Last year, before Stacey Abrams captured the Democratic nomination for the Georgia governor’s race, I asked her how a forthrightly progressive African-American woman could win in a Southern state that has been governed only by white men.

Her response was twofold. First, she argued that Democrats’ old strategy for winning in the South — running socially conservative white guys to try to lure former Democrats back to the party — has repeatedly failed.

At the same time, she said, Georgia, which is less than 53 percent non-Hispanic white, is full of people who would be receptive to her message, but who don’t vote, or don’t vote regularly. “There are enough Georgians who are going to see themselves, and believe in my capacity, if I can talk to them,” she told me. Among other things, she was putting resources into connecting with, and registering, rural African-Americans in the state’s south.

“We have to intentionally center voters of color from the beginning, because they are the majority of a Democratic coalition in the South, and they are certainly the majority of a Democratic coalition in Georgia,” Abrams said. She believed that, by allying with white liberals, those voters could elect a government in the old Confederacy that is responsive to their priorities. This would be more than a partisan upset — it would be a kind of revolution.