Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer announced Tuesday that failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams will deliver Democrats’ response to President Trump’s State of the Union address.
Abrams, who lost a tight gubernatorial race to former Georgia secretary of state Brian Kemp in November, will return to the national spotlight on February 5 to address the nation immediately after Trump concludes his remarks.
“She’s an incredible leader. She has led the charge for voting rights, which is at the root of just about everything else,” Schumer told reporters. “I’m very excited that she’s agreed to be the respondent to the president.”
Abrams said she was “honored” to be speaking on behalf of Democrats in a Tuesday afternoon tweet.
At a moment when our nation needs to hear from leaders who can unite for a common purpose, I am honored to be delivering the Democratic State of the Union response. https://t.co/0dpA3lJZpS
— Stacey Abrams (@staceyabrams) January 29, 2019
Abrams rose to prominence last year as a Democratic champion of voting rights, relentlessly attacking her opponent for using his position as the state’s top elections official to crack down on voter fraud by pursuing administrative actions that she argued were intended to disenfranchise racial minorities.
After losing to Kemp by more than 50,000 votes, Abrams refused to concede the race and backed a lawsuit that, if successful, would have resulted in a recount, on the grounds that Republicans engaged in “misconduct, fraud or irregularities . . . sufficient to change or place in doubt the results.”
The voter-suppression charges leveled against Kemp by Abrams and her allies included the shuttering of polling places in rural areas and the use of small documentary discrepancies, such as a mismatch between the personal information listed on a driver’s license and that listed on a voter-registration form, to disenfranchise some 50,000 minority voters.
In response, Kemp’s defenders pointed out that individual counties determine how many polling places to keep open and a voter affected by a documentary mismatch has two years to correct the error before he is removed from voting rolls.
The date of Trump’s State of the Union was brought into question after Speaker Nancy Pelosi publicly called on the White House to delay the speech until the government shutdown, which concluded Friday after 35 days, was resolved.