March 2020 | Rolling Stone | 75
STACEY
ABRAMS
The Democrats’ brightest star is building a
new kind of political machine in the Deep South
By Tessa StuartSTACEY ABRAMS
slips out of a
chauffeured
black Escalade
and through the
hotel caterers’ en-
trance. She snakes
down the hallway
to the step-and-
repeat, where she snaps a few quick photos with
Democratic Party officials, sweeps past the cash
bar, slowing to shake hands with Congressman
Hank Johnson, then ducks through the ball-
room’s side door to take her place at Table One.
This is her third year headlining the Gwinnett
County Democrats’ annual gala. Fifteen years
ago, Gwinnett was a mostly rural, majority-white
Republican stronghold. Today, it’s Atlanta’s
largest suburb, the state’s most racially diverse
county, and the epicenter of Georgia’s transfor-
mation into a battleground state.
Abrams, in a midnight-blue tuxedo jacket
and sparkling teardrop earrings, is the center of
gravity inside the neon-blue-lit ballroom. Party
leaders, donors, and newly declared candidates
revolve past the table to say hello, introduce
their children, take selfies. She greets each
warmly, bouncing babies on her knee, nodding
appreciatively every few minutes when someone
mentions her name from the stage. You’d never
know that she hates this part of the job.
“ ‘Hatred’ is a strong word,” Abrams says. “I
deeply dislike it, and would prefer not to do it.”
“She’s very good at it though,” Abrams’
right-hand woman, Chelsey Hall, mutters under
her breath.
That morning, inside a different hotel ball-
room, in a different Atlanta suburb — a room
you needed to sign a non-disclosure agreement
to get into — Abrams was doing the part of her
job she actually enjoys: putting together a plan
to combat the arsenal of new voting restrictions
and suppression tactics she expects will be
deployed in polling places around the country
this November.
It was day two of a summit hosted by Fair
Fight, one of the organizations Abrams formed
after her narrow defeat in the 2018 Georgia gov-
ernor’s race — an election plagued by voter-roll
purges, poll-site closings, and a thousand other
problems ranging from the grossly incompetent
(voting machines missing their power cords) to
the truly sinister (tens of thousands of mostly
black voter registrations placed on hold).
In 2018, largely thanks to Abrams, Georgia’s
Democratic Party had a full-time voter pro-
tection director; there was a hotline to report
problems, volunteers to chase down provisional
ballots, lawyers ready to go to court to keep
polls open. It wasn’t enough, it turned out,
against Abrams’ opponent, Georgia’s then-secre-
tary of state, Brian Kemp, who was in charge of
overseeing his own election — but it nearly was.
Now, with $21 million raised in 2019 alone,
Fair Fight is training similar teams in 18 states.
“I don’t have the capacity to sit still and wait for
the next term, the next opportunity for me to
stand for an office that let’s me do the work,”
Abrams says.
Dozens of Democratic heavies descended on
the summit that morning, including Michael
Bloomberg, who has donated $5 million to Fair
Fight. “Voter suppression efforts are happening
across the country,” Bloomberg tells ROLLING
STONE, “and there is no one better to lead the
counterattack than Stacey.”
The billionaire former mayor of New York is
the latest in a string of high-profile presidential
candidates to seek a sit-down with Abrams in
the past year. “Those meetings went unre-PHOTOGRAPH BY Flo Ngala