While appearing on a Guardian podcast this week, the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate recklessly escalated partisan tensions by accurately describing exactly what Republican mapmakers are doing.
I was enjoying a delightful endive salad with a senior Republican state legislator this week when my phone buzzed with an alert from the Guardian’s new podcast, Stateside with Kai and Carter. I have always appreciated the program as a forum for sensible discussions. But what I heard next nearly caused me to drop my fork.
There was former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, loudly proclaiming that Republican efforts to redraw congressional maps were "evil incarnate" and amounted to "intentional cheating" aimed at suppressing minority voting power.
Frankly, I am exhausted by this lack of decorum.
Has our political discourse really degraded to the point where we are openly calling a meticulously executed, mathematically flawless strategy to permanently silence the opposition "evil"? Do we have no respect left for the process? The men and women drawing these maps in windowless basement offices across the South are not demons. They are dedicated, hardworking professionals who use highly advanced GIS software to ensure that a neighborhood with a 70 percent Black population magically elects a white man named Thad who owns a chain of regional boat dealerships.
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to draw a congressional district that connects three separate suburban country clubs, explicitly bypasses an entire urban center, and terminates at an unpopulated nature reserve 400 miles away? It requires late nights, endless cups of coffee, and a fundamental, unwavering disregard for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. To dismiss that level of architectural dedication as mere "cheating" is frankly lazy.
Cheating implies breaking the rules. What these Republican-led legislatures have done is much more elegant: they have simply rewritten the state constitution so that the concept of a fair election is legally impossible to achieve. That isn't evil. That is just good, old-fashioned American ingenuity.
It is deeply hurtful to spend six months agonizing over exactly where to draw a jagged, snake-like line through a predominantly minority county just to dilute their political power to zero, only to be called a bad person on a podcast.
Abrams and her allies must understand that using aggressive terms like "evil incarnate" only alienates the very people who are currently trying to erase her constituents from the political map. It is the height of incivility to point out what is happening while it is happening.
If Democrats want to foster a healthier democracy, they need to stop complaining about intentional voter suppression and start focusing on how to win over voters in districts that have been explicitly engineered by supercomputers to make their existence mathematically irrelevant. Until we return to a politics of mutual respect, I fear this country will only grow more divided between those who want to participate in the democratic process, and those who have successfully made it illegal for them to do so.