Here comes Stacey Abrams
Indefatigable Stacey Abrams has announced that she’s running for the governorship in Georgia. Charismatic Beto O’Rourke is running to be Texas’ next governor. This is good news, as these popular candidates can serve to motivate weary and sometimes demoralized Democrats. Democrats too often seem susceptible to defeatism, particularly when all the boxes on our wish list don’t get ticked promptly, media coverage is skewed, and the right is relentlessly hostile. That Abrams and O’Rourke are running for governorships shows us that they believe we can do this. And they’re right, because we can do this. This year, in fact, Democrats have flipped 48 seats in Georgia.
With disheartening daily news of Republican deplorableness, it’s easy to become demotivated. We’re aghast at the hyper-partisan Supreme Court engineered by the right. It’s easy to become discouraged if we doom-scroll on social media and consume the “why bother” rhetoric we see from others on the left. The party of QAnon wants us to feel hopeless, as this is part of its multi-pronged efforts to disenfranchise us. We must not suppress the vote on our own side, and we must continue to make efforts to increase our numbers in Congress and other elected offices across the land.
The candidacies of Abrams and O’Rourke can serve to reinvigorate the progressive electorate, not just in Georgia and Texas, but nationwide. And with Massachusetts’s GOP governor announcing that he won’t be seeking another term, this gives us an opportunity to secure a governorship in the Bay State. Not voting isn’t an option when we’re faced with a radicalized GOP that’s interested only in ruling cruelly, not governing benevolently. Let’s harness this enthusiasm for Abrams and O’Rourke and deploy it to benefit Democrats in every state. While it’s not too late to save our democracy, the clock is ticking. Do not succumb to the doomsayers amongst us.
