warmer. i didn t get to the stores, i would have loved to have a bubble coat. we re wearing red because we re about to retire it in georgia. we love that. let me come to you first, mayor tomlinson. this race really has become a national election. people are talking again, unfortunately, about voter suppression. yes. what would it mean to this state if stacey abrams were able to overcome that and become the governor of georgia? it s transformational. it s frankly the transformation we ve been weighting on for five years. joy, i m going to give you a big surprise, but georgia has been a blue state for five years. we have 7 million registered voters. the majority of those are democrats. they just don t vote. so we ve ceded the state to republicans for years. over 2 million people have voted early. what s exciting about that is stacy is hitting all of her marks. over 30% african-americans
and dad could see that those sacrifices they made for us, the work they did for me and my five brothers and sisters, that it came to fruition. and that we are on the precipice of changing what leadership looks like. and to have your mother and your father, they re raising my niece right now, they have a 12-year-old at home, they are the living embodiment of why we do this work, about why education is important, why health care is important, why jobs are important. because i ve watched my parents struggle my entire life. and to be the product of their dreams is an extraordinary, extraordinary thing. and you know, what s interesting is, we ve all been covering this race all around the country because of the voter suppression, because of what bryant kemp, the current secretary of state is doing. what was completely lost on me, i ll admit, until yesterday, was the fact that your running mate is also a woman. this is actually a two-woman ticket. it is. i don t think we ve seen that an
of the voting rights act, before the united states supreme court decided that they knew better than congress, that they know more about race than successive congresses that have reauthorized the voting rights act since 1965. now we re living with the fallout. what we re seeing around the country, joy, is that everyone is stepping into the breach. that s why the courts are so important. that s why people coming out, the ground game is so important, latosha brown leading at a bus of senior citizens, it s critical that everyone decide that we re not going to allow ourselves to be turned back to pre-1965 simply because the supreme court overstepped their bounds and decided that they knew better. we re seeing the truth right now. let s remember north dakota, native americans being prevented from voting, kansas. north dakota. and florida, there are 1.5 million people who cannot vote because they paid their debt to society, they have felon records, and you know that overwhelmingly impac
president of the organization. when they eroded section 5 of the voting rights act, i knew the next step was going to be using that power to purge our rolls. and this is wrong. we know this. we know that the state is changing. and what brian kemp said in 2014 was that too many minorities are being registered and that republicans should be afraid. he said it again a couple of weeks ago. this time he said, if every eligible voter in georgia casts a ballot, he will not win. i want georgia to prove him right. you follow all these races very closely, you re following this race. i ll ask you the same question. it s been pretty blatant, whether in kansas or north dakota or here in georgia. i wonder if that has surprised you as an observer of politics for so long. it certainly has not surprised me. what has surprised me is the way that people were ready to address it immediately. so you saw kristen clark with the lawyers committee immediately ready to address it. i was less surprised that
was immediately ready to address it because you ve been doing this work since you were 19 years old. what people have to realize about this race is you not only have to win, but you have to win overwhelmingly because there is a rule that neither candidate and you re both polling neck and neck. if neither candidate gets 50%, there has object a runoff. worst case scenario, if there isn t, if neither one of you gets 50%, it s been great to turn out all the voters, the black vote was up over 40% in the may 22nd runoff, if you don t get to 50%, are you ready immediately to go into a turnout operation for a december 4th runoff? we are. we want to avoid that by having everyone vote. but we have spent this campaign building an infrastructure. people disparaged it at the beginning, they said they were spending too much money on infrastructure and not saving enough money for television. but the fundamental belief i have for this campaign and for our state is, it s an organizing opportunity.