Stacey Abrams

Abrams co-founded Nourish, Inc. in 2010.[29] Originally conceived as a beverage company with a focus on infants and toddlers,[30] it was later rebranded as Now and pivoted its business model to an invoicing solution for small businesses. Now raised a $9.5 million Series A in 2021.[29]

In mid-March 2023, community electrification advocacy nonprofit group Rewiring America announced it had hired Abrams as senior counsel.[31][32]

In 2006, Abrams ran for the 84th district for the Georgia House of Representatives, following JoAnn McClinton's announcement that she would not seek reelection. Abrams ran in the Democratic Party primary election against former state legislator George Maddox and political operative Dexter Porter. She outraised her two opponents and won the primary election with 51% of the vote, avoiding a runoff election.[34]

Abrams in 2012

Abrams represented House District 84 beginning in the 2007 session,[35] and beginning in the 2013 session (following reapportionment), District 89. Both districts covered portions of the City of Atlanta and unincorporated DeKalb County,[36] covering the communities of Candler Park, Cedar Grove, Columbia, Druid Hills, Edgewood, Highland Park, Kelley Lake, Kirkwood, Lake Claire, South DeKalb, Toney Valley, and Tilson.[37][38] She served on the Appropriations, Ethics, Judiciary Non-Civil, Rules, and Ways & Means committees.[39]

In November 2010, the Democratic caucus elected Abrams to succeed DuBose Porter as minority leader over Virgil Fludd.[40] Abrams's first major action as minority leader was to cooperate with Republican governor Nathan Deal's administration to reform the HOPE Scholarship program. She co-sponsored the 2011 legislation that preserved the HOPE program by decreasing the scholarship amount paid to Georgia students and funded a 1% low-interest loan program for students.[41]

According to Time magazine, Abrams "can credibly boast of having single-handedly stopped the largest tax increase in Georgia history."[42] In 2011 Abrams argued that a Republican proposal to cut income taxes while increasing a tax on cable service would lead to a net increase in taxes paid by most people.[42] She performed an analysis of the bill that showed that 82% of Georgians would see net tax increases, and left a copy of the analysis on the desk of every House legislator.[42] The bill subsequently failed.[42]

Abrams with John Lewis in 2017

Abrams also worked with Deal on criminal-justice reforms that reduced prison costs without increasing crime,[42] and with Republicans on the state's biggest-ever public transportation funding package.[42]

On August 25, 2017, Abrams resigned from the General Assembly to focus on her gubernatorial campaign.[43]

Stacey Abrams campaigns in 2018 for Governor of Georgia.

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• Stacey Abrams becomes first black woman to gain major U.S. party nomination for governor of Georgia

Abrams ran for governor of Georgia in 2018.[44] In the Democratic primary she ran against Stacey Evans, another member of the Georgia House of Representatives,[44] in what some called "the battle of the Staceys". Abrams was endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Our Revolution.[45][46] On May 22, she won the Democratic nomination, making her the first Black woman in the U.S. to be a major party's nominee for governor.[7] After winning the primary, Abrams secured a number of high-profile endorsements, including one from former president Barack Obama.[47][48]

Almost a week before election day, the Republican nominee, Georgia secretary of state Brian Kemp, canceled a debate scheduled seven weeks earlier to attend a Trump rally. Kemp blamed Abrams for the cancellation, saying she was unwilling to reschedule it. Abrams's campaign manager responded, "We refuse to callously take Georgians for granted and cancel on them. Just because Brian Kemp breaks his promises doesn't mean anyone else should."[49]

Two days before the election, Kemp's office announced that it was investigating the Georgia Democratic Party for unspecified "possible cybercrimes"; the Georgia Democratic Party stated that "Kemp's scurrilous claims are 100 percent false" and described them as a "political stunt".[50] A 2020 investigation by the Georgia attorney general's office concluded that there was no evidence of computer crimes.[51] Later that year, it was revealed that the alleged cybercrime against Kemp's office was in fact a planned security test that one of Kemp's staff members had signed off on three months prior.[52]

As Georgia's secretary of state, Kemp was in charge of elections and voter registration during the election. Kemp was accused of voter suppression during the election between him and Abrams.[53][54][55] Emory University professor Carol Anderson has criticized Kemp as an "enemy of democracy" and "an expert in voter suppression" for his actions as secretary of state.[56] Political scientists Michael Bernhard and Daniel O'Neill described Kemp's actions in the 2018 gubernatorial election as the worst case of voter suppression in that election year.[57] Election law expert Richard L. Hasen called Kemp "perhaps the most incompetent state chief elections officer" in the 2018 elections, pointing to a number of actions that jeopardized Georgia's election security and made it harder for eligible voters to vote.[58] Hasen writes that it was "hard to tell" which of Kemp's "actions were due to incompetence and which were attempted suppression."[58]

Between 2012 and 2018, Kemp's office canceled over 1.4 million voter registrations, with nearly 700,000 cancellations in 2017 alone.[59] On a single night in July 2017, half a million voters had their registrations canceled. According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, election-law experts said that this "may represent the largest mass disenfranchisement in US history."[60] Kemp oversaw the removals as secretary of state, and did so eight months after he declared his candidacy for governor.[61] An investigative journalism group run by Greg Palast found that of the approximately 534,000 Georgians whose voter registrations were purged between 2016 and 2017, more than 334,000 still lived where they were registered.[62] The voters were given no notice that they had been purged.[63] Palast sued Kemp, claiming over 300,000 voters were purged illegally.[64] Kemp's office denied any wrongdoing, saying that by "regularly updating our rolls, we prevent fraud and ensure that all votes are cast by eligible Georgia voters."[65]

Abrams in 2018

By early October 2018, more than 53,000 voter registration applications had been put on hold by Kemp's office, with more than 75% belonging to minorities.[66][59] The voters were eligible to re-register if they still lived in Georgia.[67][59][61][62]

In a ruling against Kemp, district judge Amy Totenberg found that Kemp's office had violated the Help America Vote Act and said an attempt by Kemp's office to expedite the certification of results "appears to suggest the secretary's foregoing of its responsibility to confirm the accuracy of the results prior to final certification, including the assessment of whether serious provisional balloting count issues have been consistently and properly handled."[68][69]

On November 6, 2018, Abrams lost the election by 54,723 votes.[70] On November 16, 2018, Abrams announced that she was ending her campaign. She emphasized that her statement was not a concession, because "concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true, or proper", but acknowledged that she could not close the gap with Kemp to force a runoff.[71] In her campaign-ending speech, Abrams announced the creation of Fair Fight Action, a voting rights nonprofit organization that sued the secretary of state and state election board in federal court for voter suppression.[72]

Fair Fight's lawsuit was initiated in December 2018; according to Politico, it "started as a sprawling case that included allegations of unreasonably long lines and wait times caused by moving and closing polling places; the impact of voter ID rules on people of color, voters with non-Anglo Saxon names and newly naturalized citizens; improper maintenance of Georgia's voter rolls; inadequate training of poll workers; and even the integrity of voting machines".[73] Six months after the lawsuit began, the Georgia legislature passed a law addressing some of its claims, with measures including the implementation of new voting machines with more advanced technology.[74] Fair Fight dropped the claims about voting machines in December 2020, around the time that Donald Trump made baseless claims about voting machine problems in Georgia affecting the 2020 presidential election.[73] In February 2021, a federal judge ruled that Fair Fight's claims about voting machines, voter list security, and polling place issues were resolved by changes in Georgia's election law, or invalidated due to lack of standing to sue.[74][75]

In April 2021, a judge allowed some claims in the legal challenge to proceed while rejecting others.[74] In October 2022, a federal judge ruled against Fair Fight on the remaining claims, finding that Georgia's voting regulations did not violate the Constitution or the Voting Rights Act.[76][77][78] According to the judge, the case "resulted in wins and losses for all parties over the course of the litigation and culminated in what is believed to have been the longest voting rights bench trial in the history of the Northern District of Georgia."[73][79][80] Over the course of the lawsuit, Fair Fight raised $61 million and paid millions to Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, Abrams's campaign chair.[73]

Since losing the election, Abrams has repeatedly said that the election was not fairly conducted[9] and has declined to call Kemp the legitimate governor of Georgia.[81] Abrams has since said that she won the election and that the election was "stolen from the voters of Georgia", claims that election law expert Richard L. Hasen said were unproven, though he argued that "it's clear that Kemp did everything in his power to put in place restrictive voting policies that would help his candidacy and hurt his opponent, all while overseeing his own election."[82] Abrams argued that Kemp, who oversaw the election in his role as Secretary of State, had a conflict of interest and suppressed turnout by purging nearly 670,000 voter registrations in 2017, and that about 53,000 voter registrations were pending a month before the election.[9][83] She has said, "I have no empirical evidence that I would have achieved a higher number of votes. However, I have sufficient and I think legally sufficient doubt about the process to say that it was not a fair election."[9]

On November 9, 2018, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that its investigation of the 2018 statewide elections in Georgia had found "no evidence ... of systematic malfeasance – or of enough tainted votes to force a runoff election".[84] A USA Today fact check noted that the actions Kemp's office took during the election "can be explained as routine under state and federal law"; political scientist Charles S. Bullock III said there is "not much empirical evidence supporting the assertion that Kemp either suppressed the vote or 'stole' the election from Abrams."[85]

According to Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler, Abrams has variously claimed that she "won" the election, that the election was "rigged", that it was "stolen", that it was not "free and fair", and that Kemp had "cheated". Kessler said that "Abrams played up claims the election was stolen until such tactics became untenable for anyone who claims to be an advocate for American democratic norms and values".[86]

Stacey Abrams and Nancy Pelosi in January 2019

On January 29, 2019, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced that Abrams would deliver the response to the State of the Union address on February 5.[87] She was the first African-American woman to give the rebuttal to the address, as well as the first and only non-office-holding person to do so since the State of the Union responses began in 1966.[88] Despite being heavily recruited by Schumer, the Democratic National Committee, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to challenge incumbent senator David Perdue, on April 30, 2019, Abrams announced that she would not run for the U.S. Senate in 2020.[89] After Senator Johnny Isakson announced his resignation due to poor health, Abrams declined to run in that election as well, citing a need to focus on ending voter suppression.

On August 17, 2019, Abrams announced the founding of Fair Fight 2020,[90] an organization to assist Democrats financially and technically to build voter protection teams in 20 states.[91] Abrams is Fair Fight Action 2020's chair.[92] Billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg contributed $5 million shortly after announcing his run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.[93][94] On ABC's The View, Abrams defended Bloomberg's spending, saying: "Every person is allowed to run and should run the race that they think they should run, and Mike Bloomberg has chosen to use his finances. Other people are using their dog, their charisma, their whatever."[95] Abrams declined to endorse Bloomberg personally.[96]

During the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, Abrams actively promoted herself for consideration as former vice president Joe Biden's running mate.[97] Kamala Harris was officially announced as Biden's running mate on August 11, 2020.[98] Abrams was selected as one of 17 speakers to jointly deliver the keynote address at the 2020 Democratic National Convention.[99]

After Biden won the 2020 U.S. presidential election, both The New York Times and The Washington Post credited Abrams with a large boost in Democratic votes in Georgia and an estimated 800,000 new voter registrations.[6][100] As part of that election, she served as an elector for the state of Georgia.[101]

On December 1, 2021, Abrams announced she would run again for governor of Georgia.[102] She ran unopposed in the Democratic primary on May 24, 2022, and faced Georgia governor Brian Kemp in the November 8 general election.[103] Abrams and Kemp had their first of two scheduled debates on October 17. In the debate, Abrams emphasized her support for gun control and legal access to abortion, while Kemp emphasized Georgia's economy under his governorship and his anti-crime proposals.[104] When asked whether she would accept the results of the election, Abrams declined to directly respond.[105] In the final debate before the election both candidates agreed to accept the results.[106] Abrams lost the November 8, 2022 election to Kemp; she conceded that night.[12]

Abrams supports criminal justice reform in the form of no cash bail for poor defendants, abolishing the death penalty, and decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana.[107][113] She also supports community policing to keep communities safe as part of criminal justice reform.[114]

Abrams would like to increase spending on public education.[42] She opposes private school vouchers, instead advocating improvements to the public education system. She supports smaller class sizes, more school counselors, protected pensions, better pay for teachers, and expanded early childhood education.[115]

In her campaign for governor, Abrams said her top priority was Medicaid expansion.[42][116] She cited research showing that Medicaid expansion improved health care access for low-income residents and made hospitals in rural locations financially viable.[116] She also created a plan to address Georgia's high maternal mortality rate.[117]

Abrams is a strong supporter of Israel and rejects "the demonization and delegitimization of Israel represented" by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, which she has called "anti-Semitic".[118][119] But she voted against Georgia's anti-BDS legislation that punishes companies that choose to boycott Israel or Israeli-occupied territories.[120] Abrams wrote, "Boycotts have been a critical part of social justice in American history, particularly for African-Americans. As the Anti-Defamation League notes, the origin of BDS is based in the anti-apartheid movement."[118]