Stacey Abrams and Georgia have changed. Will that help her in 2022?
Stacey Abrams launched a second run for Georgia governor in December 2021 in a state reshaped by 1.6 million new voters and a 2020 Democratic breakthrough -- but also by new voting restrictions and early polling that showed no clear advantage over 2018.
Stacey Abrams announced on December 1, 2021 that she would run for Georgia governor a second time, setting up a potential rematch with Republican Gov. Brian Kemp four years after she lost to him by roughly 55,000 votes in 2018. The announcement came in a state that had changed in ways favorable to Democrats since that first run: Georgia had added 1.6 million voters to its rolls since 2018, more than half of them Democratic-leaning, according to reporting on the race.
Those demographic shifts had already shown up at the ballot box. Joe Biden carried Georgia by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020 -- the first Democratic presidential win in the state since 1992 -- and Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won January 2021 runoffs that delivered control of the U.S. Senate. Abrams was widely credited as a driving force behind the voter-registration and turnout organizing that underpinned both results.
The countervailing pressure: new voting rules
Georgia's political environment had not shifted only in Democrats' favor. Gov. Kemp signed a sweeping election law in 2021 that added new ID requirements for absentee voting, reduced the number of ballot drop boxes statewide, and gave the state greater oversight over local election boards -- changes Democrats argued were a direct response to the 2020 results and would work against the same turnout strategy that had powered Abrams' prior organizing.
What early polling showed
Despite the favorable demographic trend, early horse-race polling did not show Abrams with a clear advantage over Kemp. A November 2021 Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll had Abrams trailing Kemp 44% to 47% in a head-to-head matchup, while a separate YouGov poll that October found her favorability split almost evenly, with 36.2% viewing her favorably against 35.7% unfavorably. A University of Nevada poll in January 2022 showed Kemp still ahead by four points, suggesting the competitive picture had not clearly improved for Abrams heading into the race.
US In News compiled this archived account from contemporaneous coverage by Newsweek and The 19th. It restores a story originally published on this site in December 2021; figures are as reported at the time.