Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explored the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. A lot of news has happened since I was last in your feed. On January sixth, a mob, encouraged by Donald Trump some would say incited, stormed the Capitol Much later that night, Congress finally certified Joe Biden's presidential victory. Democrats almost immediately began work on impeaching the president for a second time. All this has almost overshadowed huge news out of Georgia. On January fifth, the day before the instance on Capitol Hill, two Democrats flipped Senate seat, giving the Democratic Party control over the upper chamber of Congress fifty fifty, with a tiebreaker going to Vice President Kamala Harris. On that historic day, a lot of people were talking about one woman, Stacy Abrams. Stacy is a politician and activist whose organizing efforts in Georgia played a key role, first in helping Joe Biden win the state and then in delivering the two Senate flips. Now, Stacy Abrams is a household name. In fact, I think she is now the most important activist strategist in US politics since Karl Rove, and she may turn out to be much more important than Rove in the long term. Stacy has been working steadily for years on turning Georgia blue through creating and leading organizations like the New Georgia Project aimed at registering in new voters and Fair Fight aimed at fighting voter suppression. Her reproach is going to become a new paradigm for Democrats all over the country. They're going to focus on registering new voters, on resisting voter suppression, and on getting out the vote, particularly for voters of color, who, for various complicated reasons, have not always turned out in past elections. I spoke to Stacy about a year ago when the presidential race was just heating up, and I'm excited to re share that conversation with you today. It feels like the right time for it. Some background on Stacy Abrahams. In twenty eighteen, she ran for governor of Georgia and very narrowly lost to Brian Kemp, a Republican who was Secretary of State of Georgia at the time, meaning he was the one in charge of overseeing the election Stacy never conceded the race because she said that Kemp had suppressed votes. That experience helped spur her work on voting rights and getting every vote counted. I reached her last October by phone. Hi, this is Stacey Abrams. Hi, Stacey, it's no Effeldman. How are you? I am well? How are you? I'm great? Thank you so much for joining us. If it's okay with you, we'll just dive right in. Sounds good. So I want to begin by asking you about two organizations that you've founded, Fair Fight, which is devoted to fighting voter suppression, and fair count, which is devoted to making sure the census is fair. The fairness theme emerge is very powerfully here, and I just want to begin by asking you, given your long career in public service and as a lawyer, as an entrepreneur, what makes you think that fairness is achievable. I'd like to begin by a thinking about the fact I grew up in the Deep South. I am the daughter of two people who are civil rights activist as teenagers, and my grandparents and all of those who preceded me either live through Jim Crow or the Black Codes, or slavery and so I think of fairness as a continuum. Our responsibility is to constantly move towards the promise of equality. And in each generation of my family's life, progress has been made. It has been slow and plotting and painful and violent, but it has been achievable. And so my responsibility is not simply to see the difficulties that we face, but to remember that in each generation, and opportunity to fight back against these difficulties has been a critical responsibility. And the ultimate goal is not that we will have every scene we desire. The goal is that we will have fairness, and that is my core belief. That's a moving and it's actually even an inspiring answer. You're a lawyer, and I don't say that as a bad word. I'm a lawyer too. You know, I went to this same law school and that you did. People may hold that against us, but I don't. But I want to ask about the balance between law and more direct social activism because I sometimes worry, I mean, I even teach law students for a living, and I sometimes worry that I fall too far into the category of telling them, Look, this social movement generated legal change, and so that's how you know that it's a successful social movement in real time, and then they sort of look at me, at least when they start law school a little skeptically and say, isn't it the other way around? I mean, shouldn't the measure of a law be whether it produced social change rather than the measure of a social movement being whether it generated some some legal outcomes. And I'm wondering how you see the balance. Obviously we need both, but when you think about which comes first, or which needs to be more powerful, or where the emphasis should be, where do you come down. I think they're inherently intertwined. And I think your students are asking smart questions. But I wouldn't say unfair. But it's a more complicated question if you look at my election, For example, my decision on November sixteenth to acknowledge the legal sufficiency of the outcome, recognize that there are laws in place that have created the very process that was used to thwart voters, that those laws have been deemed appropriate by lawmakers. But my refusal to concede the election was that I take exception to the actual laws themselves, that the very presence of those rules that permitted that behavior raises the need to question and in our case overturn those laws and reconstruct those laws. Social movements give voice and power and face to what needs to change. The law gives structure and to the extent possible permanence to the existence of that change. And for me, I've never seen I understand there's a tension, but I've never seen a dichotomy or an order of priority to my participation. My response facility is to be engaged in the social action that we are pursuing through fair fight and fair count. But I am also someone who believes that I need to be part of the lawmaking process because social movements without a voice in the law do not have the longstanding and deep, deeply needed of sex if there isn't something implicated into law that makes it harder to undo or to thwart the intention. I'm really glad you brought up your non concession after the twenty eighteen Georgia governor's race, and I want to use that as you just raised it to try to ask you about a sort of a skeptical question that someone from the outside might ask, and they might say, you know, it comes down to can the system be trusted to change enough to make a difference. So as you say, you recognize the legal sufficiency of the outcome in the sense that you didn't walk into the governor's office and say I'm the governor and ask the Georgia State Police to put you in office. But you didn't conceive because you didn't want to say I lost in a fair fight, because it wasn't a fair fight. And so in that sense, you didn't want to say the words I lost because you didn't lose in some fairness sense. And I guess what I'm wondering is, couldn't someone say, look, that suggests the system is just rigged in a way where it's not going to change, and if that's the case, we need to go outside the system and engage in civil disobedience or other more radical forms of efforts to not just tweak the system through laws and improvements and social activism, but something more fundamental. I would say they're absolutely right, But for me, I have always internalized that it cannot be one or the other, that it must always be this collaboration of challenging the laws as they stand, creating better laws and fighting bad laws, and also engaging people to press the system for the change that needs to happen. Let me ask you about your own personal version of this fight. I mean, you wrote a fantastic autobiography which huge numbers of people all over read. You did a very public response to the state of the Union, which is ordinarily something that a senior legislative figure would have done at the national level. If the New York Times quoted you correctly, they said you were open to serving as vice president if asked for any Democratic nominee. These are big national within the system undertakings. What do you think is the probability that that's where you're going to end up going in the next phase of your pretty extraordinary story. Thank you again. I do not see these as conflicting spaces to operate in. I've always seen them as collaborative. When I was a state legislator, when I became Democratic leader in the House minority leader of our party, one of the challenges we faced was that we had eight hundred thousand people of color who were not registered to vote in Georgia who were eligible. Those who have been in the legislature long before I got there had been bemo owning these massive numbers three years. My approach was to start the New Georgia Project. So, while as sitting legislator and while the leader of my caucus, I was also an outside agitator who started an organization that it's registered more than four hundred thousand people of color in the state of George. As Democratic leader, I did not see a conflict between those two responsibilities. There were legal issues that I had to be very cognizantve and ways that had to manage my responsibilities, but I do not see being in elected office as a deterrent to being part of a public space. Well it shouldn't be a deterrent, but as a pragmatic matter, just to be we don't have to be super realistic, but we can be mildly realistic. You know, if you listen to all the Democratic presidential candidates now, even those who self conceive as critics of the existing system, their criticism, though in many cases sharp, still comes with a strong aspiration to be at the center of power, you know, to be sitting in the White House and leading crucial national decisions. It's I think it's just the nature running for president. You end up talking like you're in the system, that you're committed to the system, and then although you want to change it, the system basically doesn't need to be fundamentally you're structured. I think that that is not inaccurate, but I think it ignores, or can ignore, the multiple ways you can affect the system before you have that job. And so my approach has been this, I attempt to leverage whichever you know, sort of the commentary about Atlas. You give me a place to stand, and I'm going to try my best to shift the world a little bit, a terrible reduction of it, but that's how I operate. And so for me, the issue has always been you have to create external pathways to making change, because systems are not going to change themselves without external pressure, and so I attempt to create those external pressures. The New Georgia Project did so by rich Strain thousands of voters who had a very dramatic impact on the outcome of elections. Fair Fight and Fair Account will do so by affecting voter protection agencies and attempts to make certain that votes cannot be stolen afforded. And in each of those instances, I've set up organizations where I'm not in charge. I am the chair of the board, I am the chief fundraiser. I participate in strategy, but I'm not the person who does the daily work because I am inside the system and there is a conflict that happens. It's very difficult to dismantle a system that you are deeply embedded in, and so part of my responsibility is to use my inside knowledge to create outside forces and then to populate those forces so that if I move back inside, they can still operate without me. The New Georgia Project is entirely independent now. Fair fight and fair account. Should I stand for another public office, will also quickly erase me from their boards. And that's my job. My job is to be aware enough to know that when you are inside the system, it is disingenuous to say that you're going to wholly deconstruct it. But it is also an opportunity to use what you learn from inside the system to arm the populace to challenge and improve a system from the outside. It's a little daunting to imagine the huge number of different jobs that you actually have created for yourself. We haven't even gotten to author of romance novels, which I promised will come to before the end of our conversation. But when you wake up in the morning, how do you know what you're literally I mean, I mean it's the most prosaic level, like how do you know what you're going to do next? Do you look at your calendar? Do you how do you know which of these many responsibilities is the one that you should start working on that morning? It's order of urgency. Typically, again, I do my best to make certain that there are teams of people who can help me determine where my best value add is. And so my wife is basically at the mercy of a bunch of millennials and a huge en xers who organize my day. So just to get a picture of this, you're kind of the chairman and CEO of Stacy Abram's Social Justice, Inc. And you you know you've got it's a conglomerate with lots of little subparts. And in there are your your millennials, in your handful of gen xers, and they're they're each running their own effectively startups which you started. In each case it's your socialist or political seed capital, and you're weighing in to try to make sure they're all keeping it in order or something like that. Is that am I getting the picture. That's exactly it. And I think it's important because often in social justice movements, culti personality tends to organize around the founder, and the founder serves not only as the creator but also the full crom around which everything circulates, and that, to me is a dangerous position. I am in politics, I am also incredibly human and thus flawed. And anytime a social movement has to adopt or rely on the personality or the foibles of their founder, you're setting yourself up for trouble. So part of my responsibility is to work as assiduously as possible to make myself irrelevant to the long term success of the organization. Can I just say, I mean, you want to run for national office, you want to be have your maximal impact. Cultive personality is what it's all about. I mean, what I'm wondering is when you go out there, as you're doing now, building your I don't want to call it a brand, because I had to test that terminology for public servants, but building the message connected to you and the things that you want to be known for and known for doing. What's your brief description of how you want to be seen by the broader world? Not by your constituents in Georgia who know you well, but by the country. I am an architect of social justice, and that means standing in the spaces where I can be most effective and doing the work that is most needed, where I'm the right person to do the work and it's the right time for that work to be done. So architect of social justice. And is that, you know, not apical consultant. But is that a teeny bit abstract for a factory worker who's lost his job or a mother who's working several jobs and trying to go to night school at the same time. Is architect of social justice concrete enough? The way you have a conversation with a potential constituent begins with meeting them where they are. And so I wouldn't start by saying who I am. I would start by asking what they need and talk then about how my skills, how my architecture skills, how my management skills help me deliver that. But to your point, one of the most difficult parts of running for office is trying to come up with something reductive enough to be a sound bite, but meaningful enough to actually convey your intention. And that's really hard. I don't try. I was slightly a conoclastic in my campaign in part because I do not look like or operate in the way that most traditional politicians do, and that of itself became my brand, which is that I'm much more like you than like them. You do things differently. Yeah, I did, but I also have experienced many of these things. I can talk about criminal justice reform because I have a younger brother who is in and out of jail. I can talk about mental health issues because one of the reasons he finds himself in and out of jail is that he had an undiagnosed mental health disorder and he cannot receive healthcare for it because of his ex offender status and because of the challenges with Southern healthcare delivery. I can talk about debt because I've been in it and I know what it means. And so part of my part of what I think resonates is that I don't attempt to create this reductive line that makes me palatable and acceptable to all people, because the minute you've done that, it is so benign that has no meaning at all. So I think what I hear you saying is that it helps to be a real person, and you're not ashamed of actually being a real person, not at all my whole life. Yeah, and you've been able to speak directly and honestly to people about that, and that is really that has really resonated. And I do think that's hugely important because the approach you described, where you start by meeting the voter, that can work incredibly well at a smaller scale when you can actually meet the voters, but when the scale becomes national, that just becomes extraordinarily difficult. And I think here of someone who's you know, our rough contemporary, a friend of mine and probably a friend of yours too, Corey Booker, who's an extremely successful politician at the one on one or one on small group level. You know, when one meets Corey, one is blown away by his enthusiasm and his charisma and his capacity to connect. And on the national scale, he's had a hard time translating that. I think, really, you know, one in a million kind of personality into something that resonates on the broader level. And it's not for any lack of sincerity. It's just that the medium of trying to reach people all over the country via a television set or a social media account is just really different than being a human being looking somebody in the eyes and interacting with them. I would say that this is a very specific moment in our political history, and we're this a normative election where we were simply arguing about the margins and the shift from one leader on the margins to the next. I would say that Corey would his resonance would be much sharper because we are in this moment of panic and existential fear. I think there's a retrenchment that is happening that doesn't allow for newness and for his brand of personal engagement in this moment. I do not think it's just positive of his long term capacity to demonstrate him. So I think it's less than medium than that moment. That's quite interesting. It is. Yeah, if you watch how people react, how they say they want to react, and how they are telling posters they will react, which are often very different in this moment, It's what I kept hearing, Oh, I like you a lot. I think you're wonderful, but I'm not sure you can be the one to do it. And so there's a lot of i'm not sure happening. And when that is the case, people tend to return to what is the most familiar and most comfortable, and in America, ninety nine point nine percent of the time, that's a white man. I was about to ask you if you think there's some implicit or maybe not so implicit racism in that formulation, and I would also you know, note, I mean Joe Biden's situation as we speak is it's a little it's a little shaky, and Elizabeth Warren has made substantial gains, still white though a woman. I wonder if what you're describing really is essentially somebody saying, well, sure Barack Obama got elected, but right now the only way to beat the white man in the White House is with another white person. I think there's a degree of that. I think there's also just a degree of familiarity. If you have two weapons available to fight back against the beast attacking you, are you going to go with the one that you've tried one or the one that you've tried forty four times? So? Can I then ask you, somewhat undiplomatically, and because sometimes you're willing to be undiplomatic too, what is the answer for the Democratic Party in twenty twenty if it's not to go with the tools that we are familiar with. I mean, what would work the best. And I'm not asking you to name a particular candidate, but I'm asking as a general approach matter, what's the message that you think will work beyond you know, the current president has terrible views on nearly every topic, which is going to be part of any Democrats message. I do not subscribe to the notion that we need to talk about Trump that often. He's going to talk about himself enough, and typically his performance is much stronger than any characterization we could offer to those who are willing to listen. True, there is a group of people for whom he is, he cannot be defeated. And let's acknowledge that we lost because we did not turn out the people who could have elected our person. And the solution is that we have to have a candidate who is clear about their values. You don't have to agree with all of them, but we need to know what they are, who is willing to invest in the actual work of winning elections. And that's the place where I think we have the weakest performance historically but the greatest opportunity when we invest in hard to reach communities. When we invest early and broadly in canvassing, in the mechanics of winning an election, not the ease of television and not the wizardry of digital, but in the hardcore effort of turning out voters, we win and we have to broaden our field. So that's a good argument for Stacey Abrams for vice president, right because whoever the presidential candidate, it is none of them, I will say, is super great at that. You are great at that. So that's an argument that this is an election that can be won in the trenches by turnout. And here you are. You are you know, you are the the social justice architect of turnout. I've been practicing a lot. I don't want I want to be respectful of your time, but I also don't want to let you go without asking you about Selena Montgomery, your alter ego and pen name. How do you, I mean, how do you decide you're going to change the mood, walk away from social justice and start writing romance? And I will say just from a quick plans, not romance that is without some spice. Well, it's a part and parcels who I am. I love writing, I love storytelling, and you know all of my novels sit into the romance genre, but I kill a lot of people. I write about ethnobotanists and cognitive scientists and chemical physicists, so I get to explore all the other things I would have been had I not followed whatever pasta is. I'm on. But I also enjoy just creating universes and worlds where people can lose themselves and learn something and emerge a little happy because two people found each other and tell them love. Well. I hope that Selena Montgomery becomes the fictional vice president and that Stacey Abrahams becomes the actual real world social justice architect of vice presidential candidate. I'm super grateful to you for your time, and thank you so much for such a thoughtful and deep conversation. Well, no, I will say this, this has been delightful. You were one of the three else who's really nice to me as a one l and you have no reason to remember this, but you were very kind to me one day at at Yale, and I remember that fondly and was happy to do this. That's super nice to be you to say, I really I appreciate that tremendously. We'll be right back. Listening again to my conversation with Stacy, a little more than a year after we originally had it, I couldn't help but think that although January sixth, twenty twenty one was a shocking day, a dark day in the history of American democracy, the day when the Capitol was stormed, January fifth, twenty twenty one was an extraordinary, indeed wonderful day for American democracy, a day in which Stacy Abrams's strategy fully paid off, and in which the Democrats flipped two Senate seats in joy having previously won Georgia for Joe Biden in the twenty twenty presidential election. The reason January fifth, twenty twenty one is so historically significant is that it's long been the case that if African Americans in Georgia, who are overwhelmingly Democrats, turned out to vote in large numbers, that constituency would effectively guarantee the election of Democrats to statewide office in that frequently Republican leaning state. The reason that that turnout had historically been lower is a very complicated story, one that inevitably begins in the history of segregation, disenfranchisement, and voters. Segregation and then evolved slowly into more modern forms of the same. Coupled with insufficient ground efforts by Democrats to make sure that African Americans understood that their voices were valued and heard, and turned out to vote more than any other single person. Stacy Abrams was central to shifting democratic efforts in Georgia and to developing a brand new strategy. What this means for the Democratic Party and for American politics is potentially truly profound. Everywhere across the country, African American voters tend to turn out in lower numbers than they might turn out if efforts like those in Georgia were used, and everywhere that that is true, the presence of larger turnout by African American voters could substantially transform the way democratic politics works in the United States. Political strategy always involves imitation, the sincerest form of flattery. Now that Stacy's strategy worked so spectacularly both in the presidential race and the Senate races in Georgia, it is going to be copied. Just a few days after the historic Georgia victory, I read a newspaper article describing how the Stacey Abraham's approach was going to be used for the Boston, Massachusetts mayoral race. Now Boston, Massachusetts is already an overwhelmingly democratic city, but what the people who were speaking in the article meant was that the same approach to getting every vote out and getting every vote counted, especially the votes of voters of color, was going to become the key to winning that race in a city very far from Georgia. We're going to see similar efforts by Democrats across the South, across the Midwest, and potentially even beyond that. Stacy is going to become the go to person to explain how she did it, a process that she described herself to us in the interview. Sure, Stacy started in the trenches founding these organizations that she runs and subsequently running for office. But simultaneously, she also did not treat herself as though she was the only person who could do the work. She created institutions that were self sustaining and put herself much more in the founder chairperson role than in the day to day CEO role. She was the theorist, and indeed, to use the phrase that Stacy herself used, she was the architect. Listening to my conversation with Stacy, I notice to my embarrassment that I was a little skeptical about the formulation social justice architect. Well, boy, was I wrong. Indeed, what Stacy Abrams accomplished in the twenty twenty twenty one election was precisely being an architect of a new form of social justice through her extraordinary voting efforts. Now, let me be clear, the events that took place on January six are events that deserve to be remembered for the outrageousness that they produced. Donald Trump's calling to a crowd to march on the Capitol when he knew the crowd was riled up, when he knew that it contained many people who might be entirely willing to storm the Capitol itself, when he knew that the overall goal was to interfere with accounting of the votes that would have assured that Joe Biden would become president. Those were instances of impeachable conduct. They were high crimes and misdemeanors under the Constitution. By focusing today on Stacy Abrams, I in no way want to downplay the significance of Trump's wrongdoing, nor the appropriateness of Congress taking action, including impeachment if it so chooses to try to hold Trump accountable. That's all the more important because as you hear these words, Donald Trump has just a few days left in his term as president, and in that time he is of course capable of doing still more to interfere with the democratic process, whether he does so or not. But our reason to listen again to Stacy Abrams's interview is to acknowledge that we cannot only be pessimistic and backwards looking when we think of the events of the first part of twenty twenty one. We must also be optimistic and forward looking, and that optimism starts but does not end, with Stacy Abrams. Her efforts are inspiring, and you can be very sure we're going to hear her name a lot in the years to come. One last thing before we go. We could all use a little entertainment right now. Kurt Anderson and Alec Baldwin have teamed up to create a new audiobook called Asta la Vista America, Trump's Farewell Address. It's the perfect deranged finale to a deranged era, and it's available exclusively at a Trump Farewell dot Com for only ninety nine cents. It's possibly the last time we'll hear Alec Baldwin doing Trump and it's memorable. Eventually, maybe we'll remember Baldwin's Trump a lot better than we remember the real guy. By Ostalla Vista America now at a Trump Farewell dot Com. Here's an excerpt. My fellow Americans, Happy New Year. That's right. For a while, you're still free to say Happy New Year like you were free on New Year's Eve, together together and have fantastic parties and hug and sing and kiss without masks. Okay, hope, I gotta or with masks, your choice, especially if you're not immune like me and the First Family. But soon, in March or April or whenever, try going into a restaurant or a store if they're not all shut down already and say Happy Easter. They'll scream at you, kick you out, even if you're wearing a mask. America will be much less great again, My fellow Americans, this is the most important speech I've ever given, the most important in history. Speaking of history, George Washington, I cannot tell a lie, just like me, although I actually could tell lies if I wanted, but I don't. And that's actually why they hate me. The phonies, the radicals, the liberals, the elitis, the fake media, the antifas, because I tell too much truth. But our first president, first forty five, Washington invented what I'm doing now, what many historians call his farewell address. He could have run again one very easily, another term, then again and again and again forever. No rule against it. And back then also elections weren't rigged. In his farewell address, George Washington told America, like I'm doing now, why he decided against staying in Washington, d C. For another four years. No thanks bye, by going home after fighting so hard for freedom, heading south with the first lady, play golf sport of Kings, back to the big beautiful plantation with his own two hundred lifetime personal employees, almost like family, very diverse, like Marlago. As they say, history repeats. So this is my totally voluntary farewell address to you the people. Farewell, hope, like we talked about, farewell for now as far as the White House goes, because never say never. I mean, you know, after the total takeover by the communists, look at that squad over in Congress. I call it a death squad, like in the bad places they come from. Ill Han Cortez, Ayana Ocasio, Rashida Kamala, also Booker. When they're thousands of thugs and bad umbres show up in your suburbs and towns flown in from Detroit and Chicago, plus the antifas from Portland and Seattle, who can blend in look like your own kids, so sneaky, then you'll be saying, sir, we want you back, we need you back right away. Well, don't say your President Trump didn't warn you until next week, when we will be back to you with a fresh twenty twenty one episode. Be careful, be safe, and be well. Deep background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Gencott, our engineer is Martin Gonzalez, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Theme music by Luis Skerra at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Heather Faine, Carlie mcliori, Mackie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah Rfeld. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com. Slashfeld to discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts. Go to bloomberg dot com slash podcasts, and if you liked what you heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is deep background

Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explored the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. A lot of news has happened since I was last in your feed. On January sixth, a mob, encouraged by Donald Trump some would say incited, stormed the Capitol Much later that night, Congress finally certified Joe Biden's presidential victory. Democrats almost immediately began work on impeaching the president for a second time. All this has almost overshadowed huge news out of Georgia. On January fifth, the day before the instance on Capitol Hill, two Democrats flipped Senate seat, giving the Democratic Party control over the upper chamber of Congress fifty fifty, with a tiebreaker going to Vice President Kamala Harris. On that historic day, a lot of people were talking about one woman, Stacy Abrams. Stacy is a politician and activist whose organizing efforts in Georgia played a key role, first in helping Joe Biden win the state and then in delivering the two Senate flips. Now, Stacy Abrams is a household name. In fact, I think she is now the most important activist strategist in US politics since Karl Rove, and she may turn out to be much more important than Rove in the long term. Stacy has been working steadily for years on turning Georgia blue through creating and leading organizations like the New Georgia Project aimed at registering in new voters and Fair Fight aimed at fighting voter suppression. Her reproach is going to become a new paradigm for Democrats all over the country. They're going to focus on registering new voters, on resisting voter suppression, and on getting out the vote, particularly for voters of color, who, for various complicated reasons, have not always turned out in past elections. I spoke to Stacy about a year ago when the presidential race was just heating up, and I'm excited to re share that conversation with you today. It feels like the right time for it. Some background on Stacy Abrahams. In twenty eighteen, she ran for governor of Georgia and very narrowly lost to Brian Kemp, a Republican who was Secretary of State of Georgia at the time, meaning he was the one in charge of overseeing the election Stacy never conceded the race because she said that Kemp had suppressed votes. That experience helped spur her work on voting rights and getting every vote counted. I reached her last October by phone. Hi, this is Stacey Abrams. Hi, Stacey, it's no Effeldman. How are you? I am well? How are you? I'm great? Thank you so much for joining us. If it's okay with you, we'll just dive right in. Sounds good. So I want to begin by asking you about two organizations that you've founded, Fair Fight, which is devoted to fighting voter suppression, and fair count, which is devoted to making sure the census is fair. The fairness theme emerge is very powerfully here, and I just want to begin by asking you, given your long career in public service and as a lawyer, as an entrepreneur, what makes you think that fairness is achievable. I'd like to begin by a thinking about the fact I grew up in the Deep South. I am the daughter of two people who are civil rights activist as teenagers, and my grandparents and all of those who preceded me either live through Jim Crow or the Black Codes, or slavery and so I think of fairness as a continuum. Our responsibility is to constantly move towards the promise of equality. And in each generation of my family's life, progress has been made. It has been slow and plotting and painful and violent, but it has been achievable. And so my responsibility is not simply to see the difficulties that we face, but to remember that in each generation, and opportunity to fight back against these difficulties has been a critical responsibility. And the ultimate goal is not that we will have every scene we desire. The goal is that we will have fairness, and that is my core belief. That's a moving and it's actually even an inspiring answer. You're a lawyer, and I don't say that as a bad word. I'm a lawyer too. You know, I went to this same law school and that you did. People may hold that against us, but I don't. But I want to ask about the balance between law and more direct social activism because I sometimes worry, I mean, I even teach law students for a living, and I sometimes worry that I fall too far into the category of telling them, Look, this social movement generated legal change, and so that's how you know that it's a successful social movement in real time, and then they sort of look at me, at least when they start law school a little skeptically and say, isn't it the other way around? I mean, shouldn't the measure of a law be whether it produced social change rather than the measure of a social movement being whether it generated some some legal outcomes. And I'm wondering how you see the balance. Obviously we need both, but when you think about which comes first, or which needs to be more powerful, or where the emphasis should be, where do you come down. I think they're inherently intertwined. And I think your students are asking smart questions. But I wouldn't say unfair. But it's a more complicated question if you look at my election, For example, my decision on November sixteenth to acknowledge the legal sufficiency of the outcome, recognize that there are laws in place that have created the very process that was used to thwart voters, that those laws have been deemed appropriate by lawmakers. But my refusal to concede the election was that I take exception to the actual laws themselves, that the very presence of those rules that permitted that behavior raises the need to question and in our case overturn those laws and reconstruct those laws. Social movements give voice and power and face to what needs to change. The law gives structure and to the extent possible permanence to the existence of that change. And for me, I've never seen I understand there's a tension, but I've never seen a dichotomy or an order of priority to my participation. My response facility is to be engaged in the social action that we are pursuing through fair fight and fair count. But I am also someone who believes that I need to be part of the lawmaking process because social movements without a voice in the law do not have the longstanding and deep, deeply needed of sex if there isn't something implicated into law that makes it harder to undo or to thwart the intention. I'm really glad you brought up your non concession after the twenty eighteen Georgia governor's race, and I want to use that as you just raised it to try to ask you about a sort of a skeptical question that someone from the outside might ask, and they might say, you know, it comes down to can the system be trusted to change enough to make a difference. So as you say, you recognize the legal sufficiency of the outcome in the sense that you didn't walk into the governor's office and say I'm the governor and ask the Georgia State Police to put you in office. But you didn't conceive because you didn't want to say I lost in a fair fight, because it wasn't a fair fight. And so in that sense, you didn't want to say the words I lost because you didn't lose in some fairness sense. And I guess what I'm wondering is, couldn't someone say, look, that suggests the system is just rigged in a way where it's not going to change, and if that's the case, we need to go outside the system and engage in civil disobedience or other more radical forms of efforts to not just tweak the system through laws and improvements and social activism, but something more fundamental. I would say they're absolutely right, But for me, I have always internalized that it cannot be one or the other, that it must always be this collaboration of challenging the laws as they stand, creating better laws and fighting bad laws, and also engaging people to press the system for the change that needs to happen. Let me ask you about your own personal version of this fight. I mean, you wrote a fantastic autobiography which huge numbers of people all over read. You did a very public response to the state of the Union, which is ordinarily something that a senior legislative figure would have done at the national level. If the New York Times quoted you correctly, they said you were open to serving as vice president if asked for any Democratic nominee. These are big national within the system undertakings. What do you think is the probability that that's where you're going to end up going in the next phase of your pretty extraordinary story. Thank you again. I do not see these as conflicting spaces to operate in. I've always seen them as collaborative. When I was a state legislator, when I became Democratic leader in the House minority leader of our party, one of the challenges we faced was that we had eight hundred thousand people of color who were not registered to vote in Georgia who were eligible. Those who have been in the legislature long before I got there had been bemo owning these massive numbers three years. My approach was to start the New Georgia Project. So, while as sitting legislator and while the leader of my caucus, I was also an outside agitator who started an organization that it's registered more than four hundred thousand people of color in the state of George. As Democratic leader, I did not see a conflict between those two responsibilities. There were legal issues that I had to be very cognizantve and ways that had to manage my responsibilities, but I do not see being in elected office as a deterrent to being part of a public space. Well it shouldn't be a deterrent, but as a pragmatic matter, just to be we don't have to be super realistic, but we can be mildly realistic. You know, if you listen to all the Democratic presidential candidates now, even those who self conceive as critics of the existing system, their criticism, though in many cases sharp, still comes with a strong aspiration to be at the center of power, you know, to be sitting in the White House and leading crucial national decisions. It's I think it's just the nature running for president. You end up talking like you're in the system, that you're committed to the system, and then although you want to change it, the system basically doesn't need to be fundamentally you're structured. I think that that is not inaccurate, but I think it ignores, or can ignore, the multiple ways you can affect the system before you have that job. And so my approach has been this, I attempt to leverage whichever you know, sort of the commentary about Atlas. You give me a place to stand, and I'm going to try my best to shift the world a little bit, a terrible reduction of it, but that's how I operate. And so for me, the issue has always been you have to create external pathways to making change, because systems are not going to change themselves without external pressure, and so I attempt to create those external pressures. The New Georgia Project did so by rich Strain thousands of voters who had a very dramatic impact on the outcome of elections. Fair Fight and Fair Account will do so by affecting voter protection agencies and attempts to make certain that votes cannot be stolen afforded. And in each of those instances, I've set up organizations where I'm not in charge. I am the chair of the board, I am the chief fundraiser. I participate in strategy, but I'm not the person who does the daily work because I am inside the system and there is a conflict that happens. It's very difficult to dismantle a system that you are deeply embedded in, and so part of my responsibility is to use my inside knowledge to create outside forces and then to populate those forces so that if I move back inside, they can still operate without me. The New Georgia Project is entirely independent now. Fair fight and fair account. Should I stand for another public office, will also quickly erase me from their boards. And that's my job. My job is to be aware enough to know that when you are inside the system, it is disingenuous to say that you're going to wholly deconstruct it. But it is also an opportunity to use what you learn from inside the system to arm the populace to challenge and improve a system from the outside. It's a little daunting to imagine the huge number of different jobs that you actually have created for yourself. We haven't even gotten to author of romance novels, which I promised will come to before the end of our conversation. But when you wake up in the morning, how do you know what you're literally I mean, I mean it's the most prosaic level, like how do you know what you're going to do next? Do you look at your calendar? Do you how do you know which of these many responsibilities is the one that you should start working on that morning? It's order of urgency. Typically, again, I do my best to make certain that there are teams of people who can help me determine where my best value add is. And so my wife is basically at the mercy of a bunch of millennials and a huge en xers who organize my day. So just to get a picture of this, you're kind of the chairman and CEO of Stacy Abram's Social Justice, Inc. And you you know you've got it's a conglomerate with lots of little subparts. And in there are your your millennials, in your handful of gen xers, and they're they're each running their own effectively startups which you started. In each case it's your socialist or political seed capital, and you're weighing in to try to make sure they're all keeping it in order or something like that. Is that am I getting the picture. That's exactly it. And I think it's important because often in social justice movements, culti personality tends to organize around the founder, and the founder serves not only as the creator but also the full crom around which everything circulates, and that, to me is a dangerous position. I am in politics, I am also incredibly human and thus flawed. And anytime a social movement has to adopt or rely on the personality or the foibles of their founder, you're setting yourself up for trouble. So part of my responsibility is to work as assiduously as possible to make myself irrelevant to the long term success of the organization. Can I just say, I mean, you want to run for national office, you want to be have your maximal impact. Cultive personality is what it's all about. I mean, what I'm wondering is when you go out there, as you're doing now, building your I don't want to call it a brand, because I had to test that terminology for public servants, but building the message connected to you and the things that you want to be known for and known for doing. What's your brief description of how you want to be seen by the broader world? Not by your constituents in Georgia who know you well, but by the country. I am an architect of social justice, and that means standing in the spaces where I can be most effective and doing the work that is most needed, where I'm the right person to do the work and it's the right time for that work to be done. So architect of social justice. And is that, you know, not apical consultant. But is that a teeny bit abstract for a factory worker who's lost his job or a mother who's working several jobs and trying to go to night school at the same time. Is architect of social justice concrete enough? The way you have a conversation with a potential constituent begins with meeting them where they are. And so I wouldn't start by saying who I am. I would start by asking what they need and talk then about how my skills, how my architecture skills, how my management skills help me deliver that. But to your point, one of the most difficult parts of running for office is trying to come up with something reductive enough to be a sound bite, but meaningful enough to actually convey your intention. And that's really hard. I don't try. I was slightly a conoclastic in my campaign in part because I do not look like or operate in the way that most traditional politicians do, and that of itself became my brand, which is that I'm much more like you than like them. You do things differently. Yeah, I did, but I also have experienced many of these things. I can talk about criminal justice reform because I have a younger brother who is in and out of jail. I can talk about mental health issues because one of the reasons he finds himself in and out of jail is that he had an undiagnosed mental health disorder and he cannot receive healthcare for it because of his ex offender status and because of the challenges with Southern healthcare delivery. I can talk about debt because I've been in it and I know what it means. And so part of my part of what I think resonates is that I don't attempt to create this reductive line that makes me palatable and acceptable to all people, because the minute you've done that, it is so benign that has no meaning at all. So I think what I hear you saying is that it helps to be a real person, and you're not ashamed of actually being a real person, not at all my whole life. Yeah, and you've been able to speak directly and honestly to people about that, and that is really that has really resonated. And I do think that's hugely important because the approach you described, where you start by meeting the voter, that can work incredibly well at a smaller scale when you can actually meet the voters, but when the scale becomes national, that just becomes extraordinarily difficult. And I think here of someone who's you know, our rough contemporary, a friend of mine and probably a friend of yours too, Corey Booker, who's an extremely successful politician at the one on one or one on small group level. You know, when one meets Corey, one is blown away by his enthusiasm and his charisma and his capacity to connect. And on the national scale, he's had a hard time translating that. I think, really, you know, one in a million kind of personality into something that resonates on the broader level. And it's not for any lack of sincerity. It's just that the medium of trying to reach people all over the country via a television set or a social media account is just really different than being a human being looking somebody in the eyes and interacting with them. I would say that this is a very specific moment in our political history, and we're this a normative election where we were simply arguing about the margins and the shift from one leader on the margins to the next. I would say that Corey would his resonance would be much sharper because we are in this moment of panic and existential fear. I think there's a retrenchment that is happening that doesn't allow for newness and for his brand of personal engagement in this moment. I do not think it's just positive of his long term capacity to demonstrate him. So I think it's less than medium than that moment. That's quite interesting. It is. Yeah, if you watch how people react, how they say they want to react, and how they are telling posters they will react, which are often very different in this moment, It's what I kept hearing, Oh, I like you a lot. I think you're wonderful, but I'm not sure you can be the one to do it. And so there's a lot of i'm not sure happening. And when that is the case, people tend to return to what is the most familiar and most comfortable, and in America, ninety nine point nine percent of the time, that's a white man. I was about to ask you if you think there's some implicit or maybe not so implicit racism in that formulation, and I would also you know, note, I mean Joe Biden's situation as we speak is it's a little it's a little shaky, and Elizabeth Warren has made substantial gains, still white though a woman. I wonder if what you're describing really is essentially somebody saying, well, sure Barack Obama got elected, but right now the only way to beat the white man in the White House is with another white person. I think there's a degree of that. I think there's also just a degree of familiarity. If you have two weapons available to fight back against the beast attacking you, are you going to go with the one that you've tried one or the one that you've tried forty four times? So? Can I then ask you, somewhat undiplomatically, and because sometimes you're willing to be undiplomatic too, what is the answer for the Democratic Party in twenty twenty if it's not to go with the tools that we are familiar with. I mean, what would work the best. And I'm not asking you to name a particular candidate, but I'm asking as a general approach matter, what's the message that you think will work beyond you know, the current president has terrible views on nearly every topic, which is going to be part of any Democrats message. I do not subscribe to the notion that we need to talk about Trump that often. He's going to talk about himself enough, and typically his performance is much stronger than any characterization we could offer to those who are willing to listen. True, there is a group of people for whom he is, he cannot be defeated. And let's acknowledge that we lost because we did not turn out the people who could have elected our person. And the solution is that we have to have a candidate who is clear about their values. You don't have to agree with all of them, but we need to know what they are, who is willing to invest in the actual work of winning elections. And that's the place where I think we have the weakest performance historically but the greatest opportunity when we invest in hard to reach communities. When we invest early and broadly in canvassing, in the mechanics of winning an election, not the ease of television and not the wizardry of digital, but in the hardcore effort of turning out voters, we win and we have to broaden our field. So that's a good argument for Stacey Abrams for vice president, right because whoever the presidential candidate, it is none of them, I will say, is super great at that. You are great at that. So that's an argument that this is an election that can be won in the trenches by turnout. And here you are. You are you know, you are the the social justice architect of turnout. I've been practicing a lot. I don't want I want to be respectful of your time, but I also don't want to let you go without asking you about Selena Montgomery, your alter ego and pen name. How do you, I mean, how do you decide you're going to change the mood, walk away from social justice and start writing romance? And I will say just from a quick plans, not romance that is without some spice. Well, it's a part and parcels who I am. I love writing, I love storytelling, and you know all of my novels sit into the romance genre, but I kill a lot of people. I write about ethnobotanists and cognitive scientists and chemical physicists, so I get to explore all the other things I would have been had I not followed whatever pasta is. I'm on. But I also enjoy just creating universes and worlds where people can lose themselves and learn something and emerge a little happy because two people found each other and tell them love. Well. I hope that Selena Montgomery becomes the fictional vice president and that Stacey Abrahams becomes the actual real world social justice architect of vice presidential candidate. I'm super grateful to you for your time, and thank you so much for such a thoughtful and deep conversation. Well, no, I will say this, this has been delightful. You were one of the three else who's really nice to me as a one l and you have no reason to remember this, but you were very kind to me one day at at Yale, and I remember that fondly and was happy to do this. That's super nice to be you to say, I really I appreciate that tremendously. We'll be right back. Listening again to my conversation with Stacy, a little more than a year after we originally had it, I couldn't help but think that although January sixth, twenty twenty one was a shocking day, a dark day in the history of American democracy, the day when the Capitol was stormed, January fifth, twenty twenty one was an extraordinary, indeed wonderful day for American democracy, a day in which Stacy Abrams's strategy fully paid off, and in which the Democrats flipped two Senate seats in joy having previously won Georgia for Joe Biden in the twenty twenty presidential election. The reason January fifth, twenty twenty one is so historically significant is that it's long been the case that if African Americans in Georgia, who are overwhelmingly Democrats, turned out to vote in large numbers, that constituency would effectively guarantee the election of Democrats to statewide office in that frequently Republican leaning state. The reason that that turnout had historically been lower is a very complicated story, one that inevitably begins in the history of segregation, disenfranchisement, and voters. Segregation and then evolved slowly into more modern forms of the same. Coupled with insufficient ground efforts by Democrats to make sure that African Americans understood that their voices were valued and heard, and turned out to vote more than any other single person. Stacy Abrams was central to shifting democratic efforts in Georgia and to developing a brand new strategy. What this means for the Democratic Party and for American politics is potentially truly profound. Everywhere across the country, African American voters tend to turn out in lower numbers than they might turn out if efforts like those in Georgia were used, and everywhere that that is true, the presence of larger turnout by African American voters could substantially transform the way democratic politics works in the United States. Political strategy always involves imitation, the sincerest form of flattery. Now that Stacy's strategy worked so spectacularly both in the presidential race and the Senate races in Georgia, it is going to be copied. Just a few days after the historic Georgia victory, I read a newspaper article describing how the Stacey Abraham's approach was going to be used for the Boston, Massachusetts mayoral race. Now Boston, Massachusetts is already an overwhelmingly democratic city, but what the people who were speaking in the article meant was that the same approach to getting every vote out and getting every vote counted, especially the votes of voters of color, was going to become the key to winning that race in a city very far from Georgia. We're going to see similar efforts by Democrats across the South, across the Midwest, and potentially even beyond that. Stacy is going to become the go to person to explain how she did it, a process that she described herself to us in the interview. Sure, Stacy started in the trenches founding these organizations that she runs and subsequently running for office. But simultaneously, she also did not treat herself as though she was the only person who could do the work. She created institutions that were self sustaining and put herself much more in the founder chairperson role than in the day to day CEO role. She was the theorist, and indeed, to use the phrase that Stacy herself used, she was the architect. Listening to my conversation with Stacy, I notice to my embarrassment that I was a little skeptical about the formulation social justice architect. Well, boy, was I wrong. Indeed, what Stacy Abrams accomplished in the twenty twenty twenty one election was precisely being an architect of a new form of social justice through her extraordinary voting efforts. Now, let me be clear, the events that took place on January six are events that deserve to be remembered for the outrageousness that they produced. Donald Trump's calling to a crowd to march on the Capitol when he knew the crowd was riled up, when he knew that it contained many people who might be entirely willing to storm the Capitol itself, when he knew that the overall goal was to interfere with accounting of the votes that would have assured that Joe Biden would become president. Those were instances of impeachable conduct. They were high crimes and misdemeanors under the Constitution. By focusing today on Stacy Abrams, I in no way want to downplay the significance of Trump's wrongdoing, nor the appropriateness of Congress taking action, including impeachment if it so chooses to try to hold Trump accountable. That's all the more important because as you hear these words, Donald Trump has just a few days left in his term as president, and in that time he is of course capable of doing still more to interfere with the democratic process, whether he does so or not. But our reason to listen again to Stacy Abrams's interview is to acknowledge that we cannot only be pessimistic and backwards looking when we think of the events of the first part of twenty twenty one. We must also be optimistic and forward looking, and that optimism starts but does not end, with Stacy Abrams. Her efforts are inspiring, and you can be very sure we're going to hear her name a lot in the years to come. One last thing before we go. We could all use a little entertainment right now. Kurt Anderson and Alec Baldwin have teamed up to create a new audiobook called Asta la Vista America, Trump's Farewell Address. It's the perfect deranged finale to a deranged era, and it's available exclusively at a Trump Farewell dot Com for only ninety nine cents. It's possibly the last time we'll hear Alec Baldwin doing Trump and it's memorable. Eventually, maybe we'll remember Baldwin's Trump a lot better than we remember the real guy. By Ostalla Vista America now at a Trump Farewell dot Com. Here's an excerpt. My fellow Americans, Happy New Year. That's right. For a while, you're still free to say Happy New Year like you were free on New Year's Eve, together together and have fantastic parties and hug and sing and kiss without masks. Okay, hope, I gotta or with masks, your choice, especially if you're not immune like me and the First Family. But soon, in March or April or whenever, try going into a restaurant or a store if they're not all shut down already and say Happy Easter. They'll scream at you, kick you out, even if you're wearing a mask. America will be much less great again, My fellow Americans, this is the most important speech I've ever given, the most important in history. Speaking of history, George Washington, I cannot tell a lie, just like me, although I actually could tell lies if I wanted, but I don't. And that's actually why they hate me. The phonies, the radicals, the liberals, the elitis, the fake media, the antifas, because I tell too much truth. But our first president, first forty five, Washington invented what I'm doing now, what many historians call his farewell address. He could have run again one very easily, another term, then again and again and again forever. No rule against it. And back then also elections weren't rigged. In his farewell address, George Washington told America, like I'm doing now, why he decided against staying in Washington, d C. For another four years. No thanks bye, by going home after fighting so hard for freedom, heading south with the first lady, play golf sport of Kings, back to the big beautiful plantation with his own two hundred lifetime personal employees, almost like family, very diverse, like Marlago. As they say, history repeats. So this is my totally voluntary farewell address to you the people. Farewell, hope, like we talked about, farewell for now as far as the White House goes, because never say never. I mean, you know, after the total takeover by the communists, look at that squad over in Congress. I call it a death squad, like in the bad places they come from. Ill Han Cortez, Ayana Ocasio, Rashida Kamala, also Booker. When they're thousands of thugs and bad umbres show up in your suburbs and towns flown in from Detroit and Chicago, plus the antifas from Portland and Seattle, who can blend in look like your own kids, so sneaky, then you'll be saying, sir, we want you back, we need you back right away. Well, don't say your President Trump didn't warn you until next week, when we will be back to you with a fresh twenty twenty one episode. Be careful, be safe, and be well. Deep background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Gencott, our engineer is Martin Gonzalez, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Theme music by Luis Skerra at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Heather Faine, Carlie mcliori, Mackie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah Rfeld. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com. Slashfeld to discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts. Go to bloomberg dot com slash podcasts, and if you liked what you heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is deep background