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Democrat Stacey Abrams Ends Bid For Georgia Governor


UPDATE 11/16/18: Democrat Stacey Abrams ended her campaign to become the next governor of Georgia Friday, which would have made her the first black woman in American history to lead a state. After a 10-day standoff, Abrams recognized in a fiery speech that Republican Brian Kemp will assume the position.

“I acknowledge that former Secretary of State Brian Kemp will be certified as the victor in the 2018 gubernatorial election,” Abrams said. “But to watch an elected official who claims to represent the people in this state baldly pin his hopes for election on suppression of the people’s democratic right to vote has been truly appalling.”

Abrams also made it clear her speech wasn’t one of concession, saying she plans to file a federal lawsuit to challenge the “gross mismanagement” of Georgia elections.

“In the coming days, we will be filing a major federal lawsuit against the state of Georgia for the gross mismanagement of this election and to protect future elections.”

Abrams made the announcement late Friday afternoon, which—according to reports—was the earliest state officials could certify the results after a court-ordered review of absentee, provisional and other uncounted ballots.

11/ 7/18: The fight isn’t over yet for Stacey Abrams, who is refusing to step down in her quest to become the first black woman governor of Georgia. On Election Night the Democratic nominee announced in a fiery speech that she would not concede the race until every single vote is counted, a rallying call that concluded a night of voting challenges for Georgia residents.

“There are voices remaining to be heard,” she told the crowd of supporters early Wednesday morning. “We believe our chance for a stronger Georgia is just within reach.”

Abrams, the former minority leader of the Georgia General Assembly and the first black woman to lead in the House of Representatives, is up against the Republican candidate, Brian Kemp. Kemp, who is currently Georgia’s sitting Secretary of State, was endorsed by President Donald Trump during the campaign. Over the summer Trump said Kemp was “tough on crime, strong on the border and illegal immigration.”

Here’s where things get a little tricky. Right now Abrams has about 48.7 percent of the vote, with 1,907,212 votes. Kemp currently has the lead with 50.4 percent and 1,971,831 votes, according to the Associated Press. This means less than 65,000 votes separate the two candidates. And those numbers really could mean something as Georgia has an odd law that states a gubernatorial candidate must win a majority of votes (more than 50 percent) to win the election. If neither candidate takes home a majority, it triggers a run-off election. Both parties would meet again for a December 4 vote. It would mark the first general election race for governor to require a runoff, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Abrams’ campaign team believes there are at least 97,000 early votes and mail-in ballots that have not been tallied, AP reports. The team believes she needs just 25,000 of those votes to be in her favor to trigger a runoff. However, Kemp disagrees.

“There are votes left to count, but…make no mistake, the math is on our side to win this election,” he said Tuesday evening, according to the AP. Still, Abrams is willing to wait.

Kemp famously played into the President’s racist rhetoric with a primary campaign ad where he said he’d “round up illegals and bring them back myself.” He ran on a platform that included increasing teacher pay, capping state spending, lowering health care premiums, and ending sanctuary cities. Abrams focused her platform on strengthening environmental protections, supporting a pathway to citizenship for immigrants, opposing further abortion restrictions, the decriminalization of marijuana in Georgia, universal background checks, and supporting educational scholarship funding for all.

Abrams was well-aware that she wasn’t liked by everyone on the campaign trail, but chose to focus her attention on empowering sideline supporters instead.

“My approach is this,” Abrams shared with Rolling Stone about her campaign. “I’m not going to spend a disproportionate share of our resources trying to convert Republican-leaning voters when we can invest in lifting up the voices of those who share our values. Because here’s the thing: I think our values are the right ones. And I think these values that are shared actually are going to be victorious on their own.”

Abrams also had some serious star power supporting her campaign. Just prior to the election, Oprah Winfrey flew to Georgia to campaign for Abrams, even going door-to-door to garner more support for the candidate.

“Nobody paid for me to come here. Nobody even asked for me to come here. I paid for myself and I approve this message,” Oprah shared during a campaign rally for Abrams.

If Abrams gets her way, and every vote is tallied, it looks like Oprah may have to return to the Peach State soon.

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Stacey Abrams Is the American Dream. She’s Also $200,000 in Debt.



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Cynthia Nixon Promises to Keep Fighting After Losing Her Bid for Governor


Activist and actress-turned-gubernatorial candidateCynthia Nixon lost her highly publicized bid for New York governor on Thursday night, with her opponent and incumbent governor Andrew Cuomo cinching about 65 percent of votes.

Despite the defeat, Nixon left her supporters with a rousing concession speech, in which she urged progressives to continue fighting for change and pushing for equality in New York and across the rest of the country.

“This is not a time to settle for the way things are, or sit back and hope for things to change,” she said. “This is a time to fight. As long as New York remains the single most unequal state in the country, we will keep fighting.”

Nixon had positioned herself as a progressive alternative to Cuomo and promised to change the status quo. Had she won, the former Sex and The City star would have been the state’s first female and openly gay governor, and her platform included championing LGBTQ causes, as well as solutions for racial and economic injustice.

In a statement to Glamour after announcing her candidacy, she explained how the election of Donald Trump was a “wake-up” call to women who have launched political campaigns this year in unprecedented numbers.

“I’ve been humbled and inspired by the thousands of women who are running for office for the first time. And today, I am honored to join their ranks,” she said.

Nixon, like recent progressive candidates such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had pledged not to take any corporate campaign money and eventually secured a record number of small donors that helped her pull 30 percent of votes. She ended up raising about $2.5 million—just a fraction of the $25 million Cuomo reportedly spent on television ads and mailers, according to the New York Times. Buzzfeed reported that Cuomo’s spending per day was almost the same amount of Nixon’s total.

In her speech on Thursday, Nixon praised the gains her campaign had made despite being up against Cuomo’s hefty budget, and said she was inspired rather than discouraged.

“Before a single vote was cast, we have already won. We have fundamentally changed the political landscape in this state,” she said. “This campaign changed expectations about what is possible in New York state.”

She also evoked the achievements of recent progressive candidates, such as Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, who have toppled long-standing incumbents and represent a new era of progressive politics. She urged Democrats to “stand for something” and take back the party while encouraging a new generation to keep pushing forward.

“This is an incredible moment for progressives, but it is not just a moment. it is a movement, and this movement is only growing stronger… To all the young people. To all the young women. To all the young queer people who reject the gender binary. Soon you’ll be standing here, and when it’s your turn, you’ll win,” she said.

MORE: With Letitia James’ Primary Win, New York Could See Its First Black Female Attorney General





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Valerie Ervin's Bid to Be the First Black Woman Governor of Maryland


Democrat Valerie Ervin has traveled a long road to become a candidate for governor of Maryland. If she had complied with one man’s wishes years ago, she might not have set foot on the path at all.

“When I ran for the [Montgomery County] Council the first time, a very well-known African-American man, political leader, sat me down and he said, ‘There is already an African-American man running, and you can’t run because we need to make sure he wins,’ recalled Ervin, who would be the first black woman — or woman of any color — to occupy the governor’s chair.

“And I ran anyway. And I won.”

Ervin’s bid for governor is exceptional, even in an election year that’s brought new attention to women and minorities competing for office at all levels of government. In a sit down with Glamour, the longtime political activist acknowledged the conflicts generated by an opportunity born of tragedy.

Originally a candidate for lieutenant governor of Maryland, Ervin decided to move to the top of the ticket after the sudden death of her running mate, Kevin Kamenetz, just weeks before the vote. “One day we saw him; the next day, he was gone,” she said of Kamenetz, the 60-year-old Baltimore County executive who died May 10 after going into cardiac arrest.

Ervin had just days to decide whether to remain in the already-packed Democratic primary field and run in Kamenetz’s stead — and to choose a ticketmate of her own. She took the plunge, teaming up with Marisol Johnson, an El Salvador-born former member of the Baltimore County School Board.

When she filed her papers, “I could feel something in me that reminded me of all the people who went before me, who didn’t have the same kind of opportunities that I did,” said the University of Baltimore-educated Ervin, a 61-year-old former union organizer and advisor to the progressive Working Families Party.

She says she thinks not only of trailblazers — the Shirley Chisholms, the Fannie Lou Hamers — but those closer to home: “I’m inspired by the women who came before me in my family,” Ervin said. “They cleaned other people’s houses and took care of other people’s children and saved their money to make sure I went to college and had opportunity.”

Ervin, who has two adult sons and four grandkids, is not the only black woman seeking an American governorship at a time when there are no sitting black governors anywhere in the U.S. (and women run just six statehouses). But her situation is radically different from that of candidates like Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, whose Democratic primary win just secured her a place in the history books and secures her a shot at the top job.

To start, Abrams claimed victory in a one-on-one primary fight. She had a considerable war chest, enjoyed financial support from outside spending groups and drew marquee endorsements from major Democratic Party figures.

Ervin and Johnson, meanwhile, are not even the first two-woman team in an already packed and diverse field. Being Kamenetz’s ticketmate does not equate to Ervin having access to money he raised for the primary. What’s more, ballots already printed for Maryland’s June 26 primary list Kamenetz as the candidate for governor and Ervin as his chosen lieutenant—not the Ervin-Johnson ticket.

Donna Duncan, assistant deputy for election policy at the Maryland Board of Elections, told Glamour in a phone interview that votes for Kamenetz will be tabulated as counting for Ervin and that the state’s 2.14 million active registered Democrats will be informed about the change of circumstances in multiple ways, including via notices in polling booths and through social media.

Ervin, naturally, isn’t satisfied with those provisions, nor with official arguments that reprinting ballots in time for the election just isn’t feasible.

She isn’t alone in her assessment. Election expert Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine and a noted scholar of election law, wrote this week that it’s a “dicey” scenario in which the public is told a vote cast for one candidate will be logged as a vote for another.

“If absentee ballots are already out, how do we know if voters wanted to vote for the old or new candidate?” he asked Glamour. “Perhaps someone needs to seek a court order to delay the primary until new ballots can be printed and distributed. Usually candidate replacement rules are written so that replacement must occur before ballots are distributed.”

But Stella Rouse, director of the Center for American Politics and Citizenship at the University of Maryland, said the administration of the election seems to be in tune with legal precedent.

“The circumstance of her losing her running mate so near the filing deadline is definitely unfair, as she does not really have time to get her name out into the broad public domain, and thus is also limited in her ability to raise money,” Rouse said of Ervin via email.

“I can understand that she would like to at least be given the same starting position (so to speak) as her late running mate and to pick up where he left off, but she is not him and [Maryland] election law dictates how this is handled.”

Even as she objects to the conditions of the June vote, Ervin says her campaign’s ground game is in motion. Grounded in pledges of support for a $15 minimum wage, paid family leave, universal childcare and debt-free college, her bid will rely heavily on getting Maryland women of color to turn out, reprising the influential role the demographic has increasingly played in both primary and general elections.

Running in a state poised to become majority minority, and as someone who self-describedly got politicized “by being just a pissed-off mother,” Ervin is not soft pedaling issues of race or gender, from her choice of running mate to the “Black Girls Vote” button on her lapel to a campaign website that calls out “the white supremacy, bigotry, and violence sweeping our nation.”

“Something is happening in the country. These primary elections are all about women, and a lot of them are about women of color, and the white male power structure is freaking out,” she said. “And so the fearlessness [with which we] approach the campaign is what’s really got people a little off kilter.”

Considering the myriad challenges she faces in her sudden ascent to the top of the ticket, Ervin is hardly a sure thing for the Democratic nomination, much less Maryland’s governorship. Still, she said, “I have this one moment to be a voice, whether I win or not. Of course I would love to win, but even if I don’t, I think my voice and Marisol’s voice has been elevated as part of [the] story of Maryland.”





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