Stacey Abrams returns to Georgia to back Kamala Harris

Former Georgia political candidate and Democratic darling Stacey Abrams is returning to the state Tuesday evening to campaign for Vice President Kamala Harris.

Abrams, who lost races in 2018 and 2022 to Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA), will join Harris at 7 p.m. Eastern time along with Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, Sens. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) and Jon Ossoff (D-GA) and rapper Megan Thee Stallion, among others. It will be Harris’s 15th visit to the Peach State since taking office.

After serving for years in the state legislature, Abrams became a star in Democratic circles when she filed lawsuits over the 2018 Georgia governor’s race results and even drew buzz as a vice presidential candidate — a job that ultimately went to Harris — but has been relatively quiet since a 2022 rematch with Kemp, which she lost by nearly 300,000 votes.

“I’m not sure why she is not saying as much as she used to,” Spelman College professor Marilyn Davis recently told the Washington Examiner. “It could be that it would galvanize more Trump voters in the state of Georgia. But this is, of course, a national effort that she has, but recently, say within maybe three weeks ago, she is going all out to bring together organizations that have the same goal as when John Lewis had the voter project back in the 1960s and ’70s.”

Abrams is now the endowed chairwoman for race and black politics at Washington D.C.’s Howard University and working for a group looking to crack down on gas stoves, so she may be spending less time in Georgia these days. Even so, she’s respected as a political organizer who can help drive turnout in her home state, argues longtime University of Georgia political science professor Charles Bullock.

“If she can crank up the get-out-the-vote effort she operated in 2020, that could be very important for Harris’s prospects in the state,” Bullock said. “That gets her people back up and mobilized.”

Trump leads Harris in Georgia by 4.5 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average, but the two polls taken since she replaced Biden on the Democratic ticket have Trump up by only one or two points, suggesting a much closer race than before.

There’s little doubt that Abrams’ star power has fallen since 2020, when she drew mentions as a vice presidential candidate. Her claims of a stolen election have caused awkward questions for Democrats since Trump began claiming his own 2020 race was rigged, and her Fair Fight Action group has been laying off staff in the midst of significant debt.

As such, some politicos argue the rally spot could be an even bigger opportunity for Abrams than it is for Harris.

“I’m sure that the Harris ticket is a way to try and resurrect herself from the politically dead,” said former Georgia Republican congressman Bob Barr. “She had basically faded into irrelevance after her losses and all of the money that she wasted. So this gives her an opportunity.”

Still, Barr added that he thinks Georgia Democrats have done a better job in recent election cycles of getting their voters to the polls than Georgia Republicans have.

“Hopefully the Republicans have learned from the last couple of cycles that they need to do a better job of identifying voters, registering voters, and getting them to the polls,” he said.

President Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020 by a margin of just 11,779 votes, or 0.23%.

While Harris is expected to help connect with and drive turnout among Georgia’s nonwhite voters, Bullock, who has been at UGA since 1968, said it’s actually a different demographic group who may decide the state’s election.

“White, college-educated voters,” he said. “Looking again at those recent contests, those last couple of cycles, if Democrats can get 40% of the white, college-educated vote, they can win. They don’t need a majority, but they need about 40%.”

Trump and his running mate, the embattled Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), will host their own Atlanta rally on Saturday, just four days after Harris.