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Stacey Abrams just joined the group of nominees to be considered for the next Nobel Peace Prize. But other distinguished nominees include climate activist Greta Thunberg and Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, not to mention the Black Lives Matter movement, so competition will be tough.
Abrams seems sure to rise to the top of the list of nominees, but here are seven reasons she should go all the way to Number 1.
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Stacey Abrams’ work to expand voting access was more than just a numbers game. “Abrams’ work follows in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s footsteps in the fight for equality before the law and for civil rights,” Lars Haltbrekken, a member of Norway’s parliament said.
King was the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, and Haltbrekken sees Abrams following in his footsteps. “Abrams’ efforts to complete King’s work are crucial if the United States of America shall succeed in its effort to create fraternity between all its peoples and a peaceful and just society,” Haltbrekken said.
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Abrams was catapulted into the national spotlight over her loss in the the 2018 Georgia governor’s race. Brian Kemp was declared the winner. Kemp was the Georgia Secretary of State at the time, and oversaw a purge of about 670,000 Georgia voters shortly before the election, along with the hold-up of 53,000 voter registrations. Abrams lost by under 55,000 votes, despite a challenge to the Georgia election process which is still continuing.
Instead of giving up and going home, or running into the same brick wall again, Abrams doubled down on voting rights as a path to change. And if it wasn’t going to be her, it needed to be, “a leader who actually sees us all and is willing to lay out thoughtful progressive policies that will lift up the entire country and restore our international position.”
“Poverty and inequality and inequity in our country are harming our future,” Abrams told the New York Times. She concentrated her efforts through her organizations, the New Georgia Project, founded in 2014, and Fair Fight Action, to register 800,000 new Georgia voters.
This is the work the Nobel committee will look at when considering Abrams for the Peace Prize.
Meanwhile, Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp is teaming up with Republican strategists to Stop Stacey. Using predictably incendiary terms like “radical network, and “dangerous agenda,” they want to get out ahead of any future run Abrams might make for office.
Fair Fight’s response to these Republicans is short and sweet: a suggestion that they should “start serving Georgians.”
Leader Abrams has made no decision about her political future, but here’s what I do know: GA Republicans failed on 11/3 & 1/5, with weak leaders, a disastrous COVID response, and families are suffering. Rather than a desperate distraction, perhaps they can #StartServingGeorgians. https://t.co/k49DD9q5Ss
— Lauren Groh-Wargo (@gwlauren) February 1, 2021
Kemp’s attempts to defeat future campaigns is unlikely to have any effect on her consideration for the Nobel Peace Prize.
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Abrams’ work to increase voter turnout through registration and expanded access to the polls has been nominated as “work to promote nonviolent change via the ballot box,” according to Reuters. This work helped to propel President Joe Biden and senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to Washington, D.C., and now it may take Abrams all the way to a Nobel Peace Prize.
In fact, in an election season full of disinformation, Nobel Peace candidate Abrams is noteworthy for keeping her message clear. As the U.S. focused on the Georgia runoff, Abrams just told voters to be sure to cast a ballot, stay calm, and wait for the election workers to count the votes. This is how a free and fair election works, even when the stakes are high.
“We need leaders who will actually show up to do their jobs,” Abrams said. And when the votes were counted, that’s what Georgia got. The Republican senators who were both scrutinized for potentially profiting from classified coronavirus information were out, and democrats Jon Ossoff and Dr. Raphael Warnock were on their way to Washington, D.C.
WATCH: Stacey Abrams tells Meet the Press that her "mission" is to turn out Georgian voters, as President Trump feuds with state Republicans.@staceyabrams: "We need jobs. We need access to justice. We need access to health care." pic.twitter.com/lnUfWZJEtz
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) January 3, 2021
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Abrams was the founder of the Southern Economic Advancement Project, which put out a report detailing utility companies investment in new gas plants. This is happening even in the southeastern U.S., an area filling up with solar energy resources, and as most of the world acknowledges a need to move to renewable energy technologies. “It’s terrible from a climate perspective,” Leah Stokes said, a co-author of the report, told HuffPost.
“We have to understand that climate change is here, that it represents a serious threat to the economy, to our ecosystems and to our people,” Abrams said. “It’s terrible from an air quality perspective, putting people at higher risk of dying from COVID-19, and it’s terrible from a bottom-line perspective in a region where there’s already pretty high energy insecurity.”
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From her first experience as a researcher for former Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson, through deputy city attorney for the city of Atlanta, to serving as state representative for Georgia’s 89th House District (not to mention the House minority leader) of the Georgia General Assembly, Stacey Abrams has worked for equality.
And she’s not afraid to work across the aisle, which seems like a feature in Peace Prize candidates. The Nobel committee will have a lot to look at when it comes to Abrams’s record. When she was the Georgia House minority leader, she worked with then-governor, Republican Nathan Deal, on criminal justice reform. She also worked with Republicans in the statehouse to save a scholarship program, and to pass a public transportation package that was the biggest in Georgia’s history.
“Republicans would bring me their bills and ask me to look at them,” she told TIME in July 2018. “They didn’t always agree with me, but they knew they could trust me, and not every disagreement has to become a battle.”
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There are thousands of people under consideration for a Nobel Peace Prize, so just being nominated does not confer any honor from the Nobel committee.” Cases in point, both the ex-insurrectionist in chief Donald Trump, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner who made money from the tax cut he helped push through before he hoarded coronavirus supplies, crippling states ability to respond to the coronavirus.
It is hard to imagine these two will give Abrams much of a run for the money in Nobel consideration.
