Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams says that she will “likely” run for political office again after her two failed gubernatorial campaigns against Republican Brian Kemp.
Without specifying exactly what position she would run for, Abrams told Drew Barrymore on her daytime talk show that she will be back again.
“I will likely run again,” Abrams said. “If at first you don’t succeed, try try again. If it doesn’t work, you try again.”
Despite her two losses, Democrats still consider Abrams a rock star for her fundraising skills and her get-out-the-vote apparatus in the state of Georgia.
“My first responsibility is to make sure anyone who wants to vote can,” she told Barrymore. “Protecting democracy is not about a person. It’s about the ideals.”
Abrams saw her star power take a hit last month for her poor financial management in the wake of her failure to unseat Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp. As Breitbart News previously reported, Stacey Abrams raised over $100 million for her failed campaign but still finds herself over $1 million in debt, prompting her to fire staff immediately after the November election. Democrats did not withhold their criticism of her financial decisions.
“It’s incredibly bad planning, and it shows where their values are at,” a senior Democratic official told Greg Bluestein of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “You can’t look up one day and realize you can’t pay the bills.”
Abrams owes a little over $1 million to vendors, and some Democrat insiders blamed her poor spending habits for the situation, with several former staffers telling the newspaper that she regularly wasted funds on ridiculous expenses like renting a home as a backdrop for her TikTok videos.
“Some aides commandeered the vacant five-bedroom craftsman-style house, now available to rent at $12,500 a month, as a makeshift office,” noted the report. “A pop-up shop and ‘swag truck’ were assigned to dispense merchandise, such as T-shirts and hoodies, to win over young voters. But staffers grumbled that there was no apparent strategy behind the giveaways, which they said seemed careless and costly.”
Abrams also reportedly spent a great deal of money on “polls that were disregarded” along with “consultants with confusing or conflicting roles within the sprawling operation.” This was also reportedly a problem during her failed 2018 campaign for governor.
“She cast the strategy as the price of building a labor-intensive infrastructure designed to turn out oft-ignored voters who usually skipped midterm elections,” noted Bluestein. “This cycle, she could rely upon a new financial mechanism that allowed gubernatorial nominees to raise unlimited cash from individual donors.”
“Abrams amassed more than $53 million through that committee, helped by megadonors who wrote checks as large as $5 million,” he added. “Still, even as Abrams and her aides set midterm fundraising records, her campaign burned through cash at equally high rates.”