Can Stacey Abrams Save the Democrats Again?
MORE THAN 1,000 TICKET-BUYING fans bathe Stacey Abrams in adulation the minute she steps into the spotlight at the cavernous Chevalier Theatre in the Boston suburb of Medford in late October. She waves with both hands, sits down in a deep leather chair and flashes her famous gap-toothed grin until the standing ovation subsides and the sixth stop on her three-month, 12-city national speaking tour can start. That evening’s moderator, NPR host Meghna Chakrabarti, says she’s awed to be “sharing the stage with one of the great defenders of democracy,” and tees up Abrams to deliver her core message: that efforts to suppress voting rights, particularly of people of color and young voters, are a scourge in this country that must be fought. And with that, the former Georgia State Representative and current Democratic breakout star gets to work.
Work for Abrams these days—whether speaking at events like this, stumping for like-minded candidates or mobilizing voters through her nonprofit Fair Fight—is all about bolstering the Democratic Party at a time when it badly needs help. A tough loss in Virginia and close call in New Jersey in bellwether governor races this month, coupled with President Joe Biden’s sharp drop in approval ratings, are sounding alarms about a possible rout in next year’s midterm elections. Abrams, who famously turned a bitter loss in Georgia’s 2018 governor race into a powerful get-out-the-vote movement that helped deliver the White House and Congress to Democrats, is increasingly looking like a possible savior, although it’s far too early in the process to place safe bets.
She’s also made no secret of her own ambitions to seek political office again one day. But for now at least, Abrams is sticking to the script on voter suppression, thinly disguising a rallying cry for Democrats as a nonpartisan message—something she makes clear at the event in Massachusetts.
“My selections when I go into the voting booth may be partisan, but the process that gets me there should not be,” she says as hundreds of heads bob in agreement. “I’m doing what I am doing so that the people who never want me to hold public office again have the same access to voting. The people who decry those who share my complexion or my ideology, or any of the inconvenient truths that I hold in their estimation, should have not been denied their access by virtue of their belief.”
It’s a clever inversion of her theme since nobody is actually trying to keep those people—white conservatives, presumably—from voting. But Abrams’ more impressive feat here, a reflection of her drawing power, is that her audience has paid as much as $200 a seat to hear much the same spiel she regularly issues for free. A few days earlier, for
