Stacey Abrams on Track to Achieve Historic Upheaval of Voter Suppression; Trump Half-Asses a Tweet

When Donald Trump fires a sloppy attack tweet at a state politician, it’s usually a sign that Republicans are running another shit candidate in a solidly red state which is now at risk of a Democratic win. He did, and they are, and it is. On Saturday, Trump tweeted his “Strong Endorsement” [caps his] for gubernatorial candidate and current Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who’s now neck-and-neck with Democrat Stacey Abrams in a state which hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since 1998 or a Democratic president since 1996. If she wins, she’ll be America’s first black woman governor.

In the same tweet, Trump called Kemp’s unnamed “opponent” “totally unqualified” and “Would destroy a great state!”

Rather than get defensive, Abrams, who holds a degree from Yale Law School, was appointed Deputy City Attorney for Atlanta at age 29, and has spent the last six years as Minority Leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, simply pointed at her opponent.

“If success is suppressing eligible voters, leaking our Social Security numbers, and pointing a shotgun at a child on TV, I’ll pass,” she replied. “I’ll take Medicaid expansion, excellent public schools, and good-paying jobs.”

Here Kemp is pointing a shotgun at a child.

But more outrageous is that Kemp, current Georgia Secretary of State, has been using his present post to purge voters from the rolls while running–personally holding up 53,000 voter applications at this moment, which, the AP reports, represent a predominantly black population. Under the “exact match” policy, which requires voter applications to match Social Security and DMV records to a T, the Washington Post reports that some of those are held up for reasons “as simple as a dropped hyphen in a name or a transposed number in an address.” Last week, civil rights groups including the Georgia NAACP filed a joint lawsuit against Kemp. A separate lawsuit has been filed by journalist Greg Palast and the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda to force Kemp to release more information on 340,134 which they believe were improperly removed under another policy which automatically purges voters from the rolls if they don’t re-register after not voting for three years.

Abrams, on the other hand, has reportedly worked to get tens of thousands of people to register.