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