Stacey Abrams

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

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Somebody call action.

Yeah.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Welcome to The Ticket.

I'm Isaac Dover.

Well, the Democrats have their candidate.

Joe Biden will face Donald Trump this November.

So now, two big questions are.

One, how will we run an election in a pandemic?

And two,

who will be the name under Joe Biden's on the ballot?

Well, for this episode of the show, I spoke with someone who hopes to have the answer for both.

Stacey Abrams is a name you've probably heard before.

She's been a voting rights activist and Georgia politician for years, but she's best known for her gubernatorial run in 2018.

She built a uniquely impressive operation to register new voters and turn them out.

Her opponent, though, was then Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the official in charge of that very election.

And voting access turned out to be decisive.

Abrams' operation led to a big jump in Democratic votes.

But Kemp had also led a spike in voter purges, removing over 100,000 Georgians who hadn't voted in recent elections.

Abrams lost by around 50,000 votes and called the purge a use it or lose it scheme.

And Kemp is now the governor.

After her defeat, Abrams founded Fairfight, a national organizing group that works for fair elections.

That's been followed by Fair Count, which is all about getting an accurate and representative census.

And then, late last year, Abrams launched the Southern Economic Advancement Project that promotes equitable economic and social policy across the South.

Besides her activism, Abrams is also a romance novelist and a Star Trek nerd, so she's not without ways to fill her time while stuck at home.

But we got a moment to talk with her in the middle of it.

Take a listen.

Stacey Abrams, thanks for joining us on the ticket via Zoom.

Glad to be here.

Thank you you for having me.

So you're a policy wonk, you're a Star Trek enthusiast, you're a romance novel writer.

Which is the best way to spend self-isolation time?

Is it the policy and just throwing yourself into that, or is it catching up on old episodes of Star Trek or romance novel?

Well, I'm doing all of the above.

I spend, you know, I wake up, I get to the first Zoom call of the day.

do the writing that needs to be done and the research and the reviews, but I do have a hard stop stop usually around eight o'clock i catch up on some television show i desperately need to watch and then i get myself a good book and start it all over again the next day so i i don't believe in picking and choosing i think you should find ways to get it all in there

you um

have said your line is that you as a black southern democrat always expect the worst uh so

we are it seems like in some level of a

uh

well, several crises, but an electoral crisis, a democracy crisis.

Are you not surprised to see us in that situation when we're thinking about the voting this year and the voting going into the fall?

Well, to clarify, what I say is, I'm an ameliorist.

I think the glass is half full, but probably poisoned.

And I think what we are seeing.

That's the more optimistic version of what I just said.

Well, but

I think it's an important clarification for this reason.

Yes, I think that what we saw happen in Wisconsin, what we are seeing from the president, his denial of access to the safest, most accessible way to vote for most Americans, that's the poison in our process.

But I have hope because we are seeing bipartisan support.

of vote by mail.

We are seeing, because of the work we've been able to do across these 18 states this year, we have seen the ability to build capacity to fight back against the poison of voter suppression that we know is to come.

Democrats have to understand that this is

an inevitability, but I think Americans need to understand that it's also something we can fight back against.

Was Wisconsin the worst it could have been?

I think it is hard to imagine how more egregious you could be than to tell people,

one, who are facing the ravages of a disease that is exacerbated by a human contact, that the only way they could participate in the future of their lives is to risk their lives.

I think what we saw from the Supreme Court and their refusal to block this

despicable act was a dereliction of duty that is unconscionable.

But I also think what we saw was just the number of people who wanted to find a way to participate despite the harm and the risk to themselves.

What would you have told people to do?

There are people in Wisconsin, if it were

the morning of the primary,

what would you have said to them to do?

I'll say it this way.

I was born in Wisconsin.

I still have family there.

My family is originally from Mississippi, and my parents were involved in the civil rights movement.

I'm committed to this voting rights fight, not because voting itself is an act that we have to protect, but because of what voting represents.

It is the only power we have in a democracy to hire those who are in charge of our lives.

And when you look at the debacle that has been led by the current employees of our states and our nation, I would be hard pressed to tell someone, you can skip this one, that it'll get better anyway because lives are changed by who is in charge and the reality is it should be a false question but when it is not a false question i would tell folks that if they had not had a chance to submit their absentee ballots if they asked me what i would have done i would have gone to get in line but i would have told anyone who was exceptionally vulnerable to stay home but anyone who had the ability to safely distance and to protect themselves to go out because the reality is this is not a one-off.

COVID-19 is an example of what's to come.

As we become more globalized, diseases don't know borders.

And so we have to have a democracy that is resilient and that understands that.

And so it would have been a difficult decision that I would have asked everyone to search their conscience and search their health.

But we needed people to vote because their lives

today and tomorrow are in

Voting by mail is the most obvious solution that people who are trying to change what is going on and how voting is done have talked about.

But is that, that's not a complete answer, it would seem for a couple of reasons.

What else would you say needs to be part of that answer

for how voting needs to change?

Well, here's what I always say.

We should think about this as

with the goal being to have the safest, most accessible voting.

And that means you want to diminish the number of people who have to be in line, but you have to recognize that there are going to be people who have to go inside, who have to go into a polling place for the disabled, for those who face displacement because of the current economic crisis.

or the persistent economic crisis that comes with poverty.

There are some who are homeless, some who are housing unstable.

They're going to be people who have no choice but to be in line.

There are those who have language barriers, who need to be

in the polling place.

And so our mission is to diminish the number of people who have to be in that line.

Voting by mail is the safest way to diminish that number because if you vote from home, you don't have to get in that line.

And if you're voting from home, you have to have the safeguards that allow you to cast the ballot.

and allow that ballot to be counted.

And so this notion that it is all vote by mail or nothing is wrong.

There are some states that have matured to that state, but they've also put in place mechanisms to allow all vote by mail.

Most states aren't there, and we shouldn't try to force them to be there by November.

But long term, we need to make certain that voting by mail and voting from home is as accessible as possible to as many people as possible.

If we're going to have a major influx of mailed ballots, we're going to need a whole system in place and a system that people can trust.

Isn't that more than

might be possible in the middle of this crisis?

No.

Every single state in the nation has some form of vote by mail.

The issue is the scale at which that process is used and the complexity of the rules around that system.

Most of the complexities exist in order to block people from accessing the system.

And so the first order of priority has to be making it as accessible as possible to as many people as possible.

That can be done, especially if we start working in April for a November election.

Number two, because that exists in every single state, it's a question of scale.

And that is why it's so critical to get the resources in place from the federal government to fund states for doing this work.

Those dollars help solve the scale problem almost exclusively in part because it is about hiring more people to do this work but there is a way to hire people safely to process these ballots if we prepare for it.

Before I ran for office I was the deputy city attorney for the city of Atlanta and before that I had you know I worked as a program analyst for the Office of Management and Budget.

I've worked in multiple bureaucracies.

Bureaucracies can adapt, but they do not adapt quickly.

But they adapt best when they are resourced for that goal and where you have an infrastructure already in place.

And in the United States, we have an infrastructure for vote by mail.

We simply have to have the resources to make it accessible.

And I want to push back on one piece.

This isn't about making it easy.

This is about making it safe and accessible because we live in a nation that is governed by the people.

And if the people cannot participate in their governance, we are shifting towards authoritarianism.

And so it is the highest priority for me and for others who believe in our democracy to ensure that the people who should be making the decisions about the next four, the next 10 years of our lives are duly elected for that purpose and that we don't allow a pandemic to rob us of our fundamental and constitutional obligations to elect our leaders.

The space that you guys are occupying with Fairfight as compared to the other organizations that are involved in this struggle to change voting laws or or change voting accessibility.

Where do you see now in the midst of this reality that we're working in with the pandemic?

We, for the first time in, to our knowledge, for the first time in the history of the Democratic Party, we have set up in these states these dense and

very capable resources.

to protect the right to vote in these states.

That had not happened.

A lot of organizations for years have had to try to jerry-rig a solution or try to pour in resources where they anticipated problems to be, which meant often that you were playing whack-a-mole with your solutions.

What we have done with Fair Fight 2020 is ensure that in each of those states, we know what the challenges are.

We anticipated them early.

We launched in August of 2019 because we knew that using the presidential primaries as testing models would help us understand what was happening.

Because the reality is voter suppression isn't a general election problem.

It is a systemic issue, which means it appears in both general elections and primaries.

We just typically don't notice them in primaries because all of our people are going to be, we may not like the person who wins, but we never doubt that someone in our party is going to get it.

And we tend to ignore what it looks like.

But by and large, we have been able to use the preparation for and the execution of presidential primaries to understand what is to come in November.

And let's be clear, I have a closer understanding of the chaos of voter suppression in an election than most people do.

What happened in your race is you feel like there was some inappropriate behavior there that may have affected the results.

And you're not the only person who feels that way, I should be clear, right?

When you ran for governor in 2018, you were running against the sitting Secretary of State, who was the Republican Republican nominee, Brian Kemp, who is now the governor, who was elected.

You feel like that was a, there are questions of legitimacy about that election.

And again, there are a number of presidential candidates talk about,

spent the last year citing you, talking about how they feel like you are the rightful governor of Georgia.

And when we have that baked in and when those questions were obviously being raised

by you and others, not just about your race, but about other races.

How do we get people to the place of trust about us?

And it's what I tried to do in November of 2018.

I acknowledged the legal sufficiency of the outcome, but I challenged the rules that permitted it to be conducted in the way it was conducted.

Because we live in a nation of law.

And we live in a nation where trust is important, but we have always believed that trust is not an excuse for ignorance or for believing that everything was done the way it should be.

And so

I'm going to quote a Republican, trust but verify.

I

know that our democratic system works, but I also know our democratic system has to be held to the highest standard.

And my obligation and the work I have committed myself to has been about making sure we get better at what we failed at, but that we also continue to trust in this being the premier system of how we operate a government and how we work together as a society.

And so you can believe that the outcome of the election can be legitimate, but we have to work to make it so.

And we can't simply presume that every actor is a good actor, especially for young people, especially for people of color.

We have to do more.

And one of the ways we do that, one of the ways we legitimize this election is by making certain we expand access because we recognize that the traditional method will not work.

And in order to achieve our outcomes in November, as someone who has run both nonprofits, for-profits, and helped manage in the public sector, you've got to start planning now to make it work in November.

But ultimately, it can work if we do our job.

And we have to know it's not going to be easy.

That means we have to educate our voters and we have to transition as many of them as possible into the understanding that voting by mail is safe and secure.

Because there are populations that simply don't trust the system because they have actually been harmed by the system.

And our responsibility is to renew their trust.

If I can trust in the system given what happened to me, I don't trust that everything that happened is right, but I trust the fundamentals of the system, which is why I'm trying to fix it as opposed to dismantle it.

You're doing organizing online, tax emails, it's shifted like a lot of people have.

That's different from campaigning.

We see with how Joe Biden is struggling with this

and how Bernie Sanders was in the last couple of weeks of his campaign to

do the kind of traditional campaigning things that to reach voters, to not be sort of swamped by the conversation that's going on without them.

When you think about going and convincing people over the next couple of months

to move in the direction you want them to move.

Is it going to be hard to do that

with these restrictions around you?

Our voters are going to need motivation like never before, because we're asking them to overcome unprecedented obstacles and we're going to have to adapt.

But one of the ways I was successful in building a brand new coalition in Georgia, an unprecedented coalition that brought together and increased with the highest increase of voters of color of any state in the nation, But I also increased white participation.

And we did it by understanding that you had to run a different kind of campaign.

It's about building those social media resources.

It's about having the kind of direct mail campaigns, but changing the way the mail speaks to voters.

It's about phone and text campaigns, making sure it's not just candidates, but it's the volunteers that you have.

It's peer-to-peer campaigns.

It's celebrity engagement.

We did all of the above and it worked.

We turned out three quarters of a million people who had not participated before in midterm elections and I'm confident we can do this but we have to do it in a way that is seen as both authentic and again I use this word a lot but accessible.

People will vote if they're motivated if they believe that the fear they have can be outweighed by the hope and opportunity of action.

People have three choices in election.

vote for you, vote for your opponent, or don't vote.

And we cannot disregard the don't vote contingent because that's part of what happened in 2016.

So my exhortation to folks up and down the ballot is that we have to adapt to the moment and to the people.

We can't expect the people to simply come to us because they need us.

That's not how government works.

That's not how life works.

We are responsible for reaching them.

And the conversation we are going to have across this country in November is which nation do we want to be?

Do we want to be a nation that when we are all in the midst of crisis, we come together and we try to make sure the next crisis doesn't fracture us further?

Or do we say that it's every person for him or herself and we're not responsible, which is the antithesis of what our nation was built on?

I believe we will make the right choice, and I believe that that choice can be made in a legitimate election if we do our work now.

We're going to take a short break.

When we come back, I asked Abrams about possibly being Joe Biden's running mate.

And unlike most potential VPs, she isn't coy at all.

She gives a very direct pitch on why she thinks she'd be the woman for the job.

Trip planner by Expedia.

You were made to outdo your holiday,

your hammocking,

and your pooling.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.

The campaigning question could end up involving you

because

we should just

talk about it directly, right?

You said

about being Joe Biden's running mate.

You'd be honored to be picked.

You've also said, of course, you want it, but that you're not campaigning for it.

So

when's the last time you talked to Joe Biden?

I've spoken to him recently.

Do you get the sense that he would be interested in having you as his partner in in government?

My responsibility has been to ensure that no matter who the nominee is, that we can win this election.

And I'm proud of the work I've done.

And not just work I've done in the last year, but the work I've been doing for the last 20 years.

I have been focused on voting rights and civic engagement since I was 18.

And I have

dedicated my professional life and my public life to trying to always serve communities and build infrastructures to serve those communities.

Joe Biden is going to pick who he picks and I am privileged to be in the conversation.

I've been more open than most because part of my operating model is

I know where I sit and it is disingenuous and a disservice to women, to people of color, and to women of color for me to be dismissive of or coy about where I would like to serve.

It is my version of

being as you can't be what you cannot see and people won't reach for things they don't believe are possible.

But that's not the same as telling the VP who he should pick.

My job is to do the work I know how to do.

He had a very good and continues to have a very good personal dynamic of Barack Obama and has talked about that as an important piece of it.

It's something that they brought into their partnership in the administration and then which which grew a lot over the years that they served together.

So

just in terms of personal dynamics,

how is it between you and Joe Biden?

I can speak for me.

I think the world of the vision is fair.

I'll ask him what he thinks of you.

I think the world of the vice president.

I have always been very

taken by his commitment to community, his

authentic engagement of people and their challenges.

And

my

hope is that no matter who he picks as a running mate, I will be part of making him the next president of the United States.

I know there have been questions about whether I'm qualified to be that person, and I think I have a set of skills that have been grown not necessarily in the halls of Washington, but have been grown by having to position

and privileged communities that are usually left out of conversations.

I've built organizations and I've run small businesses and I've done the work of helping lift up voices that are usually either left out of commerce or left out of community and left out of politics.

But I've also built relationships across the aisle and across the country that I think could be very beneficial.

All of which is to say he's going to make the choice based on what he believes and what he needs.

But I have the deepest admiration for him and I look forward to watching him become president of the United States and working to make it so.

Can we hit on that qualifications question just a little bit more?

Because I think that

you have been in the running mate conversation for long before we had any idea who the nominee was going to be.

And for as long as that's been happening, people have,

I think fairly, because it's a big job and thinking about resumes of all the people involved, looked at your resume and said, okay, she's a lot of people find you very impressive.

And obviously, there were a lot of democrats who were inspired by the way that you ran in 2018 and seemed to connect with you but

politically the jobs that you have held are the one that you hold now leading these organizations running for governor in 2018 and you were the minority leader of the state house in Georgia so

That was to some people reason to say, hey, she's not for the job anyway.

Then to think about you being paired with Joe Biden, there are people who say, Well, you know, you'd need somebody who'd be ready to step in no matter what.

Although, of course, that would be true of any vice president, no matter what.

But I think within the pandemic, within this like major government shift and government action that's going on,

maybe people will say even more so, like, don't we need a qualified, steady, government-experienced person

and look at your resume and say,

you know, she's great, but does she have what meets the moment?

What would you say to them?

I would say, first of all, we have to win the election.

And I would point out that I ran the most successful campaign to engage the communities we need to build the broadest coalition necessary in 2020.

Because what we are going to see on the ground, as you ably pointed out, is that this is going to be a campaign unlike anything that's been run before.

And I built the broadest coalition and ran the most extensive ground game in modern politics outside of 2008.

If you look at what we were able to accomplish in Georgia, the growth of the numbers and the composition of the voters, I would put my capacity to win an election as the VP running mate alongside anyone.

And then there's the actual work of government.

I have a master's degree in public policy.

I have a law degree with a focus on tax policy from the University of Texas and from Yale Law School.

I've not only been elected to office, I've actually worked in the execution of office.

I'm the only person I know of that's in this conversation who has successfully run multi-million dollar nonprofits, for-profits, and have led teams at the state and the local level.

Because fundamentally, if you have ever been a manager, it is not simply about the title that preceded the person.

It's about their skill, their temperament, and their ability to scale their capacity.

And when faced with not having the job of governor, but still seeing the deep need to address the issues of voter suppression, of understanding the complexity of the U.S.

Census and its impact on not only our fiscal future, but our political future, as well as dealing with the policy initiatives, I've created a constellation of organizations that may have begun in Georgia, but are operating across the country right now.

And I've done that without the institutional support that comes with being in an official capacity.

And so what I would say is that we need to have a fairly protein look at what leadership and experience means.

It's not simply the title before your name, it's the work that you have done.

And I would put my CV against anyone else's CV in terms of seeing not only what I was called to do, but what I accomplished and my ability to scale that.

Because the reality is until you've been vice president, no one has ever done a job that large.

Right.

And there were questions about Joe Biden's ability to turn people out long before he won the nomination, long before coronavirus was part of our lives.

I mean, I spent a year and a half on the campaign trail going to events where he would turn out 100 people and other candidates who obviously did not win the nomination were turning out 1,000 people not very far away like on the same day.

And that worry has always dogged Biden in this race that he won't be able to get people enthusiastic and has dogged him into now what's going on with the added worries, as you say, of like what's going on in the pandemic.

Do you think that he needs the help

getting people jazzed?

I think that Vice President Biden is an extraordinary candidate, but I believe that campaigns require

a broadening of capacity simply because one person can't do everything in a campaign.

That's why you have running mates, not simply for the operation of government, but also for victory, deployment.

That's why you have surrogates and VP is the ultimate surrogate.

I have tripled turnout among Latino and Asian Pacific Islanders.

So my capacity is not simply to bolster participation among African Americans, although I did that by 40% and increased the number of black voters to the highest level in Georgia history, but I also increased Latino and Asian voters to the highest level in Georgia history.

I increased youth participation rates by 139%

and I brought along white voters, especially white suburban women who had not previously voted for Democrats.

I got the highest white participation rate since Bill Clinton.

And my capacity to be a bridge is I think

fairly unique in that I am supported both by progressives, by people of color, and by those who understand that sometimes the vision we have has to meet the reality of where we are, which is why I was a very successful minority leader in getting things actually done.

And so I would say that Joe Biden deserves to have a running mate who can amplify what he does and can operate as a surrogate who can bring together communities.

that will vote for him.

And we have to do that in a way that we have never done before and to an extent that I hope we don't misread because

yes, people are frightened and yes, people are disappointed, but there's always the option of simply trying to ride it out.

And we can't survive that as Democrats.

We have the responsibility to actually boost turnout so that we can guarantee victory up and down the ballot and for the future of our country.

I feel like you put some thought into how these numbers might go.

Should you ever be presenting them in, let's say, some kind of job or two.

I will tell you, I think you have heard me before.

I tend to believe data is a critical piece, but data has to have heart.

So I try to put the two together, and that is only vaguely a reference to Star Trek.

I am sure I will disappoint you in saying that I have not caught up with the new Picard series, which I'm sure you are

fully up to date on.

I am not.

I am not used until I have time.

Well, I need to, I have to be able to sit down and watch the entire thing, and that hasn't happened yet.

But it is my, I have one major project I have to finish, and it is that is my carrot at the end of this.

If I get this thing done, I get to sit and binge watch McCard.

I saw the first episode, and I'm so eager to get to the rest of it.

Well, Stacey Abrams, thanks for joining us on the ticket.

Thanks for having me.

That'll do it for this week of the ticket, Politics from the Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Thanks for listening, wear your face masks, and catch you next week.