Stacey Abrams vows to ‘ensure the people of Georgia have a voice’ after loss to Kemp

Her bid for governor of Georgia may have come to an end, but Stacey Abrams vowed to never stop fighting for the people who call the Peach State home.

“I will never stop doing everything in my power to ensure that the people of Georgia have a voice,” Abrams said late Tuesday night at her watch party at Hyatt Regency Hotel in Atlanta.

Abrams for a second time lost to Republican Brian Kemp in the gubernatorial race. The incumbent secured 53.5% of the vote, with 95% of votes counted, the Associated Press reported.

Abrams, a Democrat, centered her campaign around what she calls the health care crisis in Georgia. She vowed to expand Medicaid and protect the rights of LGBTQIA people in Georgia.

“This means a lot not only to the BIPOC community but to the youth and generations that’s coming up after her,” Dasan Onyx Frazier, 22, told the Ledger-Enquirer at the Abrams watch party. “To show you can come from somewhere like Spellman College, being a Morehouse grad myself, to see any of the HBCU family step in and make it happen like this is amazing. She knows the community is behind her.”

Earlier in the night, Audrey Maloof had hoped for a runoff.

Speaking of Abrams, Maloof said: “She’s just a genuinely good person. It’s very rare that you meet genuinely good people in this work, and she’s one of them.”

Abrams told her supporters she called congratulated Kemp on his win and spoke with confidence as the audience wiped tears away from their faces, clapped and cheered.

“While I may not have crossed the finish line, that does not mean we will ever stop running for a better Georgia,” she said. “Even though my fight, our fight ... may have come up short, I’m pretty tall.”