On the Campaign Trail With Stacey Abrams
On a recent Sunday in October, Stacey Abrams introduced herself to Vogue—along with a few hundred people. It was 20 minutes into morning worship at the New Life Church in Decatur, Georgia, and Abrams walked onstage, carried in by gospel music from the live band.
Abrams was there to inspire New Life’s Baptist congregation to vote for her to become Georgia’s next governor; if she wins on November 6, she’ll be the first black woman governor in the history of the United States. But instead of a stump speech, she gave a sermon: Abrams delivered her remarks with the intimate, truth-talking style and rolling cadence of a hometown preacher (she comes by it honestly; her parents were both Methodist ministers). “What scripture tells us is that the people will rise up,” she intoned, to enthusiastic applause. She closed with a request that those assembled please vote, please tell their families, their friends to vote, to “vote for the next 21 days.”
The ballots that black voters will cast in this race aren’t just in question—they’re in peril. Georgia (and its troubling disenfranchisement statistics) has been closely watched by advocacy groups for years: Since 2012, more than 200 local voting precincts have closed; between 2012 and 2016, 1.5 million people were purged from the voter rolls. But the 2018 midterm election has brought national attention to the issue, not least because Abrams’s opponent, Republican Brian Kemp, is currently Georgia’s secretary of state, and thus charged with ensuring the fairness of an election in which he himself is running. When it was reported in September that more than 50,000 voter registrations were being held up by Kemp’s office’s controversial verification practice (called “exact match,” it requires that voter application information precisely mirror what appears on other identification information held by the Social Security Administration or the Georgia Department of Driver Services, so a dropped hyphen or misspelling can hold up a registration)—over two-thirds of which were for black voters—Abrams’s historic challenge took on even more significance.
What’s happening in Georgia exemplifies America’s crisis in representation and a growing awareness among the masses that it cannot be tolerated. We’ve heard about it as a pink wave (more women candidates), a blue wave (more Democrats), and a wave of candidates of color, all trying to remake America’s leaders in our own image. Abrams, identity-wise, ticks every box. But she also embodies the people’s part of a plea for a people’s champion: One of six siblings, Abrams is quick to emphasize that her family was “working poor.” When the Vogue crew sat down for a video interview with Abrams after church in her modest townhouse in Atlanta’s Kirkwood neighborhood, she described what it meant to be the first person in her family to own a home, “to know that this is mine,” she said, gesturing at her bookshelves. Her parents always encouraged their kids to strive for more—they were “the only black kids in Gulfport, Mississippi, who watched ballroom dancing, because it was on PBS,” before the family moved to Georgia. Abrams eventually earned a bachelor’s degree from Spelman, a master’s in Public Affairs from UT Austin, and her JD from Yale, before serving in Georgia’s House of Representatives from 2007 to 2017.
Abrams’s appeal to what Democrats are clearly hoping will be a big tent come November is obvious when you spend more than a few minutes with her in public. She exudes a powerful combination of authenticity and competence, qualities that, at least in politics, often feel mutually exclusive: At 44, she’s a Gen Xer as capable of answering questions on Star Trek as she is on the series of romance thrillers she’s penned (under the name Selena Montgomery), or health care, as she recently demonstrated in a Reddit AMA. In her speech at New Life in Decatur, Abrams roused the almost entirely black congregation, who are deeply affected by the problems in Georgia’s governance that she has made central to her campaign. Medicaid expansion is something New Life’s Reverend Marlin Harris said his congregation desperately needs, and is a tenet of Abrams’s platform, which sees ending poverty as something of a moral rather than political imperative; and she has taken the case for Medicaid on the road, telling rural voters (to whom her opponent has framed Medicaid as a costly expense) that expansion will help stimulate small business and create jobs.
Nowhere was the diversity of Abrams’s base more apparent than at Sunday afternoon’s Atlanta Pride parade, in which she was the first gubernatorial candidate to ever appear. Abrams stood for hours through the sunroof of a Jeep as it made its way down Peachtree Street, signing autographs, bopping to Rihanna, and responding to the Beatlemania-level screams of “Stacey! Stacey! Stacey!”
Spending the day with Abrams—a self-professed “former shy person” now thrust into the glare of the national spotlight—made it clear that the prospect of even more attention doesn’t exactly delight her. She has weathered questions about her status as an unmarried woman, without children, probes into certain businesslike, closed-off aspects to her personality that in a male candidate might be more likely to go unmentioned. Though candid, quick to make a joke, and dynamic while speaking publicly, there is a hard limit to Abrams’s capacity for schmoozing. Now that her race is a flash point for the Democratic Party at large and she’s been endorsed by nearly every 2020 presidential frontrunner, it’s hard to remember that only five months ago she finished a heated primary campaign. (Asked about the obstacles she has faced in her political career during an appearance in New York in September, Abrams joked that she already had to beat out another Stacey to get the party nomination.) To turn off, she watches an “inordinate” amount of Netflix and reads constantly (occasionally with her family’s book club), though her grueling campaign schedule doesn’t allow for much downtime. The start of Georgia’s early voting, on October 15, would also be the beginning of a three-week bus tour for Abrams across the state.
The way that Abrams uses her background not anecdotally, to describe how she has transcended obstacles like poverty and discrimination, but rather to bring it with her, to illustrate why she believes what she believes, feels radical and new. (When asked how long she’s been planning her candidacy, Abrams cited watching her Republican colleagues in the state legislature in 2010 “pass a tax cut for the wealthiest Georgians” on the last day of the session, before stripping poor Georgians of benefits. “I remember when my family would scrounge around for $5,” she said. Witnessing the gulf between her experience and that of those in power, “running for governor became my mission.”) It feels like the way politicians should be talking about the struggles of their constituents: that our societal ills—like her six-figure debt, which she mentions when talking about public education, and her brother’s history of incarceration and drug addiction, which she discusses in the context of criminal justice reform and mental health—aren’t inevitable.
While Abrams could position herself as proof of the successful American dream—the independent, self-sufficient, bootstraps kind—she instead wants Georgia to be the bootstraps. “We have to be a society that believes in redemption,” she said, when asked about her vision for the state: “We’ll hold you accountable, but then we’ll also hold your hand and walk with you.” And it’s not just for her state; Abrams wants Georgia to be a model of stewardship that could transform the whole country. “We’ve seen some terrible ideas from governors,” she told Vogue, listing Stand Your Ground legislation in Florida, the erosion of the welfare state in Wisconsin, and mass incarceration in California. But “if you can engineer bad, you can engineer good,” she counters, no matter who is currently president.
On Wednesday, October 24, the Georgia NAACP reported that some votes for Abrams in two counties were registering on electoral machines as votes for Kemp. The news came a few days after a bus of 40 seniors who were to be driven to the polls by a group called Black Voters Matter was stopped after a county official reportedly raised concerns about it being a “political activity” that is barred at county-run facilities—though many of them ended up driving there themselves. Across the state, less than two weeks of early voting has already seen three times as many voters casting their ballots as in the last midterm election.
“I’m afraid of losing because I know what the alternative is, I’ve seen it,” Abrams said toward the end of our interview, though it wasn’t clear whether she was talking about having to get by on very little as a kid or watching Republicans continue to turn away federal aid, year after year, in a state with 14.9 percent of its population living below the poverty line. “My clarion call,” she repeated, “is to protect the vulnerable and lift up the downtrodden. And do the work to make life better for everybody. We have the right to demand more.”
Director: Tari Wariebi
DP: Mustafa Mahadi
Sound: Barry Rathbun
