Generic White Male

In 2018, Brian Kemp ran for governor of Georgia. He was also the man running the election. As Secretary of State, his office had canceled nearly 670,000 voter registrations in 2017 alone. Then, weeks before Election Day, it froze 53,000 more under a rule called "exact match." A missing hyphen. A dropped initial. That was enough. Nearly 70% of those frozen applications belonged to Black Georgians, in a state that's about 32% Black. Stacey Abrams lost by about 55,000 votes. She didn't wait for the next race. She built Fair Fight and went to work in every one of Georgia's 159 counties. She recruited poll watchers, ran registration drives, and took the system to court. Georgia organizers registered more than 800,000 new voters. Two years later, Georgia went blue for president for the first time since 1992. Two months after that, it sent two Democrats to the U.S. Senate and handed them control of the chamber. Last night Jon Ossoff won re-election. Keisha Lance Bottoms became the first Democrat elected governor of Georgia since 1998. Tanya Miller became the state's first woman attorney general.