To borrow from Irving Berlin, there was nothing Beto O’Rourke did that Stacey Abrams didn’t do better in her historic campaign for governor of Georgia. She came closer than Beto, the near-miss Senate candidate from Texas, to breaking the Republican stranglehold in an equally difficult state for Democrats, falling short by just 55,000 votes, and she did it against an opponent who had previously waged an eight-year campaign of voter suppression as Georgia’s secretary of state. Yet in the aftermath of the 2018 midterms, it was Betomania that broke out, not Staceymania. And now, it’s O’Rourke who’s running for president.

Abrams ran on tangible progressive issues rather than airy liberal rhetoric. She raised record money. She came within a whisker of winning not just thanks to her own considerable charisma, but also because she’d spent years leading an unprecedented voter-registration effort, known as the New Georgia Project, and ultimately brought out 800,000 more Democratic voters in 2018 than in the 2014 midterms. She had built a movement, not just a campaign. Along the way, she broke new political ground by speaking freely about her financial debts, her brother’s incarceration and mental-health struggles, and her sky-high political ambitions. And people were riveted: Abrams was officially the most Google-searched politician in America in 2018.

Her reward? Zero presidential buzz, aside from a small boomlet of interest after she pulled off the rare feat of delivering an effective and inspiring retort to the State of the Union address in February. If Democrats were willing to embrace a candidate who had fought nobly but lost in a state that once seemed out of reach, Abrams should have been at the top of the 2020 list from the get-go. Instead, she’s being courted by two white male warhorses, Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer, to help boost their own ambitions to become, respectively, president and Senate majority leader. In recent weeks, as O’Rourke was propelling himself into the presidential race, speculation has been swirling about which lesser office Abrams ought to pursue: Veep or Senator? Helpmeet to Biden or Schumer?

In the eyes of Washington pols and pundits, Abrams’s third option—running for governor of Georgia again in 2022—sounds hopelessly minor-league, almost as ridiculous as the notion of Abrams gunning for the White House herself in 2020. Schumer encapsulated the prevailing wisdom when he told a reporter last month: “There’s no one who knows how to fight for voting rights better than Stacey Abrams. If she got to the Senate, she’d have a huge platform to do it, not just in Georgia, but nationally.”

This was a classic example of an insult masquerading as a compliment. Abrams is already the leading national voice for voting rights—a fact that was underscored again last week when Andrew Gillum, who narrowly lost his own gubernatorial race in Florida last November, announced he’d be following in the footsteps of Abrams to lead a massive voter-engagement effort aimed at transforming his own state in a lasting way. “This isn’t the sexy work, I gotta admit. I’m sure it’s probably more fun for some of those out there running for president,” Gillum said. But like Abrams before him, he’s opting to do what he deemed “the hard work of democracy.”