Abrams refused to concede at first. “I sat shiva for 10 days,” she tells me. “Then I started plotting.” Many thought her next move would be a run for the Senate (there was the idea that Joe Biden was courting her as a vice presidential pick, rumors she has dismissed). But Abrams says her attention shifted to something more vitally important: saving American democracy itself. To this end, Abrams set up two nonprofits: Fair Count, devoted to making sure minority and poor communities are counted in Georgia during the census, and Fair Fight Action, an organization that works to secure voting rights of everyone in her state. Fair Fight Action sued the Georgia board of elections and secretary of state over charges of voter suppression in Abrams’s 2018 race. The state has unsuccessfully filed a motion to dismiss. Since then, Abrams has been traveling around the country to give speeches on her new life’s cause.
I get around to asking the question so many have asked: Will she run for president in 2020? “For me, the calculus is ‘Am I the right person, and is this the necessary time?’ ” Abrams says. She has been meditating on what she can bring to what she considers an already “solid field of candidates.” The day of the conference, she held meetings with O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg, and she spoke with both of them about the same thing. “First, I expect candidates to talk about voter suppression,” Abrams says. “The second is that the South has to be part of any strategy for victory. My mission is to ensure that Georgia is seen as a competitive state for the general election.”
To many Americans, Abrams’s wider platform has been eclipsed by her focus on voter suppression. But if she does decide to run, she says, her policy priorities will remain the same: expanding Medicaid, raising the minimum wage, enacting criminal justice reform, ensuring reproductive rights. Abrams is no Democratic Socialist and is content to talk about her values within a traditional capitalist framework. Her values were made in Georgia, she says. “I think we spend a lot of time figuring out which shade of blue we are on the spectrum, and it depends on where you live, it depends on what’s possible, it depends on how evolved your economy is,” she tells me. “I’m fighting for getting a state minimum wage above $5.15 an hour. There has to be a recognition that, on the spectrum, progress looks different because of where you are. But that doesn’t mean you don’t dream of more.”
Abrams is not the leader of a state or country yet, but she is already acting like it.
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