Losing 2018 Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams was all over the country's newspapers in 2019, maintaining she didn't lose her election, insisting minority voting rights everywhere were being trampled upon, and making a name for herself and the organizations she started.
This newspaper alone put her and her organization's activities on the front page of its publication 11 times in the first half of 2019.
On Friday, a federal judge ruled in favor of Georgia on all the remaining issues in a voting rights lawsuit filed by an organization Abrams is associated with. The lawsuit was filed weeks after the 2018 election in which Abrams refused to concede and throughout which she accused now-Gov. Brian Kemp of using his position as the state's top elections official to promote voter suppression.
This newspaper -- in an action probably similar to others across the nation -- ran the news of the end of the suit on page 3 of its second section.
Abrams, who lost to Kemp by some 55,000 votes in 2018, is the Democratic nominee for governor again this year. Given her national profile -- she reportedly was considered as a vice presidential running mate for Joe Biden in 2020 -- and now millionaire status -- her net worth was $109,000 in 2018 -- she was expected to be a shoo-in for victory.
But something happened on the way to the governor's mansion. She is trailing the current governor by more than six points in the Real Clear Politics' average of polls and has trailed in every poll taken in 2022, save for a tie in one poll in June.
Georgians apparently are no longer willing to believe her cries of wolf.
Neither did U.S. District Judge Steve Jones, a Barack Obama appointee, who said in a 288-page order that the challenged voting practices in Georgia violated "neither the constitution not the VRA [Voting Rights Act]."
"Judge Jones' ruling exposes this legal effort for what it really is: a tool wielded by a politician hoping to wrongfully weaponize the legal system to further her own political goals," Kemp said in a statement made after the ruling.
Abrams' Fair Fight organization, in filing the lawsuit and then what was left to contest after some parts had been dismissed and others changed by new state laws, alleged negative effects of the state's "exact match" policy, its statewide voter registration list and its process for in-person cancellation of absentee ballots were disproportionately felt by people of color and new citizens and amounted to violations of the U.S. Constitution and the Voting Rights Act.
The organization's attorney argued in the suit's closing statement that it was "harder to register, harder to stay registered and ultimately harder to vote," which had resulted from "choices designed to keep certain people from voting."
However, she didn't have the facts on her side.
More than a fifth of Georgia's eligible voters have registered in the past four years, about 95% of Georgia' voting-age population now is registered to vote (highest in the nation), and the May 2022 primary saw a record number of voters.
While Fair Fight garnered 3,000 stories from voters, it found few unable to cast a ballot and none during the 2020 election (and whatever problems caused voters to be unable to cast a ballot were generally resolved once state officials were contacted).
Indeed, Abrams' organization was going up against the same Republican officials, who maintained that the state's election results gave more votes to Biden in the 2020 presidential election than then-President Donald Trump, who has accused the officials of stealing the election from him.
Strange work, those Republicans, if Abrams were right. They were willing to steal an election from her but give an even bigger prize to Biden. It never made sense, it didn't to the Democrat-appointed federal judge, and we think it doesn't to Georgia voters.
Further, the changes Georgia Republicans made to voting laws in 2021 can't both be discriminatory and "Jim Crow 2.0," as Biden put it on a trip to Georgia earlier this year, and offer concessions to voting-rights advocates, as Abrams put it in statements following the federal judge's ruling last week.
Nevertheless, Abrams refuses to put herself in the same category as Trump, who continues to perpetrate the so-called "Big Lie" about the 2020 election results.
"I will never ever say that it is OK to claim fraudulent outcomes as a way to give yourself power," she told news outlet The 19th last month. "That is wrong. I reject it and will never engage in it."
Yet, that's exactly what Abrams has done since 2018. And that's why Georgia voters across the line from Tennessee will make her a two-time gubernatorial loser when they go to the polls next month.