Stacey Abrams announces she?s running for Georgia governor again

Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Democrat and leading voting rights activist, has announced she will launch another campaign to become the nation's first Black female governor.

In a video announcing her candidacy, Abrams said: "Opportunity and success in Georgia shouldn't be determined by background or access to power."

Without serious competition in a Democratic primary, the announcement could set up a rematch between Abrams and the incumbent Republican governor, Brian Kemp. Their 2018 contest was one of the most narrowly decided races for governor that year and was dominated by allegations of voter suppression.

Yet Abrams' strong showing convinced national Democrats that Georgia should no longer be written off as a GOP stronghold. Her performance and subsequent organization convinced Joe Biden to invest heavily in the state in 2020, and he became the first Democratic presidential candidate to capture it since 1992. The party later won a narrow Senate majority after victories in two special elections in the state.

The 2022 governor's race will test whether those gains were a one-time phenomenon driven by discomfort with Donald Trump or marked the beginning of a more consequential political shift in a rapidly growing and diversifying south.

Abrams, 47, ran in 2018 as an unapologetic progressive, embracing the expansion of Medicaid access, something a series of Republican governors have refused to do, and supporting abortion rights.

Abrams was defiant in the face of the 2018 loss, acknowledging Kemp as the victor but refusing to concede the race, citing "gross mismanagement" in his role as secretary of state overseeing the election. She accused Kemp of using his office to aggressively purge the rolls of inactive voters, enforce an "exact match" policy for checking voters' identities that left thousands of registrations in limbo and pass other measures to tilt the outcome in his favor. Kemp has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.