Stacey Abrams, the self-proclaimed governor of Georgia and frontrunner for the Democratic Party's vice-presidential nomination in 2020, continues to court the billionaires who have funded her political career.
Abrams will host Democratic presidential contender Michael Bloomberg (net worth: at least $50 billion) at a voting rights summit in Atlanta on Friday. The invite-only event is being organized by Fair Fight, the political action committee Abrams started after her failed gubernatorial run in 2018.
Bloomberg, who contributed $500,000 to Abrams's failed campaign, donated $5 million to Fair Fight in December. The former New York City mayor was recently criticized by black filmmaker Ana DuVernay over his administration's role in fighting a civil lawsuit brought by the so-called Central Park Five, a group of black teenagers who were wrongfully convicted of beating and raping a woman in Central Park in 1989.
'I really can’t respond."
'I don’t remember."
'Go read up on it."Sir. This will not work in 2020. The non-answers. The evasion. No, sir. Take the next opportunity to be clear about what you knew, what you did and what you did not do in this case.
A happy new year warning. https://t.co/unZOaUF4zD
— Ava DuVernay (@ava) January 1, 2020
Bloomberg, who has appeared in photographs with many of the worst villains of the #MeToo movement, has also faced criticism for using prison labor to make phone calls on behalf of his presidential campaign.
Abrams's efforts to fight against so-called voter suppression stem largely from her belief that she "won" the Georgia gubernatorial election in 2018. In reality, she lost to Republican Brian Kemp by 54,723 votes. She was one of the first prominent Democrats to criticize the media coverage of failed Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke, arguing that "race [and] phenotype plays a part" in the media's adoring coverage of Beto, who launched his failed presidential campaign in March 2019.