There is a big buzz at the Loudermilk Conference Center in downtown Atlanta as a gathering called Paradigm Shift 2.0: Black Women Confronting HIV, Health and Social Justice gets underway. Three hundred registered participants have journeyed from across the country to discuss the many challenges and possibilities facing black women and girls. The second day’s morning keynote was delivered by radical activist and professor Angela Davis. The hype has been building exponentially for lunchtime guest speaker Stacey Abrams.
When she is finally introduced the women shout and leap to their feet. Young women stand on chairs, camera phones flash. Abrams, who appears both amused and slightly disturbed by the fuss over her, takes control of the chaotic scene. I’ve witnessed this level of affection for very few political leaders in the Democratic circles I’ve been in since the 1980s. They have the last names Clinton (both Hillary and Bill), Sanders, Warren, Jackson and Obama (both Michelle and Barack).
“I’m going to make sure there is peace in this room,” Abrams says. “Y’all are about to annoy each other with these cameras, so I’m going to stand up and I’m going to stand in front of each group of you. Take pictures so you can put your camera down.”
Pandemonium ensues as she walks to the far left of the stage, like a runway supermodel, stops on a dime, poses, tilts her head slightly and smiles. Camera flashes explode. She next pivots and walks slowly to the center of the stage, freezes there and repeats the pose. Again, the flashes explode. Abrams is summoning her inner actress, and she is both enjoying the moment and getting through it to get to the conversation. She then pivots and walks to the far right of the stage, same. You wonder whether she has done this before, because it is not necessarily what one would expect from a 46-year-old politician who was nearly elected the first black female governor in U.S. history. She lost by fewer than 2 percentage points in the 2018 Georgia race riddled with allegations of voter suppression. Before that, she was a state legislator who had served as a leader in the Georgia General Assembly for a decade. Now her name is on political pundits’ shortlists of potential running mates for Joe Biden. She also happens to have predicted that she’ll be elected president by 2040.
Just as quickly Abrams leaves the runway and returns to politics. Taking her seat with the moderator, she dives into why she is here and why she believes the leadership of women matters. “We live in a time where we have purported leaders who claim to speak for us but do not know us, and in that ignorance, they make decisions that are designed not for our success but for our demise,” she says. “So my deep suspicion is that some people are lying when they say they care about us.”
The balloon of silence in the meeting room is punctured, time and again, by “Amen” and “Preach” and “You go, girl.”
“When I ran for governor, I did not run simply for me. We went around this state to all 159 counties, and everywhere we went we talked about the power of people to make a choice,” Abrams tells the crowd. “On November 6th, when malfeasance and incompetence and my opponent who was a cartoon villain stole the voices of Georgians when he purged 1.4 million voters and oversaw the shutdown of 214 precincts that left 50,000 to 60,000 people without the ability to vote, when Georgia had the longest lines in the nation and the highest rejection rates of absentee ballots and provisional ballots,” Abrams continues, “It was not just about me. He was doing that to Georgians.”
Abrams pauses for a moment, allowing her words to simmer. The audience cheers as she smiles broadly.
“And the thing is, if I had fought back and said, ‘I am going to contest this election and make myself governor,’ then everyone who loved me and stood with me would have thought, ‘Well, this is about her fight.’ My responsibility was instead to focus on the right to vote and not my right to be governor. I had no right to be governor, but I have an obligation to do the work that I said I would do if I were governor.”
Voting rights. Responsibility. Possibilities. These are the ideas and values that come up often with Stacey Abrams and her team. I heard them over and over again during the weeks I followed her around earlier this year, in Miami, in New York, in Atlanta, and listened to her give interviews and hold public conversations. She has opened up a nationwide dialogue about voting rights but has also been accused by political pundits of too aggressively pushing herself as Biden’s VP choice. What Abrams seems to know is that she must be persuasive and make her own case for her fitness for higher office — and history would suggest that she’s right to do so. Commentators have wondered whether Abrams, who has not yet won a statewide election, would be ready to serve as vice president.
Whether or not she’s chosen as Biden’s running mate, she has moved into a unique space in American politics. DuBose Porter, former chair of the Georgia Democratic Party, told me she is “brilliant,” praise that comes in spite of what some view as a relatively thin political résumé. But we live in an era in which an extensive political background hardly matters anymore — Donald Trump had never been elected to office before his 2016 win.
At this conference it’s easy to be reminded that black women have long been the most loyal supporters of the Democratic Party. They carried Doug Jones to his senatorial victory in Alabama in 2018 and were key to kick-starting Biden’s presidential campaign when it was thought to be dead, helping to lift him to victory in South Carolina’s Democratic primary. So perhaps it was only a matter of time before a black woman, especially a black woman from the American South, would rise up as a national leader and a power broker for democracy in a way we have not often seen, aside from Fannie Lou Hamer’s brief but landmark speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention and Shirley Chisholm’s historic “unbought and unbossed” run for president in 1972.
Abrams’s roots and family history have echoes of the civil rights movement, and her Southern heritage is key to her appeal. It helps explain why she has soared to prominence while serving as a standard-bearer for a new kind of multicultural and multigenerational agenda. In the last presidential campaign cycle, the racial breakdown of Democrats outside of the South was roughly 60 percent white, 17 percent African American and 23 percent Latino, according to a 2016 Blair Center Poll. In the states that form the South, those numbers were 38 percent white, 37 percent African American and 25 percent Latino. In her runs for the Georgia legislature and governor, Abrams built a coalition that excited this new Georgia. She believes she can do the same on the national stage.
Abrams is the first black woman in U.S. history to have won the gubernatorial nomination of either major party. She garnered more votes than any Democrat who has run statewide in Georgia. She lost by just over 50,000 votes to Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp.
Kemp was not only her opponent, but his office oversaw everything to do with voting, including how the voter registration rolls were purged. It would be like Tom Brady not only being the quarterback of his team, but the referee and the scorekeeper as well. Kemp’s office cut nearly 700,000 names from the rolls in the two years leading to the election, and more than 200 polling places were closed, primarily in poor and minority neighborhoods.
Abrams chose not to concede to Kemp, because she believes voters were disenfranchised. She has said she went through all the stages of grief for 10 days and then got back to work. She has spent the time since leveraging the power she gained and deciding how she wants to use it.
Stacey Abrams lives in a simple blue townhouse in a diverse middle-class neighborhood on the east side of Atlanta.
After Spelman and graduate and law school, Abrams became a tax lawyer because working in the mayor’s office showed her that if she wanted to be a public servant, she needed to learn how the entire system worked. At age 29 Abrams was appointed deputy city attorney by Mayor Shirley Franklin, another history-making Southern black politician. Franklin was the first woman to hold the post and the first black woman to be elected mayor of a major Southern city. Abrams ran for and was elected as a state representative in 2006; she rose quickly in the Georgia legislature and became Democratic Party minority leader in 2011.
She calls herself a “pragmatist,” which is a necessary asset for a Democrat in a state long controlled by Republicans. She also embraces the label “progressive”; in the race for governor she campaigned on expanding Medicaid.
My name is Stacey Abrams, and I am not the governor of Georgia. I’m not going to be the senator, ever, but what I am is a proud Southerner, I’m a proud Democrat and I believe
On this muggy, 80-degree day Abrams paced in front of an interracial crowd in an auditorium at Miami Dade College North Campus, using a story about her grandmother Wilter Abrams, who was affectionately called “Bill,” to drive home the importance of voting: “My grandmother explained to me that the first time she was truly eligible to vote was after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but — as with most federal decisions — it didn’t really get to Mississippi until ’68. So, the first time she was eligible to vote in an election was in the presidential election in 1968, and she remembered that day. My grandfather and his brother were at the house. They had gotten off work, and they were ready to take her to go and vote. ...
“My grandmother said she didn’t move. She was sitting back there on that bed and she was frozen. ...,” Abrams says, letting the story spool out. “My grandfather became less and less generous with his platitudes and more impatient with her not showing up, and he finally marched back there to get her, and he was like, ‘What’s wrong? We’ve got to go and vote!’ And she said, ‘I don’t want to go.’ My grandfather was like, ‘What do you mean you don’t want to go?’ She said, ‘I don’t want to face the dogs and the billy clubs. I don’t want to face the problems.’ And he said, ‘But we’ve got the right to vote. We’ve got the Voting Rights Acts. We can vote!’ And she said, ‘I’m afraid. I don’t want to do this.’ And my grandfather looked at her and she said she had never seen my grandfather look so disappointed. He said, ‘Your children fought for this. ...’ ”
Abrams’s grandmother summoned the courage to vote that day, and she voted in every election after that until she died. Hearing this, the crowd roars and Abrams rocks back on her heels. She’s wearing her now-familiar look of twisted natural hair, short dangling earrings, a solid colored jacket and dark blouse and slacks. She speaks without notes, merging front-porch storytelling with a nerdish marshaling of facts and history.
“Power” is a word Abrams uses often in private conversations and in public statements. It’s what she wrote about in her political memoir, “Lead From the Outside: How to Build Your Future and Make Real Change”: “[T]he questions for those in search of power abound: Who has it? How do we get and wield it? What do we do when we have less than the other guy? What do we do when we lose it? ... [T]he bald conversation of gaining power — especially for those who rarely hold it — is unusual.”
Abrams tells the Florida college students that her political opponents “know how narrow the elections are. Every moment of suppression makes it easier to keep power.”
Abrams is not at any of the three offices I visit as I meet and talk with staffers. Each is in a different location: Fair Count in a bland, nondescript house converted to office space next to a gas station; SEAP in a white building that could easily be a school; and Fair Fight in a brownish office building. All are funded by private donations, both large- and small-dollar. Fair Fight Action is a 501(c)(4) and lead plaintiff in the aforementioned lawsuit, and does advocacy work. Fair Fight PAC, with more than 120,000 individual donors and about $24 million in fundraising, works on voter protection with state Democratic parties. Fair Count has raised about $7 million, and SEAP has raised about $1 million. I am told it would be impossible to delineate funds raised by Abrams and funds raised by staff because it’s a team effort. Fair Fight Action and its PAC combined have 30 staff members, along with teams at state parties across the country. Fair Count has 26 and SEAP four.
On each visit with these organizations I see that women are in leadership positions, the staffs are a rainbow coalition of identities, and droves of young people, 20-somethings and 30-somethings, power each group.
Fair Fight Action’s chief executive is Lauren Groh-Wargo. Before Abrams began entertaining conversations about the vice presidency, she and Groh-Wargo — a political operative who launched the New Georgia Project in 2014 as a nonpartisan effort to register voters, and who started her career by organizing against slumlords in Brooklyn — would strategize on how to transform their state. They would also discuss why Abrams should run for governor in 2018, with Groh-Wargo as her campaign manager.
Their partnership reflects the bridge-building necessary in the modern Democratic Party — and is a vision, perhaps, of the party’s future leaders: Abrams is Southern, black, straight; Groh-Wargo is Midwestern, white, gay. They share core values: Both support abortion rights, the rights of immigrants, marriage equality, economic justice and environmental protections.
Groh-Wargo says that Abrams also represents a kind of politics that shows “it is possible, and the best option, for Democrats to really aggressively be building this multiracial, multiethnic coalition. We should be leading with that rather than leading with this idea that we have to start with the ‘swing voter’ concept. We lead with diverse communities of color and really let that drive strategy. What we have learned in Georgia is that no one thought a black woman would be competitive. We have learned that when you do that work and are also reaching out to white voters of all kinds, you do build a coalition.”
This is why, in spite of not being the governor of Georgia, Abrams has become a player in the Democratic Party — in her state and in the country, including her well-reviewed prime-time 2019 response to President Trump’s State of the Union address.
In a phone conversation after our in-person interview, Abrams made a point to address the lingering questions raised by pundits about her readiness for national office. “I would say that anyone who believes that they know everything on Day One is likely incorrect,” she tells me. “Part of any job is being capable of learning all of the facets but coming with enough knowledge and enough curiosity and enough capacity to adapt quickly either to the challenges you face or to the realities you confront.” To that point, Abrams adds that she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has spent the past quarter-century “self-educating” on global affairs with fellowships and other fact-finding missions, including trips to Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Abrams has made it no secret that she is open to a place next to Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket. But the question remains: Would a Biden-Abrams ticket work?
In that phone conversation, as she was sheltering in place, Abrams was thinking about why the nation was ill prepared to address the pandemic and how to be better prepared for the next. “What we’ve watched for the last 40 years has been a concentrated assault on public administration and on the public infrastructure that so many Americans take for granted,” she says. “And I think because we have not faced an internalized crisis in this country in quite a while, we have forgotten why we built what we have and that ... in times of national emergency we should have an infrastructure that can quickly be scaled up to meet the needs of the moment.”
Be it foreign affairs or other topics, Abrams is not a traditional politician, just like Robert Kennedy, who served as attorney general and a U.S. senator, was not your typical politician. Both stepped into massive spotlights in spite of their shyness, both took on the mantle of activist, and both wanted to bring all kinds of people together.
Maybe the signs and troubles of our times are why Abrams has made it no secret that she is very open to a place next to Biden on the Democratic ticket. But the question remains: Would a Biden-Abrams ticket work? Word among the political chattering class is that he is looking for a running mate who could step into the Oval Office after one term, and not every pundit is convinced that Abrams has the credentials. Biden is 77, and Democrats want to be sure they have his successor waiting in the wings. Abrams tells me that she has spoken regularly with the former vice president over the past year, since they first met to talk about his campaign in March 2019, though Abrams won’t divulge the nature of those conversations.
When I press Abrams about the 1990s sexual assault allegation from Biden’s former staffer, Tara Reade, and how that might affect him or his running mate, Abrams stands firm: “If I am chosen to be his running mate, I will proudly promote his record and his plans to help the women of America,” she tells me, noting Biden’s leadership of the Violence Against Women Act, his support for equal pay for equal work and helping to pass the Affordable Care Act.
Even if she’s not chosen, it seems that her place in the vice presidential conversation only strengthens her political future. If, for example, she was to challenge Kemp to a rematch in 2022 or run for president in 2024, she’d only have more power.
Before hanging up, we return to that subject, and Abrams again stresses her vision of political power for all people.
“Leadership,” she says, “is about answering that question: How can I help?”
