressive whites could lead Democrats to victory across the country. Although Jackson’s bid for the nomination fell short, the surprising success of his candidacy—he won 11 contests and nearly tripled his delegate total from 1984—revealed the potential of a campaign rooted in the country’s demographic revolution.
Last night, Stacey Abrams took a big step towards fulfilling that potential in the South by winning the Georgia gubernatorial Democratic nomination. The implications of her win for progressive politics and the future of the country are revolutionary in terms of political strategy and approach.
What Jackson foreshadowed in 1988, Barack Obama accomplished in 2008 and again in 2012, when he won re-election despite garnering 5 million fewer white votes than he had secured in 2008. In the wake of the 2016 election, however, many Democrats have lost their nerve, and, in too many cases, lost their minds, allocating millions of dollars to the fool’s errand of securing support from the very voters who hated our first black president and everything he represented. The significance of Abrams’s candidacy is that she has stayed the course, and in doing so provided empirical evidence about how to win in a highly polarized, racially charged political environment.
Georgia has historically been a conservative state because there were always too few people of color, and too few progressive whites, to sway statewide elections. That is no longer the case. In the 30 years since Democrats gathered in Atlanta for its national convention, the state’s population has grown increasingly racially diverse to the point where people of color are nearly a majority (47 percent) of the state’s population and 40 percent of all eligible voters.
Despite this demographic transformation, Democrats in Georgia consistently lose by an average of 230,000 votes. The strategic challenge is how to close that gap. Despite the proven success of the Obama model, conventional wisdom still maintains that Democrats can win larger shares of the white vote if they just increase their empathy for the anxieties of moderate white voters while decreasing the volume at which they champion racial justice. For example, Abrams’s opponent, state representative Stacey Evans, based her candidacy on the belief that she could use the fact that she grew up in a trailer park to win more support from white, working-class voters than prior Democratic candidates could.
All of the empirical evidence, however, shows that there is a ceiling on Democratic support from white voters. [...]
It will cost about $10 million to mobilize the 230,000 previously-uninspired voters of color required to close the gap in Georgia. The question and the challenge for the progressive movement is will they put their money where their mouth is? Progressives nationally moved upwards of $40 million to Elizabeth Warren’s 2012 Senate campaign and Wendy Davis’s Texas gubernatorial bid in 2014. Will there be similar enthusiasm and support for Abrams? If so, we can make history and fulfill the promise of what Georgia native Martin Luther King, Jr. predicted when he said, “Give us the ballot, and we will transform the South.” In addition, we can make history by electing Abrams as our nation’s first-ever black woman governor.
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES
QUOTATION
“Zach had once heard the president described as "the most dangerous narcissist alive, because the world really does revolve around him.”
~~Christopher Farnsworth, Red, White, and Blood (2012)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2009—Torture: This shouldn’t need to be said:
Let's put this straight right off the bat: favoring the use of torture is not a political position, it's a mental illness.
Any further discussion of torture should be unnecessary. However, since our our national media seems to be enthusiastically pimping depravity as a governing principle, we might as well point out that the guys that have been there, done that, seen the elephant show and lived to come home? They say it doesn't work, isn't worth it, and they want nothing to do with it.
If you need further evidence, check out Mike Ritz, a former SERE instructor who worked with our servicemen and women to prepare them for harsh interrogations torture, and who went on to found his own private "stress laboratory" where he could "use just about any technique" he had read about to "see what kind of results he could get." Tony Lagouranis, a former Army interrogator who questioned prisoners in several locations, including Abu Ghraib. In other words, these are two people who have tortured other people, neither of them is shy about that fact, and they are willing to talk about that experience. Both men appeared on NPR's Tell Me More (audio link). The guys who have really done this stuff to actual human beings do not exactly back up the words of American's biggest Dick.
First off, they discussed the difference between what service people in the intelligence field had been trained to do, and what they were then asked to do by the Bush administration.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin rounds up news from the primaries, the oddsmakers' latest, and the Grand Unifying Theory of Trump Scandal. Blackwater's back. More on Broidy covering for Trump, and on Michael Cohen's problems, and how he gets hired… and fired.
RadioPublic|LibSyn|YouTube|Patreon|Square Cash (Share code: Send $5, get $5!)