McAuliffe nods along as Stacey Abrams tells 'Big Lie' that Georgia race was stolen from her

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Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe nodded along as Democratic activist and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams repeated the claim that she truly won the 2018 governor's race.

"You see, I'm here to tell you that just because you win doesn't mean [you've] won," Abrams declared, with McAuliffe nodding in the background. "I come from a state where I was not entitled to become the governor, but as an American citizen and as a citizen of Georgia, I'm going to fight for every person who has the right to vote to be able to cast that vote. And here in Virginia, you need to cast that vote for Terry McAuliffe!"

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Throughout Abrams' remarks, McAuliffe nodded, occasionally quite vigorously, and then he broke out into applause when she asked Virginians to vote for him.

On the night of the election in 2018, Abrams conceded that "former Secretary of State Brian Kemp will be certified as the victor in the 2018 gubernatorial election." But she added, "To watch an elected official who claims to represent the people in this state baldly pin his hopes for election on suppression of the people's democratic right to vote has been truly appalling." 

She has repeatedly accused Kemp of abusing his position as secretary of state to suppress the vote. She told The New York Times Magazine in April 2019 that even though she conceded that Kemp secured enough votes to become governor, she "does not concede that the process was proper, nor do I condone that process."

(Reuters / AP )

Yet fact-checkers with PolitiFact and USA Today found "no proof" and "little empirical evidence" that Kemp stole the election. 

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While Kemp did clean up the voter rolls before the election and put holds on some voters, University of Georgia professor Charles Bullock told USA Today that the holds would not have stopped Georgians from voting.

Election law experts have contradicted Abrams' claims of voter suppression.

"I’ll give a $500 gift card to anybody who can find a federal law that mentions voter suppression," J. Christian Adams, former Department of Justice (DOJ) civil rights election lawyer, and president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, told PJ Media. "It is a term invented by the left to blend the legal with the illegal, the acceptable with the unacceptable."

"It’s a way to brand and taint people who believe in election integrity by grafting them into the bloodline of Jim Crow. It’s a fake term that doesn’t exist in the law. It’s used to smear people who advocate legal things," Adams claimed.

Abrams has also faced criticism for changing her position on ID requirements for voting. Kemp has accused her of making millions off of "scam" claims of voter suppression.

Abrams' personal website appears to describe her as "governor."

Screenshot from Stacey Abrams personal website (Stacey Abrams)

In fact, some commentators have compared Abrams' claim about voter suppression and the 2018 governor race to the Democrats' condemnations of former President Donald Trump's claims about fraud in the 2020 election, which Democrats refer to as "The Big Lie."

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"Before Trump’s Big Lie, there was the Stacey Abrams Big Lie," Eric Cunningham, editor-in-chief of Elections Daily, wrote on Twitter. "It has so thoroughly permeated the Democratic Party that it’s virtually impossible to find National Democrats that don’t think the 2018 race was stolen from her."

The McAuliffe campaign did not immediately respond to Fox News' request for comment.