30 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019
directed at North Carolina in 2016, after
it passed a law prohibiting transgender
people from using the public bathroom
of their preference. (That law was partly
repealed, in 2017.) A number of televi-
sion and movie production companies
have shot on location in Georgia in re-
cent years. But Abrams, who describes
herself as a “pragmatic progressive,” dis-
couraged any boycott by those compa-
nies, out of concern for workers who
would suffer as a result. “I think the su-
perior opportunity for Georgia,” she
told the Los Angeles Times, is to “use
the entertainment industry’s energy to
support and fund the work that we need
to do on the ground, because Georgia
is on the cusp of being able to trans-
form our political system.” Jordan Peele
and J. J. Abrams, the producers of the
HBO horror series “Lovecraft Coun-
try,” which was scheduled to shoot in
the state, announced that they would
continue production but donate “100%
of our respective episodic fees” to the
A.C.L.U. of Georgia and to Fair Fight
Action. They added that they wanted
to “stand with Stacey Abrams and the
hardworking people of Georgia.” (In
June, the A.C.L.U. of Georgia, with the
Center for Reproductive Rights and
Planned Parenthood, brought a suit
against the state, alleging that the abor-
tion law was unconstitutional. Last
month, the groups sought a court in-
junction to stop it from taking effect.)
I spoke to Abrams about H.B. 481
when it was still making its way through
the legislature, and she
framed it as part of a larger
set of reproductive-health
issues. Georgia has “one of
the highest maternal-mor-
tality rates in the nation,”
she said, adding that half
the counties lack an ob-gyn
practice and that, over all,
the quality of reproductive
care is poor. So she saw an
obligation to think about
“abortion as one of the tools in the med-
ical tool kit to address reproductive
health.” I spoke with her again after
Kemp signed the bill, and she made a
direct connection between reproductive
rights and civil rights. The law is not
only radical, she said; it also carries no
more legitimacy than the election that
gave Kemp the authority to sign it. “This
is a perfect example of what the conse-
quences of not having free and fair elec-
tions can have,” she said.
In another conversation this spring,
Abrams told me, “I live my life with an
assumption that I have the right to do
the things I think I should do, and that
my gender and my race should not be
limitations.” Two black United States
senators are currently running for Pres-
ident; the Congress is the most diverse
ever seated; and an African-American
woman, Maxine Waters, serves as the
chair of the powerful House Financial
Services Committee. In the Presidential
elections of 2008 and 2012, black women
had the highest voter-participation rate
of any demographic group. Yet they are
among the least likely to hold elected
office. (Women of color constitute just
four per cent of statewide elective ex-
ecutives.) Abrams is the first black
woman to be nominated for the gover-
norship of Georgia—if she had won,
she would have been the first black fe-
male governor in the country.
In the spring, she reissued a politi-
cal memoir, “Lead from the Outside.”
The protocols of mainstream American
politics generally frown on the word
“power.” Abrams sees that as precisely
the issue. “Minorities rarely come of age
explicitly thinking about what we want
and how to get it,” she writes. By con-
trast, “people already in power almost
never have to think about whether they
belong in the room.” Abrams is char-
acteristically direct, but such statements
are also an attempt to upend
the presumptions of what
leadership in this society is
expected to look like. She
goes on, “For most people
from the outside, every story
you read, every narrative
you’re told, except for a cou-
ple months out of the year,
is about how you’re not sup-
posed to be one of these
people.” The net effect, she
writes, is that people view themselves
as “ancillary, not essential” to the decision-
making processes.D
alton, Georgia, is a city of some
thirty thousand people in Whit-
field County, in the foothills of the Blue
Ridge Mountains, near the Tennessee
border. It’s a place earnest enough thatit claims Marla Maples, Donald Trump’s
second wife, as a famous daughter—
even though, technically, she is from
nearby Cohutta. The county is over-
whelmingly white, though the Latino
population, in particular, is growing. In
2016, Hillary Clinton lost there to
Trump by forty-five points; in 2018, a
non-Presidential election year, Abrams
lost it to Kemp by a similar margin,
though the Latino turnout increased.
Conventional wisdom would hold that
time spent by a Democratic politician
in Whitfield County is a seed tossed
onto arid soil. Abrams would say that,
according to that kind of thinking, she
never should have run for governor in
the first place. Last year, she campaigned
in every county; now that she is no
longer a candidate, she wants to keep
every county engaged with her electoral-
reform campaign.
So, on a chilly afternoon on the last
day of March, Abrams, who lives in a
gentrifying section of Atlanta’s east side,
made the ninety-minute drive to Dal-
ton, as part of a tour that she has been
conducting around the state. She was
ebullient, even though the Dalton ap-
pearance would be her second event of
the day. She had risen early to speak at
the Antioch A.M.E. Church in Stone
Mountain, a middle-class suburb of
Atlanta. “I’m not a glad-hander,” she
told me. “I’m a good responder, but I’m
also very comfortable sitting in silence.”
Abrams is, nevertheless, an effective
speaker. Her speeches are short on grand
metaphors, long on blunt, declarative
sentences. “Voters aren’t dumb,” she said.
“They can tell if you mean what you
say.” Cynicism “comes about because
people don’t tell you the truth.”
The Dalton Convention Center is a
sprawling complex just off Interstate 75,
near the site where, a historical marker
notes, Confederate forces temporarily
repelled William Tecumseh Sherman’s
troops as they marched on Atlanta.
About a hundred and fifty people had
shown up for Abrams’s event, which
had been organized by Fair Fight Ac-
tion. Many of them were older white
people, and some had volunteered for
her campaign.
Abrams was wearing a navy-blue
sheath dress and a braided strand of
pearls, and her hair was in her signature
twists. When she took the stage, she