Stacey Abrams lost to Brian Kemp by 54,723 votes in 2018. Four years later, he beat her by nearly eight points. Her critics have treated that record like a closing argument ever since.

On November 3, Georgia answered them. Voters elected Keisha Lance Bottoms the first Black woman governor in American history, swept the statewide offices for Democrats, and sent eight Black women to run everything from election administration and the attorney general’s office to schools, agriculture, labor, insurance, and utility regulation. Abrams deserves much of the credit for building the conditions that made that night possible. Saying so takes nothing from the women who won.

The newly elected 8 black women organized, engaged, and worked their campaigns to success. But if people hadn’t marched in the Civil Rights movement, it might have taken another 50 years for what America witnessed on Tuesday to happen. Stacey Abrams followed John Lewis, continuing the work of creating the election conditions that made Tuesday a historic day for Democrats, as Americans from all sides sent a clear message: change is necessary to restore hope to the kitchen table and end the tyranny of corruption.

Twenty-three years in the Air Force taught me that the jet sortie gets the headline and the ground crew makes it fly. Georgia had a ground crew. Abrams spent a decade on it.

The losses were real, and so was the math

In 2018, Abrams became the first Black woman nominated for governor by a major party. She lost by 1.4 percentage points out of more than 3.9 million ballots, while drawing 778,000 more votes than the previous Democratic nominee. That is a defeat. It is also proof of concept.

She acknowledged Kemp as the winner but refused to call it a concession, arguing that his administration of the election as secretary of state had failed voters. Kemp denied suppressing anyone, and no court ever ruled she won. Her 2022 rematch ended in a clear loss and a clean concession. Money and a national profile didn’t carry her.

Neither loss erased the voters reached or the organizers trained. Georgia political observers told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution those campaigns became a guide for the voter engagement that followed.

The work before the yard signs

Abrams founded the New Georgia Project in 2013, five years before her first run, to register young and nonwhite voters that campaigns had written off as too expensive to reach. The Associated Press reported that it registered tens of thousands of people, focusing on low-turnout neighborhoods and rural communities. Participation became a year-round job instead of a last-minute appeal.

After 2018, she launched Fair Fight Action to challenge barriers at the ballot box, then Fair Fight 2020 to fund voter-protection operations with Democratic state parties and allies across 20 states. Registering a voter means little if that voter can’t cast a ballot and have it counted, and she built for both. For me, this is not well understood outside marginalized communities, just like the need for mental healthcare, healthy food options, and good schools.

Contrary to the popular belief of many black conservatives, the “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” is an antiquated false experience for the majority of black americans who may not live in the suburbs or gated communities. These black americans live in an imbalanced and uncertain world where the pursuit of the American dream is unavailable despite the protestations of black conservatives.

Look, black conservatives can believe whatever they want, but this blue wave (Georgia, South Carolina, Nevada, Texas, Ohio, Alabama, North Carolina, etc.) is a signal that no matter what color or religion you are and what you support, people want affordable prices, lower insulin drug prices, access to basic healthcare, and not have to decide between filling their gas tank or putting food on the table.

People can’t keep living the way they are now.

In 2019, Abrams added Fair Count, a nonpartisan nonprofit working to improve census participation in undercounted communities, and the Southern Economic Advancement Project, which backs policy work and community groups across the South. Those are separate organizations with separate missions, and the nonpartisan ones are not campaign shops.

Fair and Balanced

The record has scars. In 2022, a federal judge ruled against Fair Fight Action on the remaining claims in its lawsuit over Georgia election practices. The New Georgia Project closed in 2025 after funding trouble and a $300,000 campaign-finance fine tied to its 2018 activity, years after Abrams had left. That closure is a warning worth hearing: local capacity disappears the moment the money does.

Still in the fight in 2026

Abrams didn’t sit this one out. The Journal-Constitution reported that she raised money for Bottoms, backed legislative candidates, and worked smaller events built for voters who skip rallies. She also campaigned in Tennessee, Alabama, and Texas. None of that is new for her; in 2020, she was in Florida walking college students through registration checks and voting protections.

Nobody can hand one organizer a precise share of a statewide win. The winners didn’t try. Jon Ossoff credited her years of work for making Georgia competitive, and lieutenant governor-elect Josh McLaurin pointed to the foundation she laid for this year’s victories.

Bottoms and the other seven earned their wins. And critics should not think otherwise. The Black Voters Matter organization and generations of local organizers earned theirs. Abrams stands taller in that company, not smaller.

John Lewis’s unfinished assignment

John Lewis endorsed her first campaign for governor in July 2017. And that’s good enough for me coming from a Civil Rights giant that didn’t shy away from “good trouble.” The man who bled on the Edmund Pettus Bridge backed a woman whose whole theory of power was getting more people through the door. Georgia just tested that theory.

Read Tuesday as a rebuke of Republican leadership on the ballot and of Donald Trump’s grip on the party. That reading holds. But candidates, affordability, public services, and plain confidence in leadership moved votes too, and no single explanation owns the result.

And one election doesn’t retire authoritarian politics. It checks it, and the obligation to defend democratic government doesn’t take a night off because we won one. In the military, I worked under a canopy of darkness in the thick of heat and the slippery frost. No matter the terrain or location, I faced many obstacles supporting communication missions while knowing families slept safely in their homes in the United States of America. I called the sound of military jets taking off from runways the “sound of freedom.”

Go, Air Force. Thank you to all military members serving in the defense of our nation.

The 2028 work starts now

Pull the voter-history data when it posts. Compare registration growth to actual turnout. Track whether first-time voters come back. Write down which barriers kept eligible people from voting and what help got them through, and keep those receipts separate from anybody’s victory-lap theory about which tactic won.

Fund the local groups between elections. Keep trained people on payroll. Ask communities what changed and what didn’t. Then hold the new officeholders to what they deliver, not to the history their wins made.

Abrams’s career offers a harder scorecard than a win-loss column: did the work leave other people better positioned to hold power? In Georgia, the answer came in on November 3.

Get to work.