My latest piece at @mmfa:

Conservative media keep excusing Trump's actions by comparing him to Stacey Abrams. They've got it backwards.

https://www.mediamatters.org/erick-erickson/conservative-media-keep-comparing-donald-trump-stacey-abrams-theyve-got-it-all-wrong

There's been quite the effort to treat what Trump is doing as totally normal, totally in line with what candidates have done in the past. Those efforts keep falling woefully short, none of them withstanding scrutiny.

"Well, Al Gore in 2000..."

1. Gore never went around yelling about fraud, he just wanted votes counted. If Trump just wanted recounts, that's fine. But he's seeking to have votes *thrown out*

2. It was 1 state and less than 600 votes that determined 2000. Very different now.

3. Using the 2000 comparison inadvertently highlights the dangers of a delayed transition. The 9/11 commission report specifically notes that the delayed transition may have contributed to early Bush admin unpreparedness ahead of the 9/11 attacks.

"Yes, but 2016..."

1. Clinton conceded the race the day after the election even though the electoral vote difference is identical

2. Some of Biden's leads over Trump are larger than ones Trump had over Clinton in key states

3. Jill Stein's recounts (only Wisconsin actually finished its recount; Michigan and Pennsylvania were stopped) were joined by Clinton lawyers for the sake of keeping tabs on the counting, not with an expectation that the states would flip.

4. The entire time, Trump was treated as the president-elect by the Obama administration and the transition carried on as it normally would have. That's very different from what Trump's doing now.

So there's really not a good modern analogy to make when it comes to presidential races.

And that's where we end up with comparisons from the right between Trump and Stacey Abrams.

The line goes something like this.

"Blah blah blah, Stacey Abrams STILL thinks she won!" or "The press turned Abrams into a hero BECAUSE she refused to concede!"

And ok, let's talk about those points for a moment because they're both wrong.

Some more examples I link to in my article:

People point to the fact that Abrams won't say that she concedes the 2018 race as some sort of "gotcha."

But they conveniently omit what came next in the speech she gave ending the race.

She wasn't happy about the outcome. OK.
She didn't think it was fair. OK.

But she ended the race. She didn't try to block Kemp from taking office, she didn't try to have Kemp votes thrown out. She didn't declare she won "in a landslide" as the GOP has done with Trump.

After the election, she put energy into voting rights advocacy, to make it easier for all eligible voters in Georgia to be able to make their voices heard at the ballot box. The legal cases her group has fought haven't been to overturn the last election, but to look forward.

But let's look back at the replies to one of the examples I listed earlier in the thread.

Here, one of the guys at Breitbart links to a story published in the New York Times Magazine in April 2019.

/See? Right there, it says that she says she won!/

So...

If you actually read the article ( https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/28/magazine/stacey-abrams-election-georgia.html) he linked to, you can see that the writer very specifically asked her what *exactly* she means when she says she won.

1. Kemp is legally governor. Obviously, that is not a "win" for her, but yes, it's important to say.

2. She views that election as a "win" because it helped show that there's a real appetite for democracy, because it was a sign that maybe Georgia wasn't as red of a state as had been long thought. It set the state for 2020.

3. There's no way to know whether the people who had been purged from the voter rolls by Kemp in the run-up to the election would have voted for her (or at all), but at the very least, the 2018 election drew a lot of attention to "use it or lose it" policies.

Conservatives like to talk about her as though she's just wandering the state telling people that she's the actual governor, but she very clearly is not doing that. She's pushing for positive change, holding elected officials accountable just as every voter should do.