Democrat Stacey Abrams, who lost a heated and controversial Georgia governor’s race against Republican Brian Kemp, has announced that she will definitely run for public office again.
“Yes, I’m going to run again,” she told an enthusiastic crowd at Fortune’s “Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summit” in Laguna Niguel, Calif. “What it is I’m going to run for I haven’t decided yet. Stay tuned.”
Abrams said her focus has been and will continue to be on policy and social justice issues.
“I care about policy, I am driven by a commitment to justice, to ending poverty, to addressing social needs and using public policy as a tool to improve the lives of those around us,” she told her audience.
Abrams also said that despite the disappointment of losing last month’s race for governor of Georgia, she was also happy about some of the outcomes and results of her efforts. She said that her campaign was a success for the way it energized infrequent voters and got them involved in the political process.
“We turned out voters who had never been engaged in the body politic,” she said proudly. “We tripled the number of Latinos who voted. We tripled the number of Asian-Americans. We increased African-Americans by 38 percent, increased the youth vote.”
Abrams also explained why she did not concede the race to Kemp, who was known for using many voter suppression tactics.
“There’s a moral and legal nature to conceding. It means you accept that something is right, just, proper. What happened [in our governor’s race] was not just,” she said.
“It’s about thousands of people who were denied the right to vote,” she said, alluding to the evidence during the campaign that Kemp, who was Georgia’s secretary of state, suppressed Democratic voters through many different policies.
Kemp denied voter suppression allegations and refused to resign or recuse himself from his government position during the campaign, a position that was heavily criticized.
Abrams has not given up on her fight for fairness and justice. She is still working with her organization Fair Fight Georgia, which is trying to make elections more fair in Georgia and other states. Last month, her group filed a lawsuit against the interim Georgia Secretary of State and the state’s election board members. Abrams and other voting rights advocates in Georgia want to make sure that all eligible voters have their votes counted in the future. If she is able to do that, she will truly be a winner.
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