Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams compared her election loss to the persecution of St. Paul and the Early Church in her concession speech Tuesday.
Abrams lost her gubernatorial bid to Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp for the second time after initially running against him in 2018. During the concession speech, she read a passage from 2 Corinthians 4:89, which states, “we are troubled on every side, but not distressed. We are perplexed but not in despair, persecuted but not forsaken, stale but not destroyed.”
“I know the results are not what we hoped for tonight, and I understand that you are hurting and you’re disappointed,” she said. “I am too. We may not have made it to the finish line, but we ran that race and we know this path and we know that running is what matters. That standing is what matters. That defending is what matters.”
Kemp won 54% of the vote with 86% of the votes counted, while Abrams garnered 45.3%. When she initially lost to Kemp in 2018, Abrams denied the election results and declared herself the legitimate winner.
She told MSNBC in a 2018 interview that the election “was not a free and fair” and repeatedly asserted that she had won the election. (RELATED: ‘Street Gangs Did Not Shoot Six Asian Women’: Abrams Invokes Massage Parlor Shootings In Debate With Kemp)
“I use the word ‘stolen.’ I’m not saying I absolutely know I would have won, but we know that thousands of Georgians had their voices stolen because they were not able to cast ballots, and they cannot be guaranteed that their votes will be counted in 2020 if we don’t do this right,” she said on MSNBC in 2019.
Recently, Abrams has rejected the notion that she denied the election results, telling the 19th that she criticized the “access to the election” and will not “concede to a system that permits citizens to be denied access.” She made a similar argument during the Oct. 17 debate with Kemp, where she warned of the alleged “Jim Crow 2.0” voter suppression in the state of Georgia.