Stacey Abrams to 2020 Democrats: Go after 'unlikely' voters

[BeyondGeography]

ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia's Stacey Abrams dove headlong Monday into Democrats' debate over how to win in 2020, urging her party's leaders and presidential candidates to treat her diversifying state as a key battleground and replicate nationwide her 2018 effort to bring new minority and young voters to the polls rather than chasing white voters the party lost long ago.

Abrams, who lost the Georgia governor's race by 1.4 percentage points but set a state record for Democratic votes, made her case Monday in a letter and strategy memo obtained by The Associated Press and sent to top Democratic presidential candidates, national party committees and key strategists and groups on the left.

“Democrats, let's do better and go big," Abrams wrote, arguing that her historic bid to be the first black female governor in U.S. history wasn't the sole driver of her near-win. "I am not the only candidate who can create a coalition and a strategy to win this state," she wrote, adding that "any decision less than full investment in Georgia would amount to strategic malpractice" and arguing that her 2018 coalition of nonwhites and whites from the cities and suburbs is the blueprint "to compete in the changing landscape of the Sun Belt."

The assertions from Abrams and her campaign manager, Lauren Groh-Wargo, highlight a fault line for Democrats. Some party leaders want to focus on flipping white voters who helped Trump flip Great Lakes states including Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Others want to drive turnout across Democrats' growing base of minority voters and college-educated whites in the suburbs and cities, constituencies that could put states like Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona in play, while also helping in the Upper Midwest.

..."Democratic committees, consultants and the media do not factor unlikely voters into their polling, strategy and prognostications, effectively making their analyses by re-litigating the prior election as if nothing had changed in the electorate since," she wrote.

Abrams herself added a bottom line: "We can win Georgia, and we can win across the nation in 2020."

More at https://tucson.com/news/national/abrams-to-democrats-go-after-unlikely-voters/article_e671202b-ca61-5c50-a683-9e1096def733.html

[tblue37]

1. IOW, like Howard Dean's 50-state strategy, with the added emphasis on motivating *new* voters. nt

[Celerity]

2. Abrams is brilliant, I so so hope Biden picks her as his VP nt

[LincolnRossiter]

3. My heart wants to agree, but my head says "why bother."

Anyone who requires a bullwhip to convince them to vote in the age of Trumpism, climate crisis, healthcare crisis, increasing income inequality, an increasingly lopsided federal judiciary, runaway debt, senseless foreign policy, etc. probably just isn’t that interested in being a good citizen.

[DCofVA]

4. Warren/Abrams

Now that's a winning ticket!

[crazytown]

5. "Some party leaders want to focus on flipping white voters who helped Trump flip Great Lakes states"

Ya think?