Abrams now says Harris can ‘absolutely’ beat Trump after Biden bowed out

Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams argued that Vice President Kamala Harris is “absolutely” capable of winning the 2024 presidential election despite President Joe Biden leaving the race on short notice.

Abrams, who also ran for president in 2020, had been asked if Harris could drum up enough support with less than 100 days left before the election, following President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out. The former Georgia candidate herself had voiced her support for Biden after the debate, though Abrams waived this aside and argued it was “not the comparison we need to make.”

“The question is, do we have a candidate at the top of the ticket who can win?” Abrams said on CNN. “The answer is absolutely yes. Does Vice President Harris have the capacity to win? Yes. Does she have the message and the mission? Yes. Does she have the policies that can turn out voters? Yes. The work that has to be done is about reminding voters what‘s at stake, not only reminding them of Trump, but reminding them of how dark our days were when he was last in office and how bright our future will be with Vice President Harris as our newly elected president.”

Abrams was in Georgia on Tuesday night to support Harris during a campaign stop in Georgia, marking the vice president’s first campaign stop in the Peach State since becoming the Democratic Party’s presumptive 2024 nominee. The event also featured appearances by Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, Sens. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) and Jon Ossoff (D-GA), and rapper Megan Thee Stallion.

Abrams was also asked if she had any regrets questioning the outcome of her 2018 election, as she has argued in the past that she had not lost her election against then-gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp (R-GA). She then pushed back against host Kaitlan Collins, claiming she was pushing “disinformation.” 

“What the court said, if you read the entire opinion, was that despite the flaws in the process that we acknowledge, that the courts acknowledged, they were no longer permitted to complete and fix them,” Abrams said. “They could not correct the mistakes because the law had changed between 2018 and 2022 when the case was finally adjudicated. There was never a moment where they said what happened was right. What they said was there was no capacity to correct the mistakes.”

A voting rights group that Abrams created, Fair Fight Action, had filed a lawsuit after the 2018 Georgia governor election based on alleged “misconduct, fraud or irregularities” in the voting process. However, this was thrown out in 2022, with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger deeming Abrams’s claims on the election as “nothing but poll-tested rhetoric not supported by facts and evidence.”

Abrams’s support for Harris comes as many other lawmakers have also given their endorsements to her after previously supporting Biden, with Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) being among those now supporting the vice president as the presumptive 2024 nominee.