2019-08-19_The_New_Yorker

the police chief, Eldrin Bell. That fact
heightened the indignation of the pro­
testers when the police began teargas­
sing them.
Incensed by sensational portrayals of
the protest in the local news, Abrams
organized students to call the networks
repeatedly to complain, and that led to
a meeting with Jackson. In her mem­
oir, Abrams writes, “With a boldness
that surprised me, I excoriated his rec­
ord and scoffed at his leadership. If I’d
thought more deeply before I stood I
might have held my tongue.... In this
moment I had access to power, a voice,
and a question. Sometimes the why of
ambition can only be discovered in nervy
actions that cut against our instincts.”
After graduating from Spelman, and
earning a master’s degree in public pol­
icy from the University of Texas, she
entered Yale Law School. It was there
that she began writing novels. (She has
published eight, under the pseudonym
Selena Montgomery, the last of them,
“Deception,” in 2009. They feature pro­
fessional women caught up in romance
and intrigue.) “The act of writing is in­
tegral to who I am,” she told the Wash­
ington Post last year. But fiction was a
sideline; she specialized in tax law, and
decided to go back to Georgia. She knew
that she wanted to pursue a career in
government, and, in 2002, when she was
twenty­nine, she became a deputy city
attorney for Atlanta. Four years later,
she won a seat in the Georgia House,

representing the Eighty­fourth District,

which encompassed part of the east side

of Atlanta.

I

n 2004, the Democrats had lost con­

trol of the House for the first time in

more than a century, and DuBose Por­

ter, then the leader of the Democratic

caucus, was struggling to define its role

as the minority. He saw an asset in

Abrams. “When Stacey was first elected,

she was somewhat reserved,” he told

me, but “she instantly gained credibil­

ity, because she was kind of like our

Google. If you needed some answers on

something, you would go ask Stacey.”

Abrams also earned a reputation for

being willing to oppose the Republican

leadership, though she is not a radical by

nature. Her emergence as a national figure

has coincided with the left’s ascendancy

in the Democratic Party, and many have

portrayed her as part of that movement.

But colleagues repeatedly point to her

ability to forge compromises. Porter ran

for governor in 2010—he lost in the pri­

mary, and Nathan Deal, a Republican

congressman, was elected—and, when

Abrams made a bid to replace him as

minority leader, he supported her. She

won, becoming the first woman to lead

either caucus in the Georgia House.

That year, Kemp, then a forty­six­

year­old state senator from Athens, Geor­

gia, became the secretary of state. After

the 2010 census, the Republicans redrew

the district lines. The G.O.P. was expected

to pick up seats in the 2012 races, and it

was Abrams’s job to try to prevent the

Party from winning a supermajority in

the legislature. Lauren Groh­Wargo, then

a thirty­one­year­old activist turned strat­

egist from Cleveland, who had worked

on Democratic campaigns in Ohio, in­

cluding Governor Ted Strickland’s unsuc­

cessful 2010 bid for reëlection, was look­

ing for candidates to support. She had

heard about Abrams and spoke with her

a few times by phone, and, in early 2012,

when Groh­Wargo was visiting Atlanta,

they met for lunch. Abrams hired her as

a consultant. Groh­Wargo, who is white

and a lesbian, and Abrams represented

voices that had never been at the center

of Georgia politics, and, together, they

pursued a plan to blunt the effects of re­

districting through voter mobilization.

Abrams surprised the state G.O.P. by

raising more than three hundred thou­

sand dollars to support Democratic can­

didates that year. The money was spent

not on expensive television and radio ads

but on voter­turnout strategies, like or­

ganizing canvassing teams and volunteer

networks. In the end, the Democrats held

on to four redistricted seats. “It was a re­

ally big deal that the Republicans didn’t

get the supermajority they had drawn for

themselves,” Groh­Wargo told me.

But Abrams had also discovered how

fractious party politics can be. The pre­

vious year, as part of a round of budget

cuts, Governor Deal considered severely

curtailing the state’s popular hope Schol­

arship, which had used funds from the

Georgia Lottery to pay the tuition and

the cost of books for hundreds of thou­

sands of qualifying students at certain

Georgia colleges. A plan called for full

scholarships to be made contingent on

SAT scores, which meant that many stu­

dents would no longer be eligible for

them. Abrams agreed to a compromise:

a second tier of partial tuition funding

was made available to tens of thousands

of students who met the previous stan­

dard of a 3.0 G.P.A. (Porter pointed out

that the compromise spared Georgia’s

pre­K program, which was also funded

by the lottery.) Liberals criticized the

deal, largely because tying the funds to

SAT scores would favor suburban, mostly

white students. Abrams still sounds stung

by the experience. In February, during

an interview with the MSNBC host

“I just removed a bunch of old twigs, and voilà!” Chris Hayes, she said, “I was accused of