Stacey Abrams: ‘I Have Never Denied That I Lost’ the 2018 GA Gubernatorial Race

Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams said Wednesday on ABC’s “The View” she “never denied” losing her 2018 attempt to beat Gov. Brian Kemp (R).

Co-host Sunny Hostin said, “So this is your second run against incumbent Brian Kemp for governor, and polls show a tight race, especially the poll this morning. Now, when you lost in 2018, you didn’t traditionally concede, which I appreciated, because you cited voter suppression. Are you confident that this will be a free and fair election and not a repeat performance of what happened before?”

Abrams said, “So I appreciate the question and the framing. I have never denied that I lost. I don’t live in the governor’s mansion. I would have noticed. And there is this clip that’s going around, and it shows me saying that we won, and what I was referring to was that we won in terms of communities that were long left out of the electoral process finally participating in ’18 in outstanding numbers.”

She added, “But I’m not delusional. Just so that’s clear, but what we know was that the issues that we raised in ’18, the fact that 214 precincts were shut down, that 53,000 people had their voter registrations held hostage, that 1.4 million people were purged, including half a million people who simply had chosen not to vote, that we were able to tackle that because we raised the issues because I refused to say that that was a good thing, we saw as a response, the state legislature the following year, in response to lawsuits that I filed and others, started to fix those problems.”

Co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin said, “May I just say thank you for just admitting outright you didn’t win. That’s such a rare thing.”

Abrams said, “I did it on the day I didn’t win.”

She continued, “I’m not the governor, said that. The other is the election wasn’t fair to voters. Also said that. In this country, we have the responsibility to challenge broken systems.”

Abrams added, “I don’t say things without evidence, and that I think is the distinction that is being lost in this attempt to conflate who I am and what I have done for the last four years with others.”

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN