28 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019
THEPOLITICALSCENE
THE VOTE NEXT TIME
The American electorate is changing. Stacey Abrams wants to insure that every ballot counts.BY JELANI COBB
A
mong the many issues currently
polarizing American politics—
abortion, climate change, health
care, immigration, gun control—one of
the most consequential tends to be one
of the least discussed. The American
electorate, across the country, is diver-
sifying ethnically and racially at a rapid
rate. Progressives, interpreting the shift
to mean that, following traditional paths,
the new voters will lean Democratic,
see a political landscape that is turning
blue. Conservatives apparently see the
same thing, because in recent years many
of them have supported policies, such
as voter-I.D. laws and voter-roll purges,
that have disproportionately affected
people of color.
The issue has become more pressing
with the approach of the 2020 Presi-
dential election. In June, the Supreme
Court ruled that federal judges do not
have the power to address partisan gerry-
mandering, even when it creates results
that “reasonably seem unjust.” Last
month, President Donald Trump was
finally forced to abandon his effort to
add, in defiance of another Court rul-
ing, a citizenship question to the cen-
sus—an idea that Thomas B. Hofeller,
the late Republican strategist who pro-
moted it, believed would aid the G.O.P.
in further redistricting. But, days later,
the President was telling four Ameri-
can women of color, all elected mem-
bers of the House of Representatives,
to “go back” to where they came from.
The nation got a preview of the bat-
tle for the future of electoral politics last
year, in Georgia’s gubernatorial race. The
Republican candidate was declared the
winner by a margin of less than two per-
centage points: fifty-five thousand votes
out of nearly four million cast—a record-
breaking total for a midterm election in
the state. Many Georgians, though, still
use the terms “won” and “lost” advisedly,
not only because the Democrat never tech-
nically conceded but also because of the
highly irregular nature of the contest. The
Republican, Brian Kemp, was Georgia’s
secretary of state, and in that role he pre-
sided over an election marred by charges
of voter suppression; the Democrat, Stacey
Abrams, has become the nation’s most
prominent critic of that practice.
Although she has only recently come
to wide attention, Abrams, a forty-five-
year-old tax attorney, romance novelist,
and former state representative, has been
working on electoral reform—particu-
larly on voter registration—in Georgia
for some fifteen years. In that regard,
some Georgians view her campaign
as a success; she won more votes than
any Democrat has ever won for state-
wide office. Georgia is representative of
the nation’s demographic changes. The
population is 10.5 million, and, accord-
ing to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
it was 57.5 per cent white in 2008, fell to
54.2 per cent white in 2018, and will be
53.6 per cent white next year. It will be
majority-minority by 2033. Democratic
leaders from red states in the South
and beyond with shifting populations—
they include the Presidential candidates
Mayor Pete Buttigieg, of South Bend,
Indiana, and former Representative Beto
O’Rourke, of El Paso, Texas, as well as
the former Agriculture Secretary Mike
Espy, who is considering a second run
for the U.S. Senate, in Mississippi—
have examined Abrams’s campaign to
see how they might adopt its strategies.
Espy described his discussion with her
as “a graduate course in politics.”
Abrams has yet to decide if she will
run for office again. For now, she is fo-
cussed on addressing the irregularities
that her campaign identified. Within days
of the election, she formed an organiza-
tion called Fair Fight Action, which, with
Care in Action, a domestic-worker ad-
vocacy group, filed a federal lawsuit al-
leging that Kemp had impaired citizens’
ability to vote, and thereby deprived them
of rights guaranteed under the First, Four-teenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.
(Abrams is the group’s chair; her former
campaign director, Lauren Groh-Wargo,
is the C.E.O.) The suit seeks changes to
the entire structure of Georgia’s electoral
system, from the number of polling sta-
tions and the kind of voting machines
used to policies on registration. In May, a
federal judge for the Northern District of
Georgia ruled that the case may proceed.T
he clash between Kemp and Abrams
drew national attention again in
May, as a result of another issue shaping
the 2020 race. Kemp campaigned as an
antiabortion stalwart, and, for his first
major piece of legislation, he signed
House Bill 481. A so-called heartbeat
bill, H.B. 481 prohibits abortion once
“embryonic or fetal cardiac activity” can
be detected, which can happen as early
as six weeks after conception, before a
woman may even know that she is preg-
nant. Opponents, Abrams among them,
call it the “forced-pregnancy bill.” It is
scheduled to go into effect in January.
Six other states have passed similarly re-
strictive bills this year. Many opponents
say that the laws were designed to push
legal challenges to them to the Supreme
Court, which, with the appointments of
Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, many
conservatives believe would now be will-
ing to, in effect, reverse Roe v. Wade.
A week after the signing, Abrams
warned, in a minute-long video on Twit-
ter, that “right now, across the South, and
around the country, a woman’s right to
control her body, and a doctor’s ability
to give the health care we deserve, is
under attack.” Senators Kirsten Gilli-
brand, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobu-
char, and Kamala Harris, all of whom
are running for President, also appeared
in the video, urging viewers to support
organizations working to protect access
to safe, legal abortion.
Pro-choice activists called for an eco-
nomic boycott of Georgia, like the one