On November 20, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp certified the election results that secured Joe Biden the state’s 16 electoral votes. A hand recount and historic first state-wide audit had affirmed that Georgia was blue for the first time in almost three decades.
Behind this remarkable feat for the Democratic Party is a grassroots voter-registration movement led by Georgia’s 2018 Democratic candidate for governor. Stacey Abrams, the first African-American woman to run for governor, lost narrowly in 2018 to long-serving Secretary of State Kemp, but proved quickly that she is a woman with a mission.
She has been credited as the architect behind Georgia’s increased voter turn out on November 3 and the hundreds of thousands of new voter registrations in recent years. In this election just under five million Georgians voted, a record, nearly one million more than in 2016.
