34 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019
occur before 5 p.m. that Friday. By the
end of the week, though, it became clear
that there would not be a recount, and,
on the night of November 16th, Abrams
gave a speech in which she said, “I ac-
knowledge that former Secretary of State
Brian Kemp will be certified as the vic-
tor of the 2018 gubernatorial election.
But to watch an elected official—who
claims to represent the people of this
state—baldly pin his hopes for election
on the suppression of the people’s dem-
ocratic right to vote has been truly ap-
palling. So, to be clear, this is not a speech
of concession.”
Many people in and outside Georgia
believe that, without the irregularities,
Abrams would have won. In early June,
in Atlanta, Joe Biden, the front-runner
for the 2020 Democratic Presidential
nomination, told the African American
Leadership Summit that “voter suppres-
sion is the reason Stacey Abrams isn’t
governor.” Addressing the same event,
Pete Buttigieg said, “Stacey Abrams
ought to be governor right now.”
I
n March, I interviewed Abrams for
an event at the Brookings Institution,
in Washington, D.C., and asked her
why she thought voter suppression, an
issue most closely associated with the
civil-rights era, had reëmerged as a pivotal
concern across the country. She replied,
“We’ve never not been in this situation.”
Historically, Georgia’s gubernatorial elec-
tions, in particular, have highlighted the
nexus between racism and voter suppres-
sion. In 1906, the Democratic-primary
race—between Hoke Smith, a former
publisher of the Atlanta Journal, and
Clark Howell, the editor of the Atlanta
Constitution—became a competition over
who would do more to disenfranchise
the African-American population. The
escalating rhetoric, amplified by the can-
didates’ newspapers, set off a riot that
left at least twenty-five blacks and two
whites dead. In 1946, Governor Eugene
Talmadge, a noted segregationist, lost
the popular vote in the Democratic pri-
mary to James V. Carmichael, an Atlanta
businessman who was a moderate on ra-
cial issues. But Talmadge was declared
the winner, owing to Georgia’s notori-
ous “county unit” system, which gave dis-
proportionate weight to rural areas. In
1966, Lester Maddox, an Atlanta restau-
rant owner, won the office after refusing
to serve black customers, in open defiance
of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
In 1971, Maddox was succeeded by
Jimmy Carter, but even Carter, who
would become an icon of Southern lib-
eralism, was not immune to the contor-
tions of Georgia politics. He had lost a
bid for the governorship in 1966, when
he was a state senator, in part for ap-
pearing insufficiently conservative on
matters of race. (He had worked to repeal
voter restrictions.) In 1970, he courted
the support of white conservatives, and
Maddox, who was running separately
for lieutenant governor, endorsed him.
But Carter announced, in his inaugural
address, that “the time for racial discrim-
ination is over,” and set about integrat-
ing the state government. In the 1976
Presidential election, he carried every
state of the former Confederacy except
Virginia, winning just forty-five per cent
of the white vote, but ninety-five per
cent of the black vote.
Beginning in the nineteen-seventies,
Georgia—particularly Atlanta—became
a destination for a growing number of
educated African-Americans repatriat-
ing to the South. Between 2000 and
2010, the state’s black population grew
by twenty-five per cent, and the Latino
population almost doubled, to nearly
nine per cent. By 2010, Asian-Americans
accounted for three per cent of the pop-
ulation. But those changes were not en-
tirely reflected at the polls. In 2016, six
hundred thousand African-Americans
who were eligible to vote remained un-
registered. Many people viewed this fact
as a reflection of the Democratic Par-
ty’s pessimism toward the potential of
the black electorate in the state. In 2008,
Ben Jealous, then the director of the
N.A.A.C.P., told me that Democrats
were ignoring a political bounty by fail-
ing to allocate sufficient money to or-
ganize and register black Georgians.
Shortly before Abrams announced
her candidacy, she told me, in a phone
conversation, that, if she ran, her cam-
paign strategy would rely on register-
ing those six hundred thousand people.
During our Brookings discussion, I said
that she probably could have heard my
eyebrow raise over the phone. “More
like I could hear your eyes rolling,” she
said. In her public appearances, Abrams
often rattles off statistics about the elec-
tion. But one statistic stands out: nine
hundred and twenty-five thousand
African-Americans voted in the 2014
gubernatorial race; in 2018, 1.4 million
African-Americans voted—ninety-four
per cent of them for Abrams.
The fact that her campaign had con-
ceived of a plan that, at least in theory,
made Georgia look like a purple state
has not gone unnoticed. “The path to
victory as a Democrat here is you have
got to build a multiracial, multiethnic
coalition,” Groh-Wargo told me. “You
have got to get super intellectually curi-
ous about African-American voters, about
Latino voters, about Asian-American
voters, about millennials, and white sub-
urbanites.” When I asked Abrams if the
national Party had invested too heavily
in those communities in 2016, at the ex-
pense of the lower-income white elec-
torate, ushering in Trump’s victory, she
rejected the framing of the question. “I
think where the Democratic Party has
gotten into trouble is that we’ve created
a binary, where it’s either the normative
voter we remember fondly from 1960”—
the working-class white male—“or it’s
the hodgepodge. The reality is that we
are capable as a society of having multiple
thoughts at the same time. That’s one of
the reasons why I went to the gay-pride
parade,” she added. “I know that, as an
ally, I’m responsible for making certain
that the L.G.B.T.Q. community is seen
and heard.” Most elections are framed
as a referendum on the future; Georgia’s
race was about how much of the past
had been dragged into the present.
A
ll this leaves open the question of
what Abrams will do next. Chuck
Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader,
tried to persuade her to run against
David Perdue, Georgia’s junior senator,
who is up for reëlection in 2020. In May,
she announced that she would not run
next year, a decision that was met with
disapproval from observers who think
that it’s incumbent on prominent Dem-
ocrats to help the Party win control of
the Senate. Abrams defended her deci-
sion to me by saying, “I was following
the protocol that I set for myself, mak-
ing sure that I take on jobs and roles
because they are the right thing for me,
and not simply because they’re avail-
able.” Strategists thought that she could
beat Perdue; Trump’s approval rating in
Georgia has dropped seventeen points
