Editorial: Georgia senators' election a blow for US president Trump

Stacey Abrams, centre, with Democratic candidates Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, listening to Joe Biden speak on December 15 in Atlanta. Photo / Patrick Semansky, AP

EDITORIAL

The antidote to US President Donald Trump's poison popularism could be glimpsed fleetingly on the dusty country roads and the blacktop highways all across the state of Georgia over the past couple of years.

As the Associated Press reported, Stacey Abrams spent years crisscrossing the Deep South, telling Democratic leaders, donors and prospective candidates that a vast, untapped well of potential voters could upend Republican domination in the state.

Narrowly defeated for governor in 2018, Abrams, 47, is credited with laying the groundwork for Democrats to capture the state's two Senate seats.

Former President Barack Obama called the Georgia result "a testament to the tireless and often unheralded work of grassroots organising" and credited Abrams with "resilient, visionary leadership". Former Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean called her the "LeBron James of American politics."

On Monday, Abrams stood at the Democrats' election-eve rally where Biden declared "nobody in America has done more" for voting rights and the party. "Stacey, you're changing Georgia," Biden said. "You've changed America."

Lauren Groh-Wargo, who managed Abrams' 2018 campaign for governor and now leads her Fair Fight Action political organisation, said Abrams refused to believe a people disenfranchised could never be mobilised.

"For years, that just wasn't a thing," Groh-Wargo said. "People told us year after year, no, Black people don't vote in the South and white people are too hard."

Self-acclaimed New York business genius, Trump twiddled his thumbs over his mobile phone, riding democracy into the dust, while his ultimate nemesis - a Black woman from Mississippi - tried to convince the most estranged to take a shot at an inclusive society.

And she did it.