Jesse Jackson predicted Jaime Harrison’s campaign. In 1984, Jackson, then a long-shot candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, won five statewide primaries. The majority of those victories were in Virginia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and his home state of South Carolina. Four years later, when Jackson again made a bid for the White House, he won three times as many delegates in South Carolina as his nearest competitor, and swept the Deep South.
The South was still the South, though. And Democrats, in the late stages of the “Great White Switch,” when they became members of the Republican Party we recognize today, had begun to cede the region as Republicans swept into power in statehouses and governor’s mansions. The old logic remained that a Black statewide candidate would be walloped by white southerners who would be unwilling to support him in a general election. Then, in 2008, America elected its first Black president. A surge of Black mayors soon won races in major cities across the South.
A decade later, Abrams showed that with the right mix of voter registration, money, and charisma, Georgia and the Deep South were within reach for Democrats. “Theoretically, whoever ran in that cycle was going to have a very, very desirable shot, right, because [Trump] was that bad,” Don Calloway, a Democratic strategist, told me. But without the infrastructure Abrams built to support her candidacy—the hundreds of thousands of voters her organization registered—she would not have come within 55,000 votes of winning the governorship, he said.
Abrams nodded to the influence of her governor’s race when she spoke with my colleague Vann Newkirk in 2018. “My focus is on Georgia, but the reality is, Georgia matters to everyone,” she said. “If you change the leadership of Georgia, you change the South. If you change the South, you change the country.” Even if she was unable to win in Georgia that year (her opponent, Brian Kemp, then the secretary of state, refused to recuse himself from overseeing the election, which was dogged by accusations of voter suppression), she changed the way people viewed the path to victory there. “It just goes to show you that maybe we should go out and recruit more African American candidates, because they can articulate something and bring an energy and bring a focus that is unique,” Harrison told me.