Stacey Abrams has a knack for fusing ideas and action in a way that inspires excitement—and speculation. That’s why her 2018 bid for governor of Georgia became a national phenomenon. That’s why, since she narrowly lost that race to former Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the forty-six-year-old Democrat has been much discussed as a possible nominee for Vice President.
An engaging public speaker and author of fiction and nonfiction books (including Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America, due out June 9 from Henry Holt and Co.), Abrams reframes conversations. She did so as a Georgia state legislative leader and as a gubernatorial candidate. Now she’s doing so again, having launched Fair Fight, which works on voting rights and election issues, and Fair Count, which seeks to get the 2020 U.S. Census right, as well as the Southern Economic Advancement Project, which develops and amplifies policy responses to economic inequality and injustice in Southern states.
We spoke in early May about that work, the vice presidential talk, and the roots of her politics. Here are some highlights from our conversation:
Q: Why do you think your 2018 race for governor of Georgia became a phenomenon?
Stacey Abrams: The race represented the confluence of a number of conversations that have been happening in our country and around the world for the last twenty years.
“We win in our country when we engage in a collective, inclusive approach to victory, and not when we cherry-pick who our voters should be.”
The notion that someone with progressive beliefs could be a viable candidate in the deep South, an area known for its deeply conservative ideology, was worth noting. It was a viable campaign where we were able to demonstrate across a host of metrics how we could win.
I think, for another set of communities, there was a racial component. Not only was I potentially going to be the first black woman to become a governor in the history of the country, but I was intentional about discussing race in a way that we just don’t normally see people running for executive office do. And again, doing so here in the South was a direct confrontation of social and political norms.
I would say the third piece was the gender dynamic, which was that I was in a race in the general election in a way that was very different. The notions of what women are capable of are always borne out in races for executive office, and I was again emblematic of a set of conversations.
Q: You sought to widen the political conversation, to speak to everyone in the state.
Abrams: We were able to actively engage white voters that typically had been written off as not accessible to a woman of color. We increased white voter participation overall, and specifically participation among white suburban women. I achieved rates that have not been seen since Bill Clinton.
One of the reasons we attained national attention was that I demonstrated, as a proof of concept, that you could talk about race and class. You could talk about the so-called hot-button issues and still actively engage a diversity of communities that is emblematic of where America is moving.
I captured national and international attention because we didn’t have to bifurcate this. I didn’t have to speak to only one community and write off the other. As we think about the 2020 election, it is my deep and fervent hope that we remember that, when we win in our country, it is when we engage in a collective, inclusive approach to victory, and not when we cherry-pick who our voters should be.
Q: You came so close. Why didn’t you win?
Abrams: Voter suppression is at the center of that answer. There is no way to empirically know what would have happened had we not faced the concomitant challenges of not only voter suppression, which is a systemic challenge, but also having an opponent who was responsible for both the architecture of that suppression and its execution. [Kemp, the sitting secretary of state, oversaw the 2018 election.]
Much like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, you can’t see it because you’re in it, and the absence of true objectivity says that I can’t tell you why not. But I can tell you what happened. I can tell you that tens of thousands of Georgians were denied the right to vote.
Q: Coming out of the campaign, you chose to focus on a host of democracy issues. Why put your energy there?
Abrams: Well, I’ve worked on three pieces, and these three pieces have been a part of every moment of my participation in public life.
Voter suppression and voter protection are two sides of the same coin, and I’ve been doing that since I was in college. It started with registration because, for most of my formative time, we had the Voting Rights Act. Voter suppression didn’t really become an aggressive activity of the Republican Party until around 2005, with the first restrictive voter ID measures. Then it accelerated after 2008 with closing early voting. Then it got its nuclear boost from the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act.
But it has always been a part of what I do. That’s why I created the voter registration organization, The New Georgia Project, in 2014. So there’s a through line to my history that began when I was eighteen years old at Spelman College.
The second part of what I’ve been doing is the Census. As someone who studied public policy, I understood intellectually the role of the Census, and having come into political prominence as minority leader during the last Census process, including reapportionment and redistricting, I had a very acute understanding of what it means when communities are not counted. It affects their economic power and it affects their political power. So in the wake of the election, my responsibility was to continue to target those issues.
The third piece is the reason I do all of this: I believe in good public policy. I believe that communities should have the opportunity to thrive, and I believe there are structural inequities and identifiable barriers that have to be tackled, but only if we acknowledge them and do the work. So I created a third organization, the Southern Economic Advancement Project, that has been focusing on policy.
I do this work because I want to see change and I want to see improvement, and there is no distinction in my mind from doing it in the public sector, or the nonprofit sector, or the private sector. It is a question of what office I hold, what time I have, and what space I have for action. But there has never been a moment of inaction on any of these issues.
Q: Fair Fight and the other projects you’ve launched have enjoyed a great deal of success. Are you folks doing something different that works?
Abrams: I grew up with parents who were very involved in direct action, even before they became ministers. They would take us with them to volunteer, to serve communities that were underserved, that were disadvantaged, and that appreciated the work we did. But I was always disturbed by the incidental nature of it, that there was no long-term capacity building that would allow the problem to be permanently fixed.
That’s what led me to study political science and economics and sociology in college. It’s what led me to get a health policy degree and a law degree. I believe in building systems. I believe in building infrastructure that continues, that isn’t reliant on the cult of personality of a charismatic leader, and that can adapt to solve the problem as it mutates into new challenges.
Q: Why do you think there’s been so much speculation about you as a potential national candidate, for President or Vice President?
Abrams: I can’t speak to what others see, but I can tell you what I know about me. What I’ve worked on in Georgia, I recognized very quickly, was not endemic solely to our state. And I immediately scaled each of these entities to tackle the challenges in other places.
So while Fair Fight may have started in Georgia, we very quickly became a national organization and we have built infrastructure in twenty states. These are states that have the greatest impact on our national elections, but also states whose state elections and down-ballot elections will shape the future of our country.
I did the same thing with Fair Count. We began in Georgia but quickly became a resource nationally for our models, our testing, and our methodology. And SEAP, the Southern Economic Advancement Project, began in four states. We’re now in twelve Southern states.
Q: What difference has the COVID-19 pandemic and spiking unemployment had on these issues?
Abrams: What we are seeing in the structural inequities of COVID-19 has played out in real time in the South. These are the communities that have not received access to health care, that have a broken public health infrastructure, that do not have access to the resources for testing, and that, in the wake of the President’s pronouncement, are being forced to risk their lives to work in meat-processing plants.
That’s not only endemic to Iowa or Georgia, it’s happening across the country. So every moment of what I do focuses on my grounding here in the South but has an impact nationally.
As someone born in Wisconsin, for example, I have family that lives there. It matters to me that the COVID-19 work we’re doing through SEAP has implications for black and brown communities in places like Wisconsin. The structural inequities that are leading to the highest rates of death among African Americans do not care whether you’re from Wisconsin or Mississippi or Georgia, and thus we need a national response.
Q: You referenced Wisconsin. Tell me what you thought when Wisconsinites were forced to choose between their safety and their right to vote in the April 7 election.
Abrams: It was horrifying. It was anti-American. It was mean and callous. But it was also an example of how vital the work that not only Fair Fight 2020 but other organizations are doing, how vital it is to our nation’s future. As I said, I have family that lives in Wisconsin. I have family [members] that suffer from COVID-19. And they know, as do most Wisconsinites, that their ability to shape their future, and their recovery, was dependent on participating in that election.
There should never be a moment in American history again where we tell people they have to put their lives on the line in order to practice the most fundamental act of democracy, and that is casting their vote.
Q: You were asked about a sexual assault allegation against former Vice President Biden, before he had addressed the allegations. Have women who are potential running mates been put in a difficult or unfair position by such questions?
Abrams: The #MeToo movement has been led by women because women have the most direct experience with the contours of sexual assault and sexual harassment. It’s not exclusive, but certainly predominant. I respect the tendency of women to step forward because there is the need to protect those who have had the opportunity to be heard and those who have not.
I believe it was the right thing for Vice President Biden to do, to directly address those issues himself, and I think he answered the questions as he should.
I would divorce the conversation about the Vice President from that larger structural issue in this way: Women take the lead because they are often the victims if they don’t, and therefore their voices tend to be more prominent. I believe it is critically important that women’s voices be the predominant voices of the movement, but not to speak for or about men in the absence of their voices being heard. And that’s why I’m very pleased that Vice President Biden spoke directly to this issue.
Q: You are a writer. How does that intersect with your political work? Does it inform your politics?
Abrams: Writing is who I am. I love writing. I believe effective communication is essential to invoking a sense of responsibility or even wonder about the world we’re in.
When I wrote my first romance novel, I used a pseudonym, in part because I was also publishing articles on tax policy, and in my mind, these were separate issues. No one is going to read a romance novel by Alan Greenspan, and most people aren’t going to turn to a romance novelist to understand the business income tax exemption.
So I recognize that, for many people, the complexity of how I think and write tends to require some sharp delineation. But in my mind and in my person, they are not different. The person who writes about ethnobotany and cognitive science in romantic suspense novels is the same person who published an article on the re-democratization of Brazil. Those, in my mind, are of a piece because we have to be able to tell effective stories if we want people to understand what’s at stake.
Q: Where do your politics come from?
Abrams: My parents, and growing up in working poor communities in Mississippi. I saw how hard my parents worked, and how far they were from what they should have been able to achieve. The intersections of race and class and gender were an everyday part of my reality, and never in a way that was bitter or complaining, but in a way that was motivating.
I believe that we waste human capital when we don’t solve these very clear challenges we have. I believe that we create harm where good could happen, and that good is actually both economically and socially beneficial to us all. I think poverty is immoral and is a solvable problem.
So my politics are driven by my belief that we can make things better and that the most effective system for doing so is government. The private sector’s job is not to create employment. The private sector’s job is to create money. That’s what it does. The nonprofit sector stands in the gap to help address the spaces where the public sector and the private sector cannot meet. But we create government because we, as a society, have agreed that there are certain social needs that only can be accomplished through a macro-approach.
That’s why this pandemic is so devastating, because what it has put into sharp relief is the failure of the public sector to fully understand and execute its responsibility. My politics exist because I want to fix that, because I think that is a solvable problem.