Democrat Beto O’Rourke appeared on ABC’s “The View” last week in an attempt to relaunch his 2020 presidential campaign, which had stalled after a promising launch back in March.
He wanted to hit the right notes with the all-female, mostly liberal panel. Among other things, he talked about the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election and how Democrat Stacey Abrams was a “real hero” who handled her defeat with “grace.”
Those of us who have paid attention to what Abrams has consistently said in the six months since that election were left scratching our heads after hearing O’Rourke’s effusive praise for her “grace.”
Because she hasn’t been the least bit graceful about anything. She has repeatedly refused to concede. Even more troubling, she continues to tell people that she won it.
“I did win my election. I just didn’t get to have the job.” she said back in March.
“I don’t concede that I lost. I acknowledge that I’m not the governor of Georgia,” Abrams told Vanderbilt University students that same month. “That’s made plain every day I don’t walk into the Governor’s Mansion.”
On that November night when she acknowledged Republican Brian Kemp had more votes than she did, Abrams made it clear she was not actually conceding. “This is not a speech of concession, because concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true or proper,” she announced in front of a crowd of supporters.
Several days later, she would say in an interview that the governor’s race “was not a free and fair election.”
For the last six months, Abrams has given speeches, written opinion pieces at major newspapers, and appeared on countless talking head shows and political forums where she’s made similar remarks.
She is rarely, if ever, questioned on her election claims by the mainstream media. Conservative fact checkers have weighed in and have made convincing cases that Abrams’s claims are incorrect, but major national newspapers to date have not critically reviewed what she’s asserted. Official fact-check organizations have not analyzed her statements.
Since her defeat back in November, Abrams has repeatedly undermined the election process in the state of Georgia to much fanfare, applause, amens, nods and winks from the same media and pundit classes who roundly excoriated presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016 for not committing to accepting the election results if he wasn’t declared the winner.
Abrams isn’t the only one saying her election was “stolen.” Other Democrats — in addition to O’Rourke — who have said this in so many words include Sen. Cory Booker (NJ), who is also a presidential candidate, Sen. Sherrod Brown (OH), and Hillary Clinton.
“If she had a fair election, she already would have won,” Clinton said about a week after the election last year. “Stacey Abrams should be governor, leading that state right now,” Clinton would later assert in a March speech in Selma, Alabama.
But in 2016, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who pundits and pollsters predicted would trounce Trump in November, sang a different tune on respecting the outcome of an election. In October of that same year, Clinton tweeted that “Donald Trump refused to say that he’d respect the results of this election. That’s a direct threat to our democracy.”
That same month, another Democrat posted their thoughts on Twitter on what they thought about Trump’s refusal to say that he’d accept the outcome of the election.
“Trump’s refusal to concede the election if he loses proves he is a petty man uninterested in our national stability,” said the Democratic minority leader of Georgia’s House of Representatives.
That Democrat was Stacey Abrams.
Stacey Matthews is a veteran blogger who has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a regular contributor to Red State and Legal Insurrection.