Women
Shaping
The
Future76 | Rolling Stone | March 2020
HAIR^AND^ MAKEUP^ BY^ TERRI^WATSON.^ S
TYLING^ BY^ IMAN^ RAMADAN.^
LOCATION^
COURTE
SYO
F^ PARKER’SO
N^ PENCE,^ DECATUR,^ GEORGIA
.could have succumbed to the immense pressure
to run for one of her state’s two open Senate
seats. But she didn’t. That’s because Abrams has
a very specific idea of what she is after, and here
in Georgia, she’s already building it.T
WENTY-EIGHT YEARS AGO, Abrams
was 18, heartbroken, and sitting in the
Spelman College computer lab. She’d
just been dumped by her boyfriend,
and if her life felt like a bit of a mess, at least
she could find relief in the neat rows of a Lotus
1-2-3 workbook. In one column of a spreadsheet
she entered a list of goals (publish a bestselling
novel, become a millionaire running her own
business, be elected mayor of Atlanta). In
another, the age by which she intended to have
accomplished said goal (24, 30, 35, respectively).
None of it happened on schedule. She’s the
author of eight romance novels written under
the pen name Selena Montgomery — inspired
by Elizabeth Montgomery, the
actress who played Samantha
and her evil twin, Serena,
on Bewitched — but the first
wasn’t published until she was- She took a pen name not
because she worried that being
a romance novelist would hurt
a future political career, but
because she worried her novels
wouldn’t sell if readers knew
she was a nerd. “If you Googled
my name, the first thing that
came up was that I’d written
an article at the age of 17 on
Mesopotamian astronomy.
Both I and my publisher were
concerned that people would
not want to buy a [romance]
book written by, well, not Neil
deGrasse Tyson, but basically
by Stephen Hawking.”
With only a few minor adjust-
ments, Abrams has had a pretty
firm sense of what she’s wanted
since that night in the computer
lab. “I don’t like just the idea
of doing stuff,” Abrams says. “I think you need
to create a structure for it,” She still updates
the spreadsheet (now an Excel file), adding
new goals or revising old ones. She swapped
out mayor for governor after a stint as deputy
city attorney. “The mayor can do extraordinary
things, but she will always be thwarted by a state
government that, especially in the South, strips
you of your power,” Abrams explains.
She was elected in 2006, but it took years of
toiling before she was in a position to pursue the
governorship. In the meantime, she was laying
marked upon until I met with the [former] vice
president,” Abrams sighs. “And then there was a
rumor started.”
She’s being diplomatic: Before Joe Biden got
in the race, advisers to his campaign publicly
floated the idea that he and Abrams might an-
nounce a joint ticket even before primary voting
began. Abrams swatted down that report. (At
the time, she was still considering her own run
for president.) Biden isn’t the only one who has
seemed interested: Bernie Sanders praised her
abilities; Elizabeth Warren — who campaigned
for Abrams in 2018 — said she’s open to naming
a female VP; Pete Buttigieg met with Abrams
privately and phone-banked for Fair Fight
Action, stoking speculation he might tap her as a
potential running mate.
And why not? Abrams is a young, charismatic
Democrat from a potentially flippable state, a
prodigious fundraiser, a captivating speaker. She
is also black, like a large portion of the Demo-
cratic base (and unlike any of the leading candi-
dates), with a record of motivating voters of all
races. Latino and Asian-Pacific Islander turnout
tripled when she ran for governor, and she got
the highest level of support from white voters of
any Democrat in Georgia since Bill Clinton.
She has an overachiever’s résumé — a gradu-
ate of Yale Law, a college professor, co-founder
of a financial-services firm, bestselling author
— but the personality of someone you’d actually
want to hang out with. She’ll rap with you about
her favorite Star Trek episodes, or country
music (Dolly Parton and Earl Thomas Conley
are favorites), or provide a detailed explanation
of why the platypus is her favorite animal (“It is
such an odd creature, makes no sense — it’s both
mammalian and reptilian”).
Her team of aides address her as “Leader” — a
holdover from her days as minority leader in
the Statehouse but one that sounds quasi-cultish
because of staffers’ obvious affection for her.
She inspires a similar reaction in strangers: After
the 2018 election, Abrams took her first vacation
in years, to Turks and Caicos. “I had to stay
inside because there were a lot of people that
kept trying to hug me,” she says.
She even won over Republicans she worked
with during her time in the Statehouse. In 2011,
one GOP appointee predicted Abrams would be
president someday: “Once she puts her mind to
something, there is really nothing she can’t do.”
Abrams herself has come around to that idea,
answering, when she was asked recently if she
saw herself in the White House within the next
20 years: “I do.”
So, of course potential Democratic nominees
want her. The question is, What does Stacey
Abrams want? If she was interested in a fancy
title and stuffy office in Washington, D.C., she
the groundwork, starting an organization — the
New Georgia Project — that would register the
tens of thousands of voters she knew she would
need to have a chance at winning.
It still wasn’t enough. Kemp had purged more
than 1.4 million voters from the rolls in Georgia
between 2012 and 2018. He’d ordered the arrest
of black organizers for registering voters ahead
of a school-board election, and put the registra-
tions of some 53,000 new voters — 70 percent of
them black — “on hold.”
On the night of the election, “the incoming
fire hose of problems — it was worse than I
would have imagined,” says Lauren Groh-
Wargo, Abrams’ former campaign manager
and a co-founder of Fair Fight. “I had all these
scenarios sketched out, and we were in Scenario
Z, basically the clusterfuck scenario: that we
don’t have enough information to know what’s
even happening because there were such big
voting problems.”
Abrams lost by 54,723 votes. She has resigned
herself to the fact that she will probably never
have full understanding of all the factors that
conspired to arrive at that particular figure.
“One of the ways suppression is so effective is
that you never see all of it,” she says quietly.
Ten days after the election,
she delivered a speech ending
her bid; her youngest sister,
Jeanine Abrams McLean, stood
behind her, ashen. “I wish I
didn’t look so pissed in the
photo,” Abrams McLean says. “I
thought my face looked neutral,
but every time I see it, I’m like,
You motherf—.” Jeanine still
gets choked up thinking of how
much, in that moment, Stacey
reminded her of their mother.
As teens, both Abrams’ par-
ents were active in the civil-rights
movement in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. When
he was a teenager, Abrams’ dad, Robert, was
arrested for helping register black voters. “My
mom, across town, was doing the same work —
she was just smart enough not to get caught,”
Abrams jokes.
Her parents, who both became pastors,
brought their six children with them to vote in
every election and raised them to value public
service: Abrams’ sisters are a federal judge, a
college professor, and a Ph.D. working in public
health; one of her brothers is a social worker,
the other worked on hurricane recovery efforts
in Mississippi.
“My mom and my father shared the same
belief systems,” she says. And both, like Abrams,
are storytellers: “When my dad does a sermon,
there’s usually a really compelling story, anMost people who
go into politics,
they want to be
in politics. For me,
policy is the reason
we do this. It’s,
“How can we
make people’s
lives better?”