Don’t let Stacey Abrams slide — she was an election denier before Trump was

Democratic rock star Stacey Abrams, who still hasn’t conceded her 55,000-vote loss in her 2018 race for governor of Georgia, is trying to distinguish herself from the “election deniers” whom Joe Biden has declared a threat to our democracy.

Nobody should fall for this bogus claim. Abrams repeatedly refused to say Republican Brian Kemp was the legitimate governor of Georgia. She repeatedly said she didn’t lose the election but, in fact, won it — despite having no grounds for that assertion.

This isn’t just a Stacey Abrams thing. Before President Donald Trump imitated their example and turned it up to 11 in 2020, Democrats had a pattern of rejecting their own election losses.

Democratic congressmen falsely called George W. Bush’s 2000 election victory a “coup d’etat.” But at least that one was close. In a joint session of Congress, they also attempted to overturn Bush’s 2004 Electoral College victory, in which Bush won a convincing popular vote majority and added some extra states to his 2000 victory tally.

Some prominent Democrats also attempted to overturn Donald Trump’s 2016 Electoral College victory in a joint session in January 2017. Famously, Hillary Clinton said — based on false rumors that it turns out her own campaign had started — that “Trump knows he’s an illegitimate President.” Jimmy Carter said, based on those same rumors, that a full investigation would show that “Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016 — he lost the election, and he was put in office because the Russians interfered.”

Because of widespread election denialism by Democratic leaders, most Democratic voters came to believe the conspiracy theory that Russia stole the election. Two years after that race, when Stacey Abrams lost her election and then began denying it, two-thirds of Democrats agreed that “Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President.”

Election denialism was a standard Democratic Party tactic at the time. So it was normal when Democratic Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown said, “If Stacey Abrams doesn’t win in Georgia, they stole it. It’s clear. It’s clear.”

Abrams lost by 55,000 votes but has never admitted defeat.

Jake Tapper asked Abrams if the election was stolen and if Kemp was “not the legitimate governor-elect of Georgia.” Abrams refused to answer either of those questions. So Tapper followed up, “Is he the legitimate governor-elect of Georgia?” Abrams again refused to answer, and Tapper asked a third time, and she flatly refused to say yes.

Watch the video:

It’s not ambiguous: Stacey Abrams doesn’t believe Kemp is the legitimate governor of Georgia. She made that clear again and again.

She said the election she lost was “not a free and fair election.”

In January 2019, Abrams spoke at a healthcare conference. When the host, Sister Simone Campbell, introduced Abrams and said, “She lost the race by less than 2% of 3.9 million votes,” Abrams thanked her but said, “I’m going to correct Sister Simone Campbell … Thank you for such a kind introduction, but we didn’t lose. We just didn’t get the governor’s mansion.”

Abrams then tried to dilute her election denial into some broader claim about progressive victories, but what she said was clear and direct: When her host said, “She lost the [governor’s] race,” Abrams “corrected” her to say, “We didn’t lose.” The cutesy wordplay afterward doesn’t change that.

Abrams’s current defense holds no water at all. She was an election denier in a whole party of habitual election deniers. The most charitable interpretation is that she has now shifted away from open election denialism because Donald Trump has claimed that mantle for the Republican Party. But there’s an election coming up, and she is trailing badly in the polls, so we’ll see how long that lasts.