She's got my vote if she wants it

And finally Stacey Abrams isn't president of Earth. I know it's hard for you guys at National Review to understand the difference, but that's a TV show.

Apparently National Review is all bent out of shape about a cameo appearance by Stacey Abrams as "United Earth President" on the Paramount series Star Trek: Discovery. 

Stacey Abrams Does Not Deserve to Be President of Earth

thunders Jack Butler:

Jim [Geraghty] has covered the Star Trek criticism, so I’ll focus on Stacey Abrams. Abrams is, at this time, most famous for losing the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election and then proceeding to deny she had lost it, behavior that Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger has convincingly argued is morally indistinguishable from — and helped set the stage for — former president Donald Trump’s behavior after the 2020 presidential election.

And earlier this week, Matt Mashburn, a member of Georgia’s state elections board, argued that the House January 6 Committee’s decision to pursue the legal argument that those who argued the 2020 election* did so knowing this was false and then raised money off of it anyway are guilty of fraud should make Abrams, who has profited handsomely in her own way from her election denial, nervous. As Spock once said, sauce for the goose.

*Some words like "that the 2020 election was rigged" seem to have wandered away from the sentence at this point, arguably frightened off by all the argle-bargle that precedes it in the pancake of relative clauses. We'll come to that presently.

I don't know about The Corner, but in my house Abrams is more famous as the architect of Democratic victories in Georgia in November 2020 and January 2021 that gave the party the White House and the Senate majority.

Also, Raffensperger's argument may have been convincing in the National Review offices, which published it in March 2021 by way of blaming Abrams for the January 6 coup attempt, but it's not convincing to me. One way in which you could morally distinguish Abrams's conduct from Donald Trump's would be to note that Abrams acknowledged her defeat on November 16 2018, ten days after the election, however grudgingly ("I can certainly bring a new case to keep this one contest alive, but I don’t want to hold public office if I need to scheme my way into the post"), while Trump never really did give up, even when he got close seven months after his election (telling Sean Hannity "We didn’t win, but let’s see what happens on that") .

Nor is it correct to suggest that there was no evidence of vote suppression in the 2018 gubernatorial election, run by Raffensperger's predecessor, Brian Kemp, while he was running for governor; it just wasn't sufficient evidence, as Richard Hasen has explained, in part because you could never be sure whether Kemp was wrecking things on purpose or just incredibly bad at his job:

Hasen described Kemp as "perhaps the most incompetent state chief elections officer" in the 2018 elections and said it was "hard to tell" which of Kemp's "actions were due to incompetence and which were attempted suppression [but] "there is no question that Georgia in general and Brian Kemp in particular took steps to make it harder for people to register and vote, and that those people tended to skew Democratic.."^[7]

In particular,

The Washington Post reported that "more than 200 polling places" across Georgia were closed in the 2018 election, "primarily in poor and minority neighborhoods. Voters reported long lines, malfunctioning voting machines and other problems that delayed or thwarted voting in those areas." (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that "precinct closures and longer distances likely prevented an estimated 54,000 to 85,000 voters from casting ballots" on the 2018 Election Day.) 

Since Kemp's margin of victory in the final count was about 55,000 votes, those forms of suppression could easily account for the whole thing. We'll just never know.

So Abrams may have been wrong to insist that the election was "stolen", but she's easily morally distinguishable from Trump. Hasen criticizes her harshly for not quite conceding the election, but praises her for the positive action she took subsequently not on her own behalf but that of Georgia's voters:

In a massive lawsuit filed against—oops!—the office of Brad Raffensperger. (The suit mostly lost, in the end, in federal court, but led to improvements in Georgia election law that certainly helped achieve a fairer result in the 2020 election and January runoffs.)

As to Rep. Mashburn's argument (also published in the National Review) about arguing about arguing, which argues that if Trump should be charged with wire fraud for his Stop the Steal grift then Abrams should too, no, no, no. Abrams didn't do anything resembling this:

Former President Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party leveraged false claims of voter fraud and promises to overturn the election to raise more than a quarter-billion dollars in November and December as hundreds of thousands of trusting supporters listened and opened their wallets.

But the Trump campaign spent only a tiny fraction of its haul on lawyers and other legal bills related to those claims. Instead, Mr. Trump and the G.O.P. stored away much of the money — $175 million or so — even as they continued to issue breathless, aggressive and often misleading appeals for cash that promised it would help with recounts, the rooting out of election fraud and even the Republican candidates’ chances in the two Senate runoff races in Georgia.

This is what Stacey Abrams raises money for (make a donation if you get a chance). And these fools should really be able to tell the difference.