And that’s not helping her out all that much. Project FiveThirtyEight has Gov. Brian Kemp with a more than six-and-a-half-point lead. RealClearPolitics has him with a 7.6-point lead in their average.

In other words, Abrams is circling the drain, which means she needs to make a splash.

I’m going to guess that accusing two-thirds of the sheriffs in the state of being horrible racists isn’t the kind of splash she needs.

Democrat Stacey Abrams said in the final Georgia gubernatorial debate that state sheriffs want to “take Black people off the streets,” handing Republicans a talking point on a pivotal issue a little over a week before the election.

During the Sunday debate on WSB-TV in Atlanta, Ms. Abrams fired back after Republican Gov. Brian Kemp touted his support from law enforcement, saying that he had been endorsed by 107 state sheriffs.

“As I pointed out before, I’m not a member of the good ol’ boys club. So, no, I don’t have 107 sheriffs who want to be able to take Black people off the streets, who want to be able to go without accountability,” said Ms. Abrams.

She quickly added: “I don’t believe every sheriff wants that, but I do know that we need a governor who believes in both defending law enforcement, but also defending the people of Georgia.”

No, just two-thirds.

For the record, Georgia has a whopping 159 counties, hence the two-thirds figure.

The problem here, though, is that there are a number of reasons why those 107 sheriffs support Brian Kemp over Abrams, and some of that certainly is that they see Abrams as a potential governor that would make their jobs more difficult.

Of course, considering how many counties in Georgia would be considered rural counties, a lot of them likely simply don’t like any of Abrams’s policies, and even if she were the otherwise law-and-order candidate, they’d still side with Kemp.

Yet Abrams’s comment suggests a much deeper problem with her candidacy, and that’s namely she’s focused more on black Georgians than anyone else. The problem, as she sees it, is that cracking down on criminals would get more black people arrested, and that is the issue. She’s not worried about the black people who are overwhelmingly the victims of violent crime throughout the state, only those who would be locked up.

And she assumes those would be black folks.

But her comment is clear here. She sees the arrest of these black people not as an effort to protect all citizens of the state–the same people she claims she intends to fight for–but a racist effort by “good old boys” from back in the dark days of the South’s reconstructionist and segregationist history.

She’s painting these law enforcement officials–people elected by the voters in their respective counties–as racists just one step beyond trying to herd black men and women back onto the plantation.

And this is the kind of person anti-gun Democrats are holding up as an example of what Georgia really needs? Seriously?

I hate to break it to Abrams, but Georgia isn’t teeming with secret racists, much less electing them sheriff in two-thirds of our counties. We just are sick of seeing smarmy progressive politicians defending criminals and pretending enforcing the laws on the books is automatically racist.