Stacey Abrams won a decisive victory over opponent Stacey Evans during the Georgia Democrat gubernatorial primary on Tuesday, setting the stage for Abrams to potentially become the country’s first-ever black female governor. Abrams, the former minority leader of the Georgia Statehouse, took 76.5 percent of the primary vote over Evans, who in defeat swiftly urged her own voters to back her former opponent so that Democrats can present “a unified voice to rally against Trump.”
“We are writing the next chapter of Georgia history, where no one is unseen, no one is unheard and no one is uninspired,” Abrams told supporters during her victory party in Atlanta. “Now let’s go get it done.”
According to Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPAC, Abrams’ victory signaled the rising importance of black voters in the heavily conservative state, where women of color make up 23 percent of the population but only eight percent of officeholders. But despite Georgia’s rising diversity of population — and the fact that Hillary Clinton came within five percentage points of winning the state during the 2016 election — to say that Abrams will be fighting an uphill battle is an understatement. Abrams will compete with the winner of a GOP primary runoff as Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle and Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp compete in a battle that has seen the two candidates put out increasingly hyperbolic ads touting their anti-immigrant attitudes. In one of Cagle’s ads, people wearing MS-13 gang tattoos fire guns directly at the viewer, while in one of Kemp’s, the Republican is seen promising to corral every undocumented immigrant he finds in his “big truck.”
