Call me a purist, but I feel like our Georgia Democrats are very conservative when it comes to small-d democratic participation. 

We talk about turnout and services for the poor, but do we take our state constitution seriously? Do we take the impact of the state constitution upon our lives seriously? 

Why are our elected Dems so cold to “Western-style” ballot initiatives? Why do we act like the fever which has ailed our state will suddenly break when we elect the Abrams slate to office?

When we take the governor’s mansion, I hope that the team we send to both the mansion and the Gold Dome take the need to amend our constitution and empower the democratic vote seriously. 

We cannot allow the Abrams slate to be Obama 2008, when the Dems won a majority of governorships and Congressional seats but was not sustained by 2010 and were cratered in a succession of elections which became more of a measure of Obama’s personality than of Democrats’ political will. 

We cannot be a flash in the pan, a blip in this state’s political history. Do it all, do it big, and fuck the haters. Otherwise, every #BlueWave promise we’ve made – Medicaid expansion, HOPE 2.0, gun law reform, redistricting reform – will have all been in vain by the next gubernatorial election in 2022. 

But then again, I have the creeping suspicion that I’m losing my mind with anxiety as I stay in this state. I’m openly glad and anxious that we are this close to winning, but I’m privately mad as hell that our Georgia Dems are so conservative in their political imagination.