🔰Stacey Abrams: 2020 Dems. Should Focus On Voter Suppression | Hardball | MSNBC

Welcome back to Harbo. In 2018, last year, Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams came very close to winning to the governorship, losing to Republican Brian Kemp by only a notch more than 1% and setting a statewide record for total Democratic votes. And now she's urging the Democratic Party nationally not to overlook George as a state, a presidential candidate of the party can win down there in 2020. In a campaign playbook released just today, her team writes building a strong multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalition with historic turnout levels while making meaningful marginal improvements on white voters support levels put the Abrams for governor campaign on the doorstep of statewide victory and puts Democrats in a strong position to break down that door in 2020. Adding with a diverse growing population and rapidly changing electorate, George is not a future opportunity for Democrats. It's a necessity right now. I'm joined right now by Stacey Abrams, the 2018 Democratic candidate for governor in Georgia and founder of and chair of Fair Fight. I've never met you before, madam. It's an honor to meet you. You have the best press of anybody I know in politics. I want to know the secret to your greatness, but you, uh, you just seem like a great person. So let me ask you about, let me, I'm going right to the chase here tonight. This Thursday night, we're going to have a real debate. All the top front runners in the Democratic Party, all the way from Biden to Warren, Sanders, Buttigieg, Harris, all together on the same stage. These are the top potential candidates for president. What would you like to hear them say this night in the debate where everyone's going to be watching that would sell in Georgia? Well, I think number one, first of all, I want to say thank you for having me today. It's an honor to be here. And I want to hear what I've been talking about for the last nine months, that the right to vote is under attack in the United States. And we need candidates who are not only prepared to talk about it, but prepared to use this campaign to address it. And when the best ways to address voter suppression is to ensure that we turn out as many voters as possible, voter suppression doesn't go away because you increase voter turnout, but it does make it harder to thwart the will of the people when more and more people turn out. And I want that to be the mission of every candidate on that stage. And I want them to start in Georgia to kill reconstruction after the civil war, the clan and everybody else on the white side of the fight destroyed the ability of people to vote with literacy tests and all kinds of vote, what do you call it? You had to pay to vote and all that sort of thing. What are the techniques now used in places like Georgia to keep people from voting? Voter suppression has three pieces to it. One is being able to register and stay on the rolls. And that's why we're seeing stories about people being purged from the rolls in Kentucky and in Ohio, something that happened in Georgia to extraordinary degree in the last eight years. The second is the ability to cast a ballot. That means that your absentee ballot actually arrives when you apply for it. It means that your precinct isn't shut down the day before you get there. It means that you actually know that you have the right to vote. And then it's making sure your ballot is counted. That's why election security is such a critical issue. It's why everyone is angry that the federal government, particularly the Senate, refuses to take action on election security. But it's also making certain those absentee ballots, when submitted, get fairly counted, that they're not discarded for things like signature mismatches. Being able to cast a ballot, have that ballot counted and stay on the rolls, that's voter suppression. How do you win that fight? For example, how do you win the fight on that signature thing? I knew growing up in Philadelphia, I ran in a primary up there once. If your signature is not exactly the same way as it on the street list, they can challenge it. That's the way the game plays. And the guy running against you will do that. How do you fight that? Well, number one, on your petitions, I'm talking about your petitions, I should say, you put in your petitions and they're not exactly the same. They get challenged. Well, what we have found in Georgia and what happened in Florida is that the signature mismatch is not lawful. We had a federal court that struck down the discarding of ballots because of that reason. As I like to say, my signature doesn't match from CVS to Kroger. My democratic rights should not be eviscerated because someone watched forensic files and thinks that they can tell what my signature should be. The right to vote in America should be sacrosanct for every eligible American. And that's why we've launched Fair Fight 2020. And that's also why we introduced this playbook, because we want every state to be in competition. But we want people to understand that Georgia was not only ground zero for voter suppression, but also ground zero for opportunity. We can pick up two Senate seats, give 16 electoral votes to the Democratic nominee, and we can flip the House, the state as well as taking holding one and adding another congressional seat. Those are extraordinary opportunities. And Georgia is the place to fight voter suppression, but also fight for Democratic votes. Well, let's see the Democratic ticket next year going into November is Biden and Abrams. And that's the ticket going into Georgia, just as an example. You know, I'm doing here. And that's an example. I see what you're doing. How would you tell a voter who walks in a voting booth? They've been voting for years in the same voting booth, voting district, and they walk in their names down on the list because it's been purged because they had the same name as a felon or something like that. What do you tell that person to do at that moment? Well, number one, we launched Fair Fight 2020 dot org so we can stop that from happening to begin with. We're working in 20 battleground states, including Georgia, to make certain that people who are on the roll stay on the rolls, that they know what their rights are and that they know what the remedies are. Technically, that person could file a provisional ballot. But we want to make certain that before you even get to that step, that you have all the information and all the support you need. And we know that in the 20 battleground states where we've launched Fair Fight 2020 dot org, we can help make certain that local people have the information and the resources they need to fight back against voter suppression, no matter what form it takes and no matter which state it's in. Let's talk about population growth, because I think that's what's the interesting piece. A lot of these northern districts like up in up in New York City where you saw AOC win against Crowley. That's because the population changed. You see the same thing in the old Cambridge district that Tip O'Neill had, that Capuano had. That population's changed. So Presley could win, AOC could win. Is there a changing population significant enough in Georgia that it could elect a Democrat for president? That population has not only changed, the change has happened. We have watched this change happen over the last few electoral cycles. During my term as Democratic leader, I was able to block a Republican supermajority every single cycle because of that demographic change. But what our campaign demonstrated in 2018 is that you can concentrate on that change. You can cultivate those communities of color, which comprise the largest portion of that change, but you don't have to sacrifice white votes to do so. That we are capable as Democrats of walking and chewing gum at the same time. But it requires early, significant investment. It requires talking to unlikely voters, because unlikely voters typically don't respond because we don't show up until the last minute and we do a fairly poor job of communicating. But if we treat those unlikely voters, that population change, the same way we treat swing voters, they will engage. And we proved it in Georgia, outperforming the last two presidential candidates to campaign in Georgia. The honor's mine to have you on tonight. Thank you. It's great to have you. I hope you get elected to a really big office because you seem like a great leader. Thank you so much, Daisy Abrams of the Peach State. or click over on this list to see lots of other great videos.