MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough said Georgia’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams “doesn’t want” to appear with President Joe Biden over his low approval ratings.
Biden traveled to Atlanta, Georgia early Tuesday with calls to possibly eliminate the filibuster in order to pass two Democrat-led election bills—the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Abrams, a leading voice in voting rights legislation, was absent at the president’s event.
“This is an event custom-made for Stacey Abrams, she obviously doesn’t want to be on the same stage with Joe Biden,” Scarborough said Tuesday. “I am not criticizing Stacey Abrams here, I am making a comment about the political standing of Joe Biden as seen from a woman who’s running for governor of Georgia and wants to win that election.”
“Politicians show up with presidents when they have 52% approval ratings. Politicians don’t show up with presidents when their approval ratings may be in the thirties in a state where they want to be elected governor,” he continued.
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Recent polling data showed Biden’s approval ratings hitting record-low numbers with only 24% of Independent voters taking a positive stance on the president’s job performance. He currently holds a 54% disapproval rating nationally among registered voters.
Scarborough pointed out that Abrams had been a leading voice in passing voting rights legislation and has been “on the forefront” of the president’s agenda in the speech. (RELATED: Editor Daily Rundown: Biden Heads To Georgia To Radicalize Push For Filibuster Destruction)
“This is politics 101. I find it fascinating, and it speaks less to Stacey Abrams, it really does, than it does what she perceives to be Joe Biden’s political standing to be in the state of Georgia right now,” Scarborough said. “That she is not showing up to an event custom-made for her. She is the one who is the champion of voting rights, she is the one that helped Joe Biden win the state of Georgia, she is the one that most people look at as being on the forefront of everything he is talking about today.”
“All the more reason you would think she would be there unless she thought it didn’t help her campaign running for governor of Georgia,” the MSNBC host said.
Abrams was an outspoken critic of Georgia’s election bill, S.B. 202, which she referred to as “a resurgence of the Jim Crow-style voter suppression measures sweeping across state legislatures” during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing April 20, 2021. Biden called the election integrity bill the “Jim Crow of the 21st century” in a statement after Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed the legislation into law on March 25 following its passage in both chambers of the state’s legislature.
An Abrams aide told Fox News that the candidate has an unspecified conflict but continues to support Biden.
MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski said Abrams is credited with the Democratic voter turnout in Georgia, which Biden narrowly won in the 2020 election. The president became the first Democrat to achieve victory in the state since 1992. A guest appearing on the show said that many Democrats are “reluctant” to change the filibuster with fears that Republicans could make major changes if they gained control of the Senate.