“The View” co-host Sunny Hostin lauded Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams on Wednesday for refusing to accept the results of the 2018 election.
Abrams joined the show to discuss her campaign against incumbent Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, to whom she lost four years ago.
“So this is your second run against incumbent Brian Kemp for governor, and polls show a tight race, especially this morning. When you lost in 2018, you didn’t traditionally concede, which I appreciated because you cited voter suppression,” Hostin said. “Are you confident that this will be a free and fair election and not a repeat performance of what happened before?”
“I appreciate the question and the framing,” Abrams said. “I have never denied that I lost. I don’t live in the governor’s mansion. I would have noticed.”
Abrams told The New York Times Magazine in 2019 that she still believed she won the 2018 election despite losing by nearly 55,000 votes.
“If you look at my immediate reaction after the election, I refused to concede,” Abrams said. “It was largely because I could not prove what had happened, but I knew from the calls that we got that something happened.”
“Now, I cannot say that everybody who tried to cast a ballot would’ve voted for me. But if you look at the totality of information, it is sufficient to demonstrate that so many people were disenfranchised and disengaged by the very act of the person who won the election that I feel comfortable now saying, ‘I won,'” she added. “My larger point is, look, I won because we transformed the electorate, we turned out people who had never voted, we outmatched every Democrat in Georgia history.” (RELATED: Stacey Abrams Twists Herself Into Knots Trying To Explain Away Surging Voter Turnout)
Abrams then told the magazine her refusal to concede was based on “empirical evidence” of alleged voter suppression.
She also said in the days after the election that she would “not concede because the erosion of our democracy is not right” and again blamed her loss on Kemp’s alleged suppression of voter turnout.
Stacey Abrams now says she never claimed she won the 2018 Georgia election. Here she is on video claiming she won. I look forward to Joe Biden condemning this unacceptable attack upon democracy. pic.twitter.com/Xkj3jvLD1q
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) September 13, 2022
“But I’m not delusional, just to be clear,” Abrams told Hostin and the other hosts. “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 issue.”
Abrams then went on to say the US has the “capacity to have free and fair elections,” but that it will require work to achieve that goal.