Appearing Thursday on MSNBC, left-wing activist Stacey Abrams accused the Republican Party of suppressing voter rights due to an “existential panic” in the wake of Georgia enacting election integrity measures.
A transcript is as follows:
JOY REID: It is breathtaking to see just the breadth of the number of laws and ways that Republicans are throwing bricks in front of voters. When you look at it as someone who has been a politician, who has been an elected official, is this more straight up, sort of, racist attempts to reconfigure the electorate or is it more GOTV [Get Out The Vote]? Part of me thinks part of it is GOTV.
STACEY ABRAMS: I actually think it’s more of an existential panic, and cowardice, and laziness. What they realized in the last election is a confluence of possibilities came into being. Communities of color that had largely not fully recognized there power, became part of the electorate. Young people, who had largely kept themselves at a more diminished capacity, participated in the elections. And because of COVID, more Americans, especially those Americans who were most vulnerable and disadvantaged, understood that there were alternatives for participating in elections, and they did so.
Rather than confront and grapple with what it means to have a more engaged and expanded electorate, they are instead working as hard as they can to not only throw up those bricks, but also to, to your point, to use this GOTV strategy to create a new boogieman for their own for their constituents. But at the same time, they’re expressing their hostility towards those communities that changed the outcome in 2020 and 2021, and those are largely communities of color. So, racial animus is absolutely a part of it. But, I think, overall it is an existential crisis and existential panic leading to the tactic that worked well for so many other parties and that’s voter suppression.