Georgia Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams will miss President Biden’s voting rights speech in Atlanta and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough asserted on Tuesday that she is skipping the landmark event because she “obviously doesn’t want to be on the same stage as Joe Biden.”

I am not criticizing Stacey Abrams here,” Scarborough insisted. “I am making a comment about the political standing of Joe Biden as seen from a woman who’s running for governor of Georgia and wants to win that election. Politicians show up with presidents when they have 52% approval ratings. Politicians don’t show up with presidents when their approval ratings may be in the 30s in the state…”

“This is politics 101. I find it fascinating, and it speaks less to Stacey Abrams, that really does, than it does what she perceives Joe Biden’s political standing to be in the state of Georgia right now, that she’s not showing up in an event that was custom-made for her” he noted, pointing out that Abrams is “on the forefront of everything we are talking about today.”

“All the more reason you’d think she would be there unless she thought it didn’t help her campaign running for governor of Georgia,” he added.

“The fight for voting rights takes persistence. As MLK exhorted, ‘The clock of destiny is ticking out. We must act now before it is too late.’ Thank you, @POTUS, for refusing to relent until the work is finished. Welcome back to Georgia where we get good done,” Abrams tweeted on Monday while bowing out of the event.

Biden will grace the stage in Georgia with Vice President Kamala Harris to push the voting rights act. They will also visit Ebenezer Baptist Church and place a wreath at the crypt of Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King in a racially motivated photo-op.

“The president will forcefully advocate for protecting the most bedrock American right, the right to vote and have your voice counted in a free and fair and secure election that is not tainted by partisan manipulation,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday, promoting Biden’s push for federalizing elections to ostensibly keep Democrats in power permanently.

Biden has repeatedly asserted that he doesn’t support nixing the filibuster. But desperation in politics makes compromising your stances uber easy. Now he is saying he is open to carving out an exception (just this once) to the filibuster rule in order to shove through the voting rights act.

Axing the filibuster would lower the typical 60-vote threshold for passage to 50. In the equally split Senate, Harris could then break a tie, allowing Democrats to pass the act,  bypassing Republican objections.

Conservatives were all over Abrams for the excuse she gave for not attending Biden’s speech.