“Why Democrats Should Not Call the Georgia Governor’s Race ‘Stolen’; There are three important reasons to cool this rhetoric, despite Brian Kemp’s odious voter suppression efforts.”

I have written this piece for Slate. It begins:

Many Democrats are understandably angry about efforts to suppress the vote in Georgia and elsewhere in the 2018 midterm elections. In the Peach State, there is no question that Gov.-elect Brian Kemp, while secretary of state, made it harder for minority and other voters to register and vote, through a combination of deliberate efforts and gross incompetence. He administered what I consider to be the most egregious partisan action by an election official in the modern era when he falsely accused the Georgia Democratic Party of hacking into the state election system, and a few days before Election Day, posted that false accusation on the website that Georgia voters used to get polling information.

But for three reasons, Democrats should stop with the rhetoric that the race was “stolen,” as Sherrod Brown, Democratic senator from Ohio has said, and they should not follow the lead of Kemp’s Democratic opponent Stacey Abrams, who repeatedly refused to acknowledge Kemp as the “legitimate” winner of the election when questioned Sunday by CNN’s Jake Tapper.

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