Abrams said her failed 2018 campaign against Brian Kemp was ‘rigged’ and ‘stolen’
In Harvard University’s eyes, Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams is a “political mastermind.”
This fall, the Ivy League school is holding a history seminar, “Race, Gender, and the Law Through the Archive,” that analyzes the role 20th-century “Black women and non-binary people have played in shaping politics, grassroots organizing, the legal bar, and higher education during Jim (Jane) Crow and beyond.” A course description notes that “Critical Legal Studies scholars and Critical Race theorists argue that the law is subjective.”
“From First Lady Michelle Obama to political mastermind Stacy Abrams [sic] to Vice President Kamala Harris, Black women have left their stamp on 21st-century politics and grassroots organizing,” the course description reads.
It’s a bizarre choice to call Abrams a “political mastermind,” given that she’s never won a statewide election or held office at the federal level. She’s also lost two consecutive gubernatorial races and accused an opponent of stealing an election from her.
Myisha Eatmon, the tenure-track professor of African-American history who’s teaching the course, has long pushed radical viewpoints on race. “Racism is a virus and white privilege is a drug,” she said in a November 2020 post. “Black radicalism is only radical within a system ruled by and built upon white supremacy,” she wrote the following June.
Fighting misinformation and white supremacy is hard work. I tired… and it’s only 4pm pic.twitter.com/NDpJVTt8md
— Dr. Myisha S. Eatmon (@DrMyishaSEatmon) January 19, 2021
A lot of my friends from college play in the #nfl, but I’ll never watch them play because I won’t allow massa to silence social justice warriors to appease white supremacy. #NFLBoycott https://t.co/L8aQOjaJYy
— Dr. Myisha S. Eatmon (@DrMyishaSEatmon) May 29, 2018
Abrams, a former state representative, lost a 2018 bid for Georgia’s governor’s mansion to Republican Brian Kemp, then lost the 2022 rematch by an even wider margin. Still, she’s eyeing a third run in 2026, even as state Democratic leaders suggest she step aside.
For years, Abrams claimed the 2018 race was “rigged” and “stolen”—claims she maintained through her 2022 rematch. Then in January, a voting rights group Abrams founded, the New Georgia Project, paid a historic $300,000 fine after admitting it violated 16 campaign finance laws while aiding her 2018 gubernatorial campaign. At the time, now-Sen. Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) headed the group.
Abrams also authored eight romance novels under the pen name “Selena Montgomery,” two of which were written during her time in Georgia’s house of representatives. Soon after her first gubernatorial defeat, CBS announced that it would adapt her 2004 book Never Tell, though it has yet to air. The novel is filled with steamy encounters between a criminal psychologist and an investigative journalist as they hunt down a serial killer.
NBC also agreed to adapt one of Abrams’s novels, but that hasn’t been released, either.
In 2023, PBS News host Christiane Amanpour asked Abrams how she balances her political and creative pursuits at once.
“I try to balance my life so that I’m tackling the issues I care about from multiple perspectives,” Abrams responded, adding that writing novels is particularly enjoyable because she can “kill off the people I don’t like.”
