Chris Whitfield/Daily Citizen-NewsFormer Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams addresses an enthusiastic crowd of supporters during a "thank you" event on Sunday at the Dalton Convention Center.

DALTON, Ga. — Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic nominee for governor, told an enthusiastic crowd at the Dalton Convention Center on Sunday something they may not have realized: “We won!”

“Now clearly I am not the governor of Georgia,” Abrams said, “but I know what we started to do, I know that we began this process, I know that we came to Whitfield County not once, not twice, but four times — twice we went to Miller Brothers — but the reason I kept coming to Dalton, the reason we kept coming to northwest Georgia, I believe that we can transform the state of Georgia.”

Abrams, who has been mentioned as a possible vice presidential candidate selection and a possible candidate for the U.S. Senate in Georgia, appeared in Dalton as part of a “thank you” tour of the state.

“I was asked why I’m doing a thank you tour … I’m thanking people for showing up, because if you don’t say thank you for fighting your way through hardship, why would people come back and try it again?” she said. “I’m here to say thank you for believing in our democracy even though our democracy doesn’t seem to believe in us.”

That was an apparent reference to Abrams’ frustrations with her run for governor in 2018 against the man who was elected, Republican Brian Kemp, who was secretary of state during the campaign.

“Under the secretary of state who decided he should also be the scorekeeper, the contestant and the referee, we know that in the state of Georgia there were not fair fights in our elections,” Abrams said. “The bad news is we didn’t get the victory we secured. The thing is we won’t ever know empirically that I got more votes because we will never know which votes didn’t get counted because of an architecture of voter suppression that began by stripping people from the rolls. Actually, it began by not even letting people get on the rolls. This is a person in the office of secretary of state who worked to stop people from registering to vote. When that didn’t work, he then tried to hold them up from being added to the rolls using exact match, a system he was told by a federal judge was racially discriminatory. …

“People were told their votes didn’t count, and when you tell someone their vote doesn’t count, you’re telling them they don’t count, and in a democracy and in Georgia we all count and we will all be counted. … We are here today to demand a fair fight in Georgia.”

Abrams told those assembled, “You guys have known for a long time that it’s hard to get Democrats elected in northwest Georgia, but you’ve never backed down from the challenge. You’ve always understood that it’s not about one person or one party, it’s about believing that opportunity belongs to all of us and responsibility belongs to all of us, and that every voice counts and should be counted.”

Abrams noted that in the most recent election “we tripled Latino turnout in the state of Georgia, we tripled the Asian Pacific Islander turnout in the state of Georgia, the young people were told ‘you don’t vote, you don’t care,’ they showed us because they increased their participation rate by 139 percent, the African American turnout rate increased by 40 percent.”

“You can talk about the issues facing Latinos in the state of Georgia, you can center conversations about the LGBTQ community, you can reach out to African Americans and the Asian Pacific Islanders and you did not have to exclude white voters to do so,” Abrams said. “And in this election, because of the work you did and because of the work done across the state, we increased the white share of the Democratic Party for the first time in more than 20 years. We proved that we could build coalitions together, we proved that we could talk about community issues together.”

Abrams, whose group Fair Fight Action says it is focusing on election reform, voter education and voter turnout to “secure the voting rights of Georgians,” said, “The whole point of democracy is we can link arms and link ideals and link values and change our state, and that is why we want and deserve a fair fight.

“I am here to say thank you because I know we have fight in us, we have a fair fight in us … We are going to lock arms and lock values and lock ideals and we are going to lock out evil and bring good to Georgia.”