A host of “The View” praised Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams for not conceding her election in 2018 as she defended her claim that she “won” her race against Republican Gov. Brian Kemp.
“So this is your second run against incumbent Brian Kemp for governor, and polls show a tight race, especially the poll this morning. When you lost in 2018, you didn’t traditionally concede which I appreciated because you cited voter suppression. Are you confident that this will be a free and fair election, and not a repeat performance of what happened before?” co-host Sunny Hostin asked.
Abrams said she appreciated the framing of Hostin’s question. “I have never denied that I lost. I don’t live in the governor’s mansion. I would have noticed,” she said.
“And there is this clip that’s going around, and it shows me saying that we won, and what I was referring to was that we won in terms of communities that were long left out of the electoral process finally participating in ’18 in outstanding numbers,” she said.
GEORGE SOROS THROWS $1M BEHIND STACEY ABRAMS’ SECOND GUBERNATORIAL RUN
“But I’m not delusional. Just so that’s clear, but what we know was that the issues that we raised in ’18, the fact that 214 precincts were shut down, that 53,000 people had their voter registrations held hostage, that 1.4 million people were purged, including half a million who simply had chosen not to vote, that we were able to tackle that because we raised the issues, because I refused to say that that was a good thing, we saw as a response, the state legislature the following year, in response to lawsuits that I filed and others, started to fix those problems,” Abrams said, touting high election turnout in 2020 when President Biden won the state.
Co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin thanked Abrams for “admitting” she outright did not win. “That’s such a rare thing,” she said.
“I did it on the day I didn’t win,” Abrams said. “I’m not the governor, said that. The other is election wasn’t fair to voters. Also said that. In this country, we have the responsibility to challenge broken systems. If we do not lift up problems, we will not get answers. What we don’t have the right to is violent response or to spin out conspiracy theories. I don’t say things without evidence, and that I think is the distinction that is being lost in this attempt to conflate who I am and what I have done for the last four years with others.”
In 2019, Abrams addressed a crowd at the annual convention of the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and said, “despite the final tally and the inauguration [of Gov. Brian Kemp] and the situation we find ourselves in, I do have a very affirmative statement to make: We won.”
“Concession needs to say something is right and true and proper,” Abrams said at the time. “You can’t trick me into saying it was right.”
She told the New York Times in 2019 she stood by her claim of having “won” despite not being governor.
“Now, I cannot say that everybody who tried to cast a ballot would’ve voted for me, but if you look at the totality of the information, it is sufficient to demonstrate that so many people were disenfranchised and disengaged by the very act of the person who won the election that I feel comfortable now saying, ‘I won,’” she said. “My larger point is, look, I won because we transformed the electorate, we turned out people who had never voted, we outmatched every Democrat in Georgia history.”
Abrams told Axios in February that she would “acknowledge the victor” in the 2022 gubernatorial election.
“I will always acknowledge the legal outcome of an election. I have never failed to do that,” Abrams told Axios. She added that she doesn’t want the American people to be in a place “where we cannot legitimately question” and criticize systems in order to improve them.
