Stacey Abrams: Meet the politician who helped deliver Georgia for Joe Biden

‘Georgia, thank you. But our work is not done’. Andrew Buncombe profiles the key state’s influential Democrat

Supporters say Abrams’s future is very bright (Getty)

Was it that Stacey Abrams was not one to celebrate, or rather a reflection of how much work was still to be done, as those around her collectively cheered?

Last weekend, when the Associated Press called Pennsylvania for Joe Biden, and in doing so officially projected the 77-year-old as the nation’s next president, Abrams permitted herself just the briefest of moments to cheer.  

In an interview with Hillary Clinton, and later broadcast in a podcast hosted by the Democrats’ 2016 presidential candidate, she was asked if she had put up her feet.

“I think I had like 14 minutes on Sunday,” said Abrams. “But we’ve got some work to do.”

The 46-year-old former minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives was not lying. As Democrats across the country were celebrating Biden’s victory with a rare intensity, and the former vice president would himself declare in a televised address he would work for national unity, several hugely significant issues remained unsettled.

Firstly, after Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger said the race between Trump and Biden was “too close to call”, officials set about a recount, one we now know is being done by hand. (On Friday, officials announced the state and its 16 electoral college votes had gone to the former vice president, putting his total at 306, the same Trump managed in 2016.) 

Secondly, the race for both Senate seats in Georgia were not settled on election day, and instead will go to a January 5 run-off. If Democrats win both seats – something they have a decent chance to do – the party would have the numbers to take control of the Senate, with the tie-splitting vote of vice president Kamala Harris, to go with the House. Such a scenario would make easier Biden’s efforts to quickly address challenges such as the coronavirus pandemic.

And so after those few minutes, Abrams went back to work, seeking to ensure the recount was carried out fairly, and trying to raise more money for the Democratic candidates in those Senate races – Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. She is also hoping to drive up voter turn out for those contests.

“Georgia, thank you. Together, we have changed the course of our state for the better,” she tweeted last Saturday. “But our work is not done. Join me in supporting @ReverendWarnock and @ossoff so we can keep up the fight and win the US Senate.”

For many, the first time they will have become aware of Stacey Abrams was in the autumn of 2018 when she won the Democratic primary to become the party’s gubernatorial candidate.

There was intense excitement that the youthful woman who had grown up in Gulfport, Mississippi, one of six children, was going to take on Republican secretary of state, Brian Kemp. If she could win, she would the nation’s first black woman governor.

“We are writing the next chapter of Georgia history, where no one is unseen, no one is unheard and no one is uninspired,” Abrams told her supporters that day, when anything seemed possible.

Abrams, who ran on a progressive platform and whose strategy sought to secure the support of people who had never voted before, pushed Kemp very close, but he would emerge the winner 50.2 to 48.8. Abrams claimed that in his role as secretary of state, Kemp had sought to suppress access to the ballot, especially for African Americans, who were more likely to support her. He denied doing so.

In a speech that November, she acknowledged she was not going to the governor’s mansion, but pointedly did not concede the race, saying that to do would have required her to have viewed it a fair and untainted contest, which she did not.

“Let’s be clear: this is not a speech of concession because concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true or proper. As a woman of conscience and faith, I cannot concede that.”

Abrams, who had come within 55,000 votes of beating Kemp after a massive 2017 voter purge in Georgia that disproportionately impacted black people and removed 1.6 million voters, was briefly allowed to lick her wounds. A few months later, she was asked by the Democrats to deliver the party’s rebuttal to the president’s state of the union in January, the first black woman to do so.

“Even as I am very disappointed by the president’s approach to our problems – I still don’t want him to fail,” she said.

“But we need him to tell the truth, and to respect his duties and the extraordinary diversity that defines America. Our progress has always found refuge in the basic instinct of the American experiment – to do right by our people. And with a renewed commitment to social and economic justice, we will create a stronger America, together.” 

Among Democrats, especially within its progressive wing, there was hope and speculation she would make a 2020 run for one of Senate seats from the Peach state. Some wondered if she might make a run for the White House.

She did neither. Rather, she set about establishing a group to counter the voter suppression she said she had suffered, and bring more people to the polls, especially those who had never voted before.

Her organisation, Fair Fight, initially focussed on Georgia, but in the summer of 2019, she unveiled a nationwide plan to secure and defend voter access across the nation ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

“We’re going to have a fair fight in 2020 because my mission is to make certain that no one has to go through in 2020 what we went through in 2018,” she said, addressing the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades in Las Vegas.

“I’m going to use energies and my very, very loud voice to raise the money we need to train people across the country in our 20 battleground states to make sure that Donald Trump and the Senate take a hike and we put people in place who know what we need.” 

Abrams is a prolific writer. Her political books include 2018’s Minority Leader: How to Build Your Future and Make Real Change, and Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America, which was published this summer.

She has been even busier in the fiction department. Under the pen name Selena Montgomery, she has written eight romance novels, starting with Rules Of Engagement, in 2001. Shades of Romance magazine described it as a “story of trust, forgiveness and letting go while clinging to newfound love in one powerful punch”.

Reports suggest Abrams and other organisers in Georgia registered as many as 1 million voters, some of them people who had been purged from the voter lists, along with people who had never been registered. She specifically targeted young people, heavily African African counties and women.

“What they looked at were latent voters of colour. They realised blacks could be more influential if they were registered to vote, and they actually showed up to vote,” Andra Gillespie, associate professor of political science at Atlanta’s Emory University, tells The Independent.

Gillespie, whose books include The New Black Politician: Cory Booker, Newark and Post-Racial America, adds: “What they did was they made it their business, to register blacks, to register people of colour, to register young people, to register young women.”

She says while other activists were involved, because of her position and profile she was able to “institutionalise this in the Democratic Party”.

David Worley, a former chair of the Georgia Democratic Party pays tribute to Abrams as a powerful fundraiser, the benefits of which were being used not simply by candidate in Georgia but in races in other states.

Worley, who is currently a member of the state election board and who says he saw nothing to support Trump’s claims of voter fraud, says another major factor in building the size of the electorate, was a 2016 change to the driver’s licence application, in which people were automatically registered to vote at the same time.

“Stacey Abrams is obviously a very effective fundraiser. She has been able to raise quite a bit of money for her organisation, Fair Fight, and a lots of that money, has gone to help the Georgia Democratic Party and other state parties around the country,” he says.

“That has been a real bonus for for Georgia Democrats without question. And she has focused on mobilising lower propensity voters and their turnout has been a part of - though not all of - behind the increase in voter turnout in Georgia.”

The politics of Georgia are complicated. For decades it was solidly Democratic, but after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, politicians such as Richard Nixon, using the 1964 playbook of Barry Goldwater, sought to seize on the resentment of white voters, over the now partial empowerment of African Americans – the so-called southern strategy. In 1972, Nixon won 49 states in the race against George McGovern, including the entirety of the south. Ronald Reagan would use a similar pro-white strategy in his two campaigns

Yet, Georgia was not monolithic. Jimmy Carter, who is from Georgia, carried it in 1976, and did so again in 1980. Bill Clinton, another southerner, won the Georgia on his way to the White House. And while former House speaker Newt Gingrich led his crusade against Clinton and the Democrats from his base in Georgia’s 6th congressional district, Democrat Sam Nunn held a seat in the US Senate from Georgia from 1972 to 1997.

Perhaps most crucial amid all of this has been the dominance of Republicans within the Georgia state legislature. Since 2003, the GOP has controlled the governor’s mansion, the House and the Senate – a so-called trifecta.

It was this sort of control and political machinery that allowed Republicans to errect the hurdles cast at Stacey Abrams. It has been those barriers she has spent the last few years dismantling.

“What's so remarkable about her and her team, is that she diagnosed a tailored, specific plan for Georgia,” says Angie Maxwell, an associate professor of political science at the University of Arkansas and co-author of The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics.

“She ran at the top and she saw all the obstacles that happened. And rather than run herself [again]…she decided she was going to tackle the voter suppression.”

She adds: “It’s very scientific, but there’s something deeper to it as well. The part that people sometimes miss is … that Stacey Abrams made them believe that it was worth it. That it mattered, that it could make a difference. That they should not let their voice be taken away.”

Asked how significant she has been in helping Biden in 2020, she says Abrams and other activists had not only flipped Georgia, but “made the Democratic Party pay attention to the south.”

The next weeks are going to be busy. In recent days, reports suggest Abrams organisation has raised more than $6m (£4.5m) to help the two run-offs for the Senate.

Yet before that, voters in Georgia's 5th congressional must hold a special election to fill the seat vacated by John Lewis, the lionised civil rights icon who died earlier thus year. Because of the nature of Georgia primaries, two Democrats, Kwanaza Hall and Robert Michael Franklin Jr are competing for the seat.

Abrams and Lewis were close. When he died in July, she said of him: “He was a giant of this modern age, one who saw its hatred but fought ever towards the light.”

There is plenty of talk about what Abrams may do in the future, and many assume she will contest again for the governorship in 2022.  (She was among the small group of women from which Biden picked his running mate, ultimately opting for Harris.)

Right now, she is focussed on the days ahead and making sure her state delivers Biden control of the Senate.

“Winning Georgia was not one person's effort,” she tweeted this week. “It took hard work – particularly by women of colour – for a decade to organise and mobilise voters. This was a team effort and a team victory, and we can do it again on January 5.”