Wisconsin Democrats have spent the fall warning voters about election deniers. On Thursday, they are scheduled to appear alongside one.
Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Democrat who refused to concede her 2018 gubernatorial race, will be the special guest at a United Steelworkers rally on Thursday, October 29, at Operating Engineers Local 420 in Oak Creek, according to a Wisconsin State AFL-CIO post.
The flyer lists Democratic gubernatorial nominee David Crowley, Attorney General Josh Kaul, congressional candidate Mitchell Berman, state Senate candidate Robyn Vining, and Assembly candidate Dan Bukiewicz as featured speakers. Additional speakers include USW District 2 Director Mike Millsap, USW International Vice President Amber Miller, and Wisconsin State AFL-CIO President Stephanie Bloomingdale. The event is titled “Labor Votes 2026.”
Abrams lost to Republican Brian Kemp by nearly 55,000 votes in 2018. She never conceded.
“So, to be clear, this is not a speech of concession,” Abrams said on November 16, 2018, in a speech ending her campaign. “As a woman of conscience and faith, I cannot concede.” She closed with, “I will not concede because the erosion of our democracy is not right.”
She kept going. At the National Action Network convention on April 4, 2019, Abrams told the crowd, “We won,” according to The Washington Post. In another 2019 speech, she referred to the race as “what I believe was a stolen election,” adding, “I’m not saying they stole it from me. They stole it from the voters of Georgia.” She also stated, “I did win my election, I just didn’t get to have the job.”
Her allies pursued legal action. Fair Fight Action, the group Abrams launched after the election, sued Georgia days after the election. After what the judge described as likely the longest voting rights bench trial in the district’s history, U.S. District Judge Steve Jones, an Obama appointee, ruled for the state on every remaining count on September 30, 2022.
“Although Georgia’s election system is not perfect, the challenged practices violate neither the Constitution nor the VRA,” Jones wrote.
Abrams lost a 2022 rematch to Kemp by a wider margin. By then, she said on “The View,” “I have never denied that I lost.”
Her Wisconsin hosts have made election denial a campaign theme. Crowley told PBS Wisconsin last month that Republican nominee Tom Tiffany is “someone who’s not willing to stand up and say Donald Trump actually lost the 2020 election.” In the same interview, Crowley said, “I’m always going to sing at the mountaintops about how I believe in our election system.”
The press has joined the effort. Journal Sentinel reporter Jessie Opoien wrote a story on Assembly Democrats’ “election denier” list and gave a Republican candidate 19 hours to respond, the Heartland Post reported.
Thursday, Crowley will sing it alongside a woman who regularly told anyone who would listen that she won a race she lost.
