As the Bible tells the story, Moses delivers his people from bondage and to the “promised land,” but even with all his efforts he is not allowed to enter. He must gaze upon it from a distance.

This, I fear, is the story of Stacey Abrams. She built the huge voter registration and turnout machine that helped Joe Biden carry Georgia in 2020, and helped the state elect its first Jewish and Black senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, giving Democrats control of the Senate. If Warnock wins his runoff next month, she will have helped Democrats strengthen their control of the chamber.

It would be easy to be cynical here and say that a woman did the work, and now a man is benefiting from it, again. But that obscures the fact that what Abrams gave to Georgia and the country was so much larger than any one contest, hers included.

Georgia is a state transformed. Liberal Georgians have tasted power, and there is no turning back from it. It is no longer a fantastical possibility, a hope and a prayer among people prisoner to their numerical disadvantage. Georgia now has the proof and validation that not only could it be flipped, it was flipped

Much of the credit belongs to Abrams.

So what went wrong? I wish I had a comprehensive answer and could articulate it briefly, but I don’t and I can’t.

All I know is that every time I asked people about Abrams’s chances this cycle, they’d demur, or roll their eyes, or give an incredulous and worried “I don’t know.”

In fact, “worried” was a word I heard too often. It seemed to me contagious and self-perpetuating: People became worried because others were saying they were worried.

I simply couldn’t find enthusiastic Abrams voters in my everyday interactions. I live in midtown Atlanta, but I also wasn’t seeing many yard signs or window placards. I wasn’t seeing many TV ads.

I figured my news consumption had become like that of many young people: I was mostly watching national news or getting news online, including through social media. So I turned back the clock to my younger self, and I started watching more local news and listening to more radio. There were the ads!