Meet Stacey Abrams, the architect of Georgia’s political shift from ‘red’ to ‘purple’

• Stacey Abrams, Georgia’s 2018 Democratic gubernatorial nominee, has long pushed the national party to invest in the fast-growing Southern state.
• Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and President Donald Trump seriously competed in Georgia, reflecting its shift from a reliable red state to one that might flip blue.
• Biden is currently leading Trump by a small margin in Georgia.
• Abrams, who has helped register hundreds of thousands of new voters in the state over the past decade, was widely lauded for making Democrats relevant in the state once again.
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For years, Stacey Abrams told the national Democratic Party that Georgia was the key to its electoral future.

“Georgia is a state Democrats can and must win,” she wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece just last year.

With its rapidly growing Black, Latino, and Asian populations, along with an influx of younger residents and Northern transplants, the state was becoming a symbol of the culturally-ascendant New South.

Republicans have long controlled the levers of power in the Peach State. The last Democrat elected to the Senate was Zell Miller in 2000, and the party hasn’t occupied the Governor’s Mansion since 2003. Population growth, while robust in the Democratic-leaning Atlanta metropolitan area, never seemed like it wasn’t enough to overcome the state’s deeply conservative rural areas, which deliver huge vote margins to Republican candidates.

This perception of Republican control over the state was shattered on November 3, when President Donald Trump’s initial lead over President-elect Joe Biden diminished throughout the night as Atlanta and its populous suburbs reported their vote totals.

By November 6, Biden had pulled ahead of Trump in the longtime Republican state. Biden currently leads by a razor-thin 49.5%-49.3% margin over Trump, with a little over 12,000 votes separating the two men out of almost 5 million votes cast.

If Biden prevails, he’d be the first Democratic presidential nominee to win the state since Bill Clinton in 1992.

To many, Abrams’ long-term vision was finally taking hold, and she was widely praised for steering the Biden campaign to this pivotal moment in Southern politics.

Here are four things that you should know about Abrams’ life and career, leading up to her work in accelerating Georgia’s political transition from a conservative “red” state to a competitive “purple” state:

Education has a been a defining part of her life

Abrams, 46, was born in Wisconsin, but spent her childhood in Gulfport, Mississippi and Atlanta.

In an interview with The Washington Post, she spoke about her life in Mississippi and vividly recalled how her parents, Robert and Carolyn Abrams, picked a home on a particular street so that their six children could attend higher-performing public schools.

“My parents understood that education was the essential ingredient to success for both of them,” Abrams told The Post. “My mom is the only one of her siblings to finish high school. My dad is the first man in his family to go to college.”

Abrams was the first Black female valedictorian at DeKalb County’s Avondale High School in 1991.

She then went to Spelman College, a renowned historically Black college in Atlanta, where she distinguished herself as a Harry S. Truman Scholar and graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in interdisciplinary studies (political science, economics, and sociology).

After college, Abrams received a master’s degree in public affairs from the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin and a juris doctor degree from Yale Law School.

She began her professional career as a tax attorney.

She served in the Georgia House of Representatives

In 2006, Abrams ran for a state House seat that included parts of Atlanta and suburban DeKalb, winning the Democratic primary and the general election. She began her first term as a state legislator in 2007.

During her tenure, Abrams aimed for bipartisanship, working successfully with Republican legislators, while also scrutinizing the policies of the majority party.

“In 2011, Abrams was largely responsible for blocking what Georgia Republicans initially portrayed as a major income-tax cut,” according to a Politico report. “Abrams analyzed the proposal and found that it would amount to a major tax increase. She brought her analysis back to her colleagues and worked to persuade them to vote against it. The proposal was defeated.”

She led the House Democratic caucus as Minority Leader from 2011 to 2017, until resigning from the chamber to run for governor.

She is the first Black woman to be a major party gubernatorial nominee in the US

In 2018, Abrams became the first Black female nominee from a major political party to run for governor in US history. This represented a groundbreaking moment not only for Black women, but for Georgia, which was still defined by a largely conservative electorate.

Abrams and her opponent, then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp, were close in the polls throughout the entire race, and both sides aimed to boost their support from their strongest groups — Abrams focused on energizing minority and suburban voters, while Kemp relied heavily on his GOP base in rural and exurban areas.

In the end, Kemp narrowly defeated Abrams. The race represented the smallest margin in a Georgia governor’s race since 1966.

Kemp, who had oversight of the election process, refused to step down during the race, despite numerous calls to do so. While Secretary of State, he “oversaw purges of the voting rolls and supported a tightening of registration rules,” according to The New York Times.

Abrams, who ended her campaign but wouldn’t formally concede to Kemp, said that voter suppression clouded the legitimacy of the election.

“More than 200 years into Georgia’s democratic experiment, the state failed its voters,” she said at the time. “Eight years of systemic disenfranchisement, disinvestment, and incompetence had its desired effect on the electoral process in Georgia.”

She has long been passionate about voting rights

Over the past decade, Abrams helped register hundreds of thousands of new voters in the state. After her 2018 loss, she started Fair Fight, a national voting rights organization aimed at rooting out voter suppression. The organization is an extension of Abrams’ personal mission to bring new people into the voting process.

Earlier this year, she reminisced about her passion for voting rights with a group of college students while discussing youth engagement, according to The Washington Post.

“I started my voting rights activism at Spelman College,” she told the students. “I started a voter-registration drive even before I was old enough to vote. I was probably the only person who turned 18 in college and got excited to go register and nothing else. But for me, the issue of voter registration is the beginning of the conversation because it is a conversation about power.”