Kemp has not commented on the video, and he was not asked about it in Tuesday night’s gubernatorial debate.

Abrams’s opposition to symbols celebrating the Confederacy does not make her extreme — it puts her in the Democratic Party’s mainstream. Most Democrats (65 percent) supported removing Confederate statues from public spaces around the country in an August 2017 Quinnipiac University survey.

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And Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state, is within the Republican Party’s mainstream in his embrace of memorials and monuments honoring Confederate soldiers. The overwhelming majority of Republicans (81 percent) opposed removing the statues in that same Quinnipiac poll.

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In 1992, while a student at Spelman College in Atlanta, Abrams attended a protest on the steps of Georgia’s State Capitol that included demonstrators lighting a state flag on fire. A photo of the act appeared on the cover of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that year. And now 26 years later, a video of the protest has surfaced, and her participation in the act (a leader of the march to the capitol said she did not burn the flag) has become the latest race-related controversy in the much-watched political race.

Abrams is seeking to become the first black female governor in the country by appealing to the Democratic base, which in Georgia is largely composed of people of color, women and millennial voters. She has also gone as far as to aggressively seek white low-income voters in rural Georgia. Kemp, an ally of President Trump, who won Georgia by five points in the 2016 presidential election, says Abrams is too liberal to lead the Southern state.

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Kemp has regularly portrayed Abrams as an out-of-touch liberal in ads since she won her May primary. He did not address the flag issue during Tuesday’s debate. But Abrams sought to use the event to remind Georgia voters that she, like many of them, wanted to put the state’s racist past behind it.

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At the gubernatorial debate, she said she was “proud of Georgia and proud to be a Georgian” but “deeply disturbed” by the racism that led to officials adding the Confederate emblem to the previous flag in 1956 “as a rebuke of the growing civil rights movement,” where activists fought to eradicate segregation.

“Twenty-six years ago as a college freshman, I along with many other Georgians — including the governor of Georgia — were deeply disturbed by the racial divisiveness that was embedded in the state flag with that Confederate symbol,” Abrams said Tuesday night of the incident.

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The average of RealClearPolitics polls shows Kemp leading Abrams by less than two points — 47.8 percent to 46.3 percent. The margin of error of the five polls they counted is large enough that they show Abrams with a shot to win the race. It could all depend on voter turnout, which has also become a big issue in this race.

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More than 50,000 voter registrations have been marked “pending” for failing Georgia’s “exact match system,” which blocks attempts at voter registration if the name on the applications lacks a hyphen or something else preventing an “exact match.” The majority of Georgia residents whose applications are pending are black Americans and therefore more likely to vote for the Democratic candidate.