Part 10 here.

The left is taking Stacey Abrams’s Georgia gubernatorial bid  extremely seriously. They are treating her race as a national race. So must we.

Stacey Abrams’s 400,000 vote 75%/23% landslide victory in the May 22, 2018, Georgia Democratic gubernatorial primary should be a massive wake-up call to Peach State Republicans and conservatives, and more importantly to the national GOP.

Stacey Abrams will be a formidable opponent in the November election.

“We are writing the next chapter of Georgia history, where no one is unseen, no one is unheard and no one is uninspired,” Abrams told supporters in Atlanta Tuesday night at her victory party. “Now let’s go get it done.”

As leftist commentators Melissa Harris-Perry and Dorian Warren have commented:

The Republican candidates, Casey Cagle and Brian Kemp, are now in a runoff after a crowded primary race. But Abrams, it’s important to note, got more votes than both Cagle and Kemp combined. This was not a small win — it was huge.

Stacey Abrams is not just a threat because of her own considerable talents. The Georgia State Senator is the protege of San Francisco Democratic power broker Steve Phillips and his wife Susan Sandler, daughter of multi-billionaire bankers Herb and the late Marion Sandler. Sandler money is a foundation of PowerPAC+, a Steve Phillips’ vehicle for electing as many far left “candidates of color” across the country as possible.

Stacey Abrams, Steve Phillips

Susan Sandler put $1 million of her own money behind Abrams’ campaign and personally recruited other big donors who committed to another $1 million.

Phillips and Sandler want to flip red state Georgia blue and see Abrams’ campaign as a doorway to that goal.

“The upset election of Doug Jones in the Alabama Senate race in December gave a glimpse of a new electoral equation,” Sandler wrote in a memo to potential Abrams supporters. “If we elect Stacey, we will show that we know how to win in the South without compromising our principles and beliefs.”

Steve Phillips and Susan Sandler are explicitly running a “Rainbow Coalition” strategy – uniting “progressive” white and minority voters into an election winning alliance. Phillips worked in Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition in 1984 and 1988, and he learned a thing or two. The Sandler family fortune has enabled him to test his theories in real elections. More often than not, he has come up winning.

Phillips has updated Jackson’s strategy for the new millenia. Cultivating and harvesting the progressive/minority vote, ignoring white “swing” voters, is the emerging Democratic Party strategy.

Phillips crowed over Stacey Abrams’ victory in The Nation:

“The Rainbow Coalition is like a quilt—many patches, many pieces, many colors, bound by a common thread.” I was in Atlanta, Georgia, at the 1988 Democratic National Convention listening to Jesse Jackson describe his vision for how a multiracial and explicitly progressive coalition of people of color and progressive whites could lead Democrats to victory across the country. Although Jackson’s bid for the nomination fell short, the surprising success of his candidacy—he won 11 contests and nearly tripled his delegate total from 1984—revealed the potential of a campaign rooted in the country’s demographic revolution.

Last night, Stacey Abrams took a big step towards fulfilling that potential in the South by winning the Georgia gubernatorial Democratic nomination. The implications of her win for progressive politics and the future of the country are revolutionary in terms of political strategy and approach.

As a self-confessed Marxist-Leninist student, when Phillips uses the word “revolutionary,” he means it – literally.

Steve Phillips was also “one of the architects of the victory in Alabama” in which Democrat Doug Jones beat Republican Roy Moore in the November 2017 special Senate election.

According to USA Today:

Sandler and Phillips  helped fuel the large voter turnout in the Alabama Senate race. They plan to use the same strategies: a mix of door-to-door outreach, phone calls and advertising to turn the tide on the Georgia governor race.

African Americans make up about 30% of the electorate in Georgia. Sandler and Phillips want some 80,000 black voters to back Abrams in the primary. They plan to hire 250 to help them push the campaign.

Like most modern Marxists, Steve Phillips sees humanity through a racial prism.

Steve Phillips wrote in The Nation:

Georgia has historically been a conservative state, because there were always too few people of color, and too few progressive whites, to sway statewide elections. That is no longer the case. In the 30 years since Democrats gathered in Atlanta for its national convention, the state’s population has grown increasingly racially diverse to the point where people of color are nearly a majority (47 percent) of the state’s population and 40 percent of all eligible voters…

Despite this demographic transformation, Democrats in Georgia consistently lose by an average of 230,000 votes. The strategic challenge is how to close that gap.

Phillips understands that swinging a few centrist independents and undecideds won’t be enough. Nor will relying on the white “progressives.”

All of the empirical evidence, however, shows that there is a ceiling on Democratic support from white voters. Just four years ago, children of two iconic Democratic families—Jimmy Carter’s grandson Jason Carter and former senator Sam Nunn’s daughter Michelle Nunn—made statewide bids that sought to attract greater white support. Both of them ran into the ceiling of white support, garnering the same 23 percent of whites that supported Obama in 2008 and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Jason Carter in 2014. In 2016, Hillary Clinton captured only 21 percent of the white vote.

Recognizing that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, Abrams chose a sounder strategy, backed up by mathematical data and aligned with population trends. In the last gubernatorial election, there were 1.5 million eligible people of color who didn’t cast ballots. It’s that pool of voters that Abrams is focused on to close the gap. About 80 percent of Georgians of color vote Democratic, the return on investment from mobilizing those voters is well worth the effort. 

Stacey Abrams has been mining that black vote through her New Georgia Project, which she founded in 2013 with a massive voter registration campaign. Abrams also attracted some flak for drawing a salary of $177,000 from the project.

New Georgia Project is essentially a voter registration organization, in the mold of the highly successful New Virginia Majority, which helped to turn the Commonwealth almost blue. Unsurprisingly, New Virginia Majority co-leader Tram Nguyen was in Georgia to help Stacey Abrams over the finish line.

Tram Nguyen,  Stacey Abrams

Out of Georgia’s roughly 1.5 million unregistered voting-age residents, as many as 900,000 are minorities. No one has done more to tap that potential voting pool than Stacey Abrams.

From Atlanta magazine:

At the end of 2013, the Atlanta lawmaker founded an initiative called the New Georgia Project that set an ambitious goal of registering at least 120,000 minority voters across the state by the 2014 midterm elections.

Though she raised at least $3 million in donations—more money than Barack Obama spent in Georgia during either of his presidential campaigns—Abrams’ effort ultimately registered just 46,000 people. Now, with less than a year until the 2016 election, Abrams is doubling down. The goal this time? To register 170,000 minority voters between now and the upcoming presidential election, as well as to persuade 600,000 infrequent voters to get out to the polls next November. With an even higher hurdle than two years ago, Abrams is looking to raise not $3 million this time, but $10 million. Call it the new New Georgia Project.

These details are outlined in a pair of fundraising memos obtained by Atlanta magazine. Abrams has asked Democracy Alliance…to donate up to $5.9 million for the New Georgia Project and contribute another $4.35 million for Voter Access Institute, a little-known progressive advocacy group she founded last year. Her funding requests aren’t surprising; one of the Democracy Alliance’s members, Democratic financier George Soros, wrote Abrams’s political action committee, Georgia Next, Inc., a $500,000 check in 2014 to fund her voter registration efforts. 

Both Steve Phillips and Susan Sandler are very active in the Democracy Alliance.

According to Phillips:

It will cost about $10 million to mobilize the 230,000 previously uninspired voters of color required to close the gap in Georgia. The question and the challenge for the progressive movement is will they put their money where their mouth is? Progressives nationally moved upwards of $40 million to Elizabeth Warren’s 2012 Senate campaign and Wendy Davis’s Texas gubernatorial bid in 2014. Will there be similar enthusiasm and support for Abrams? If so, we can make history and fulfill the promise of what Georgia native Martin Luther King Jr. predicted when he said, “Give us the ballot, and we will transform the South.”

Steve Phillips also used Sandler money and the Rainbow Coalition approach to elect Cory Booker as Senator of New Jersey and Kamala Harris to the US Senate from California.

Both dutifully got behind Stacey Abrams’ primary campaign.

Senator Kamala Harris, Stacey Abrams

Another Steve Phillips protege, former Ohio state Senator, now president of the nationwide Bernie Sanders support organization Our Revolution, also traveled to Georgia to support Stacey Abrams.

Our Revolution, which endorsed Abrams, is simply a front for Democratic Socialists of America. Metro Atlanta DSA is about 400 strong. There are also DSA chapters in the Athens and Augusta areas. Neighboring Tennessee, Alabama and Northern Florida DSA chapters could also contribute several hundred doorknockers, phone bankers and donors to the Abrams campaign.

DSA recently helped elect Randall Woodfin as Mayor of Birmingham, Alabama and ultra-radical Chokwe Lumumba to the Mayoralty of Jackson, Mississippi. Their intervention in Georgia could be enough to make the difference.

Stacey Abrams is an old friend of Metro Atlanta Democratic Socialists of America. They may not publicly endorse her, but you can guarantee they will support her campaign.

As in Alabama, old communists and Maoists from the 1960s also came out to support the neo-Rainbow agenda.

One notable was long-time Georgia State Senator Nan Orrock, who publicly endorsed Stacey Abrams in early May.

Nan Orrock endorses Abrams

Nan Orrock (then Nan Guerrero) was “privileged to cut cane in Cuba” as part of the Venceremos Brigade in 1970. In 1971, she supported two Communist Party USA fronts, the Southern Conference Educational Fund and the pro-North Korea, American-Korean Friendship and Information Center. In 1975, Nan Orrock was a Georgia delegate to the pro-China, October League’s December 1975 “National Fight Back Conference” in Chicago.

In recent times Nan Orrock has worked closely with Metro Atlanta Democratic Socialists of America.

Nan Orrock 3rd from left, April 2011

Steve Phillip’s stable of organizations and their allies in Our Revolution and Democratic Socialists of America are throwing huge resources into the Republican’s soft underbelly in the South and the Southwest. They are particularly targeting North Carolina, Florida, Arizona, Texas and Georgia – all blue trending red states with large black and Latino populations, who tend towards low voter turnout. If they can flip vulnerable North Carolina,  Florida, Arizona and maybe Georgia in 2018, that is the end of the Trump presidency. That is also the beginning of the end of the Republican Party as a national force.

Blue leaning Georgia is critical to this plan. Democracy in Color is another Steve Phillips entity backing Stacey Abrams. Wrote Phillips:

Building political power in Georgia is critical to taking back our country over the next four years. In the Democracy in Color plan Return of the Majority, we show how Georgia is one of the Frontline States trending Democratic, and how we can win the Georgia governor’s office in 2018 and then capture its 16 electoral votes in the 2020 presidential race.

The Republicans must treat the Georgia gubernatorial race as a national battle with huge longterm ramifications. They must pour significant money into the race and thousands of on the ground workers into this battle.

The left is taking Stacey Abrams’ Georgia gubernatorial bid extremely seriously. They are treating her race as a national race. So must we.

Look for Part 12 coming soon: “Flipping Florida”