“There were two employees.
They were barely keeping the lights on. It was a
wreck,” Rebecca DeHart, who Abrams tapped to help
rebuild the party, recalls. “Stacey — always think-
ing long-term — knew she wanted a strong party
structure in Georgia.” By the time Abrams ran for
governor in 2018, the party had 150 employees and
$25 million in the bank. “We built it to where we
wanted it to be,” DeHart says. That year, they flipped
16 seats.
Now, Abrams is creating a new kind of political
machine, poised to reshape the Georgia electorate
from the ground up. It began in the days after the
2018 election, when she was sick and depressed sit-
ting on the couch in her Kirkwood townhouse, binge-
ing episodes ofDoctor Who.
“I had a notepad, and I’m sitting in the corner of
my couch, and Jeanine would come by every day
to make sure I’m not committing ritual suicide,”
Abrams jokes. “I had drawn this chart, and it had
three circles. It said, ‘Voting,’ ‘Census,’ ‘Policy.’
“These are the things that I just don’t trust [Kemp]
to do,” she told her sister. “If I believe in what I’ve
been saying, my job is to make sure it gets done any-
way, even if I’m not able to use the platform of a gov-
ernorship to do it.”
The circles are now four stand-alone organiza-
tions, each run by a different trusted female deputy:
Fair Fight, the political arm; Fair Fight Action; Fair
Count; and the Southern Economic Advancement
Project, a think tank intended to, in Abrams’ words,
“translate good policy into Southern.”
Of the organizations, Fair Fight Action — which is
spearheading a lawsuit accusing Kemp of systemat-
ically disenfranchising lower-income and minority
voters — is the best known. But the organization that
has the potential to make the biggest immediate im-
pact on Georgia is Fair Count, the nonprofit Abrams
conceived to combat the undercount of minority
communities in the 2020 census, which will decide
how more than $1.5 trillion in federal resources are
allocated and howcongressional districts are drawn.
The predicted undercount of black men alone in
Georgia is expected to cost the state $154 million
annually — enough to pay for Medicaid expansion
in the state.
“The undercount in Georgia [in 2010] had a vis-
ceral effect on the work I was able to do as a legisla-
tor,” Abrams says. “I knew communities were simply
erased from the narrative.”
Abrams asked her sister Jeanine — who was work-
ing with epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, studying the spread of gon-
orrhea — how she would go about trying to ensure
every person in Georgia was counted. “Her job was
to literally find people who did not want to be found,”
Abrams recalls. “I said, ‘How would you do that?’ ”
Jeanine quit her job and joined Fair Count. From a
small clapboard house in Atlanta’s Grant Park neigh-
borhood, she, DeHart, and a teamof 23 employees
are figuring out how to reach every person in Geor-
gia. Because 2020 is the first time the census will
accept responses online, they’re giving away iPads
and Chromebooks and installing internet routers in
places like churches, barbershops, soup kitchens,
day cares, and community centers.
“There’s really no other organization like Fair
Count in the nation,” DeHart says. “It’s not surpris-
ing — it was born out of Stacey’s brain.”
A
BRAMS HOPS UP into the Escalade and ex-
hales. It’s late, she is exhausted, and she still
has a long drive home from Gwinnett. She
got a call from her mom earlier that day. Carolyn
said she heard the Fair Fight summit had gone well
— a friend of a friend told her the strategy session set
her “on fire.” Abrams smiles at that thought. “To be-
lieve in possibility in Mississippi when it comes to
voter protection? If we can pull that off, then it was
really effective.”
Abrams may not have enjoyed all the glad-handing
she had to do at the fundraiser, but at least she can
feel satisfied knowing she’d done her part. She jokes
that her father used to get in trouble for telling his
congregants that they were “going to hell because
they weren’t doing enough good work.” You get the
sense that this idea — that she’s not doing enough —
haunts Abrams.
“Most people who go into politics, they want to
be in politics. They enjoy the rigor of the campaign
as much as they do the policy,” she says. “For me,
policy is the reason we do this. It’show do you make
people’s lives better?”
That’s what Stacey Abrams wants. And if there is a
political office from which she can do it, that’s great.
And if there isn’t, she’ll find another way. “The goal I
can plan for is, most likely, governor. There are other
opportunities,” Abrams says obliquely. “But I have no
control over how that happens.”
She doesn’t shrink from questions about the vice
presidency, though. “I think it’s not only disingen-
uous, but it is inappropriate as a woman of color,
when presented with that as an option, to dismiss it
out of hand,” Abrams tells me. “Because the idiom
‘You can’t be what you cannot see’ is true. How do
you get things if people don’t know you want them?
For me, it’s not that I want that for itself, but if people
ask me if that’s a job I would take? Absolutely.”
The most obvious clue that she’s keen on the
prospect surfaces when I ask her what she wishes
more people knew about her. Her answer: that
she has a lot of foreign-policy experience. (An
aide later emails, unprompted, a 13-point list of
Abrams’ foreign-policy experience, including seven
international fellowships.)
“I believe that there is value to serving as the chief
lieutenant to someone who has to remake the world
that’s been broken by our current administration,”
Abrams says.
Her interest, as always, is contingent on the work
she would be able to do there. “If you look at H.R.1
and H.R.4” — legislation to expand voting rights and
limit gerrymandering that’s languishing while Repub-
licans have control of the Senate — “there are blue-
prints that have already gone through Congress. One
of the jobs I would love to have is making sure that
those laws actually become real,” she says.
But what she wants more than anything — more
than the governorship or the vice presidency or for
the organizations she’s created to thrive, is for those
organizations to cease to exist.
“I would love for the work we do to be rendered
obsolete by the permanence of protection for those
who need it,” she says. “The permanence of policies
that serve to benefit the communities that are most
vulnerable. I mean, that’s the goal. The goal is
obsolescence. If we have good leadership, if people
actually get to vote, if those who are marginalized
actually wield their power effectively and elect lead-
ers who see them, then you don’t need organizations
to remind them and to teach them how that power
can be used.”STACEY ABRAMS[Cont. from 77]
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