Georgia governor race 2018: Stacey Abrams vs. Brian Kemp

Democrat Stacey Abrams announced she would end her campaign in Georgia’s governor’s race on Friday, putting Republican Brian Kemp in the governor’s mansion and keeping the leadership of Georgia in GOP hands for at least four more years.

In a Friday afternoon speech, Abrams acknowledged that with the state preparing to certify the election results, she could not erase Kemp’s lead. “I acknowledge that former Secretary of State Brian Kemp will be certified as the victor in the 2018 gubernatorial election,” she 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.”

The fight for the Georgia governor’s race isn’t over yet.

Though Republican Brian Kemp declared victory over Democrat Stacey Abrams last week, a string of recent court rulings has called for Georgia to count votes that the state previously rejected, further extending the contest and narrowing the margin Abrams needs to trigger an official recount or runoff.

Brian Kemp is resigning as Georgia secretary of state one day after declaring victory over Democrat Stacey Abrams in the state’s gubernatorial contest.

According to the Associated Press, a member of Georgia’s attorney general office announced Kemp’s resignation in federal court Thursday morning. The AP reports that Kemp submitted his resignation to Gov. Nathan Deal earlier today, and that his resignation will be effective Thursday.

Narrowly behind in the vote count, Democrat Stacey Abrams has yet to concede to Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp in Georgia in one of the most-watched gubernatorial races of the year.

Kemp currently holds a narrow lead of 1,962,547 votes to Abrams’s 1,887,161, and Abrams is telling supporters to wait for full counts on absentee ballots to narrow the gap.

As Georgia voters headed to the polls on Tuesday morning, expectations of high voter turnout collided with delays, technical issues, and a limited number of voting machines in some parts of the state with high minority populations. Late on Tuesday, local elections officials announced that voting hours would be extended past 7 pm in some locations to compensate for the problems.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, machines in at least four voting locations in Gwinnett County temporarily went down, causing voters to resort to paper ballots. The issues further extended long lines at polling locations, with some voters waiting more than four hours to vote. Three Gwinnett precincts will stay open later to make up for the delays.

In the weeks leading up to the 2018 midterms, no state has attracted as much attention as Georgia, where allegations of voter suppression — coupled with the potentially historic gubernatorial campaign of Democrat Stacey Abrams — have prompted several lawsuits, fueled accusations of election rigging, and placed a spotlight squarely on voting systems in the state.

Georgia has been at the center of several recent complaints charging that state officials are attempting to diminish black voters’ power. Many of these complaints revolve around Brian Kemp, Georgia’s current secretary of state and the Republican candidate for governor. Kemp refuses to leave office before the election, prompting voting rights advocates, civil rights groups, and Abrams’s campaign to argue that it’s inappropriate for the man in charge of voting systems in the state to continue to manage those systems while running for office. Kemp says he is working to ensure “election integrity,” and that allegations of voter suppression are a “farce.”

Republicans currently hold an astonishing two-thirds of the governors’ mansions across the country, giving the GOP an overwhelming advantage in controlling state governments. This year, 26 of those seats are on the ballot.

Forecasts from leading election watchers show about 18 of the most competitive governor races in the 2018 midterm elections are currently Republican-held seats. Democrats finally have a lot of chances to regain some ground.

In the final days of Georgia’s tight governor race between Republican candidate Brian Kemp and Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams, things are heating up.

Kemp, who is Georgia’s secretary of state and also the chief officer overseeing the election, has been repeatedly accused by Democrats and civil rights groups of trying to influence the results. However, on Sunday, Kemp accused Democrats of attempting to hack the state’s voter registration system — a claim that has rankled Democrats.

The consequences of this week’s midterm elections will ripple outward through the next decade: Should Democrats win key governorships and state legislative seats, they can begin to roll back the advantage Republicans have built in for themselves in the House of Representatives.

This fall, I wrote a longer piece on how important this year’s midterms will be for unwinding Republican gerrymandering in key states. This is mainly because many state politicians elected this year who get a say in redistricting — largely governors and state senators who serve four-year terms — will be in office in 2021, when the next round of redistricting begins. Neither party will have another bite at the apple for these races after they are settled this week.

Georgia secretary of state and Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp has raised eyebrows with some fishy tactics heading into his race against Democrat Stacey Abrams. The latest development: His office announced an “investigation into the Democratic Party of Georgia” over an alleged election registry system breach.

On Sunday, Kemp’s office said that it opened the probe on Saturday after “a failed attempt to hack the state’s voter registration system,” about which it alerted the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. It later provided more but limited details, saying it had received information from its legal team about an attempted breach and was “working with our private sector vendors and investigators to review data logs.”

Former President Barack Obama and his successor Donald Trump went head to head in dueling rallies on Friday, swapping sharp insults as they made their closing pitches to voters in the final days before the high-stakes 2018 midterm elections.

Speaking at a campaign rally in Miami for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum and Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), Obama bluntly accused Trump of lying and sowing division in a nation racked by polarization. Obama only recently decided to stop holding back, and at Friday’s rally the former president called Trump’s “constant fear-mongering” a desperate attempt to mobilize Republican voters.

Facing allegations of voter suppression, scrutiny from voting rights groups, and calls to resign from his opponent, Georgia secretary of state and current GOP gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp recently said that Stacey Abrams’s voter outreach effort “continues to concern us, especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote,” according to a new report.

Rolling Stone’s Jamil Smith reports that Kemp made the remarks during a ticketed October 19 “Georgia Professionals for Kemp” event held at Atlanta’s Blind Pig Parlour Bar, which was closed to the press. Someone who attended the event provided roughly 20 minutes of audio from Kemp’s speech to Rolling Stone.

As early voting began Monday in Georgia, a group of black senior citizens gathered for a voter outreach event at Jefferson County’s Leisure Center. Members of Black Voters Matter, one of the groups behind the event, offered to drive the group of about 40 seniors to the polls.

But shortly after the seniors boarded the organization’s bus, county officials stopped the trip, prompting new accusations of voter suppression in a state already dealing with several such controversies.

At least 53,000 voter registration applications, the large majority of them from black voters, are being held for additional screening in the state of Georgia, potentially removing the ability for a significant number of people to vote in the November election, the Associated Press reported this week. The news has ignited a controversy closely tied to Georgia’s upcoming gubernatorial election, with voting rights advocates arguing that Republicans are attempting to suppress the black vote and rig the election just weeks before Election Day.

These concerns mostly revolve around Brian Kemp, Georgia’s current secretary of state and the Republican candidate for governor. Kemp refuses to leave office before the election, prompting voting rights advocates, civil rights groups, and the campaign of his Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams, to argue that it’s inappropriate for the man in charge of voting systems in the state to continue to manage those systems while running for office. Kemp’s opponents argue that the pending applications prove he cannot be trusted to oversee the election.

With Tuesday night’s Georgia primary results in, the stage is now set for an epic governor’s race between Stacey Abrams, the former minority leader of the state Senate running to try to be the first African-American woman elected governor of any state; and Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who successfully ran to the right of already-very-conservative Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle.

The ads with which the parties’ respective nominees sealed the deal really illustrate the difference between the two parties in profound ways.

Stacey Abrams, the former minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives, won Tuesday night’s Democratic gubernatorial primary and is now set to be her party’s nominee in the open race to govern the state. She’ll face the Republican nominee, likely the winner of a runoff in July between Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and Secretary of State Brian Kemp.

Despite a favorable national political climate for Democrats, she’ll be an underdog — this is still Georgia — but if she does win, she’ll break history on a number of levels. Abrams would be the first woman elected governor of Georgia, the first African American elected governor of Georgia, and the first black woman to govern any state in the US. Indeed, it’s extremely rare for black women to be in state elected executive offices at all. Right now, there’s Jenean Hampton, the Republican lieutenant governor of Kentucky; Connecticut state Treasurer Denise Nappier; and New Jersey Lt. Gov. Sheila Oliver (both Nappier and Oliver are Democrats) — that’s it.