How Georgia's Race For Governor Will Be Won
The reality that this election won’t be any of the things that the Yankee pundits will be claiming from now till November — not a “referendum on race,” not a “test” of whether Georgia is “ready” for a female governor, and sure as hell not anything ideological or policy-oriented — doesn’t mean that all those factors, and more, won’t make it a rip-roaring fireworks display. Quite the contrary. Kemp will be race-baiting and culture-warring up a storm, and it will get spectacularly ugly and stay that way through November. Abrams, for her part, isn’t just a genius when it comes to political strategy: As she recently showed a national audience on Late Night With Seth Meyers, she’s also a once-in-a-generation political charmer, possessed of the sense of humor and sharpness of wit it takes to cut an opponent like Kemp down to size without lapsing into defensiveness or moral outrage. Check out the way she gleefully pokes at the infamous Kemp ad where he points a double-barrel shotgun at his daughter’s date:
Kemp showed in his primary campaign — running against other white conservatives — that he won’t shy away from anything that helps him stoke old white Georgians’ prejudices. Victory in November, for Kemp, hinges on whether he can turn Abrams into the fictionalized radical black woman he’s already running against — not so much another Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi as another “radical black leftist” like Angela Davis or (closer to home) former Georgia congresswoman and eternal GOP bete noire Cynthia McKinney.
Of course, Abrams needs to make sure that every progressive white, black, Asian, Latino, and fair-minded Georgia voter sees Kemp as not just the state’s version of Donald Trump, but the reincarnation of George C. Wallace. The beauty part, for Abrams and the Democrats, is that Kemp has already done most of that vital work for her — both as the voter-suppressing Secretary of State and the great foe of Abrams’s New Georgia Project, and as a gubernatorial candidate whose idea of a racially coded message is nothing less than an advertisement that strongly suggests he’d like to lead an old-fashioned lynch mob, this time aimed at running Latinos out of the state:
Abrams won’t have to cast Kemp as a wild-eyed racist, misogynist, religious bigot — the list could go on. Dude is already doing it for her, and his only path to victory is to keep it up.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/how-georgias-race-for-governor-will-be-won-703266/
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