Her fight against voter suppression won Georgia for the Democrats and helped get Joe Biden into the White House. Now Stacey Abrams, the 47-year-old lawyer from Mississippi, is being tipped as a future president of the United States – and writing political thrillers in her spare time.
At a drive-in rally in Atlanta, Georgia, last month, to commemorate his first 100 days in office, Joe Biden was already looking further ahead – all the way to his replacement, in fact, tipping Stacey Abrams as a potential successor. "Stacey Abrams can be anything she wants to be, from whatever she chooses, to President," pronounced Biden, in his idiosyncratic syntax.
It's far from the first time he has bigged up Abrams who, at 47 and with no national political experience, might not be an obvious frontrunner for future president. She was shortlisted by Biden to become his vice-president, despite never having held national office. And in January, on the eve of a crucial Senate race in Georgia, the president-elect publicly praised her in the most effusive terms. "Let's hear it for Stacey Abrams," he said. "Nobody, nobody, in America has done more for the right to vote than Stacey. Stacey, you are changing Georgia. You have changed America."
After four years of Donald Trump's wild exaggerations, we've become used to the leader of the free world hamming it up. But Biden isn't Trump and his plaudits for Abrams aren't hyperbole. They are, however, the words of a very grateful man.
Abrams is the founder of Fair Fight, an organisation set up to tackle voter suppression, which signed up 800,000 new voters – predominantly young people and people of colour – in her home state of Georgia in the run-up to the election in November 2020. The state had not voted for a Democrat since Bill Clinton, a southerner, was elected in 1992 and many believed there was no chance of it doing so almost three decades later. On November 19, after two Republican-ordered recounts, Biden eventually won Georgia by 12,284 votes, in what was probably the biggest surprise of his election victory. It's no exaggeration to say that without Fair Fight, Biden would almost certainly not have won Georgia.
The day after the election, Barack Obama's former national security adviser, Susan Rice, tweeted: "We owe Stacey Abrams our greatest gratitude and respect. Rarely does one person deserve such disproportionate credit for major progress and change."
A month after the election, she made the Forbes list of the World's 100 Most Powerful Women, alongside Angela Merkel, Kamala Harris, Jacinda Ardern and Oprah Winfrey. It is no exaggeration either to say that Abrams is now widely considered the most prominent political power broker in the United States.
"I don't like losing," says Abrams when I speak to her in her office in Atlanta. "But because I've never enjoyed an easy path to opportunity, I always have a back-up plan and a back-up plan to the back-up plan."
In 2018, she stood for Governor of Georgia. Had she won, she would have been the first Black woman to run a US state. She was backed by Obama and Winfrey, plus the singer John Legend and actor Will Ferrell, all of whom campaigned on her behalf.
After losing out to Republican Brian Kemp by less than 55,000 votes, she "sat shiva" for 10 days. "I went through all the stages of grief." And then, she says, "I started plotting." She founded Fair Fight, the impact of which has, ironically, propelled her to national and international prominence, far beyond what she would have gained as Governor.
Among American liberals, Abrams is now regarded as something of a deity, a veritable progressive pin-up. The response from American friends when I tell them I'm interviewing her is one of starstruck awe on a level usually reserved for A-list celebrities.
In person, none of the usual A-list traits – expansive ego, inability to answer the questions and/or reversion to a set of key messaging points – is apparent. Abrams does have a tendency towards wordiness but it's wrapped in a mellifluous Mississippi lilt.
Also unusually, particularly for one frequently praised as a fiery orator, Abrams confesses that aspects of public life are a serious challenge. She is, she says, a certified introvert.
"When I told my best friend I was running for office the first time, she laughed for five minutes solid," she says. Her perfect weekend is spent alone with just the Star Trek marathon for company. "People tend to conflate introversion and shyness," she says. "Introversion is how I navigate the world, but it is not in conflict with ambition. I am goal-oriented and it turns out you can't secretly run for office."
Perhaps just as surprising is that, as well as fighting for voting rights, Abrams has a side hustle in books. She's published two political titles: Lead from the Outside and Our Time Is Now. Less predictably, she has authored eight steamy romance novels – including Reckless, Deception and Hidden Sins – under her nom de plume, Selena Montgomery.
An ardent James Bond fan, she'd always aspired to write a spy story featuring a Black female protagonist, but in her final year at Yale Law School, when she sat down to write her first novel, publishers were not interested in stories with Black heroines, particularly in the espionage genre. So she tweaked the story slightly and gave her Black heroine romance alongside intrigue. "I would call it serendipity that, because I couldn't publish it as a spy novel, I discovered I could write really exciting romance novels."
Her first book, Rules of Engagement, was about a Black woman who was a chemical physicist and a spy.
Writing romance was also partly "self-tutelage". She admits she is "very bad at reading romantic cues". Writing, she says, has "not solved the ultimate problem but there's a lot of self-discovery". She is single. "I briefly dated someone in 2020, but it did not work out. There was no great trial, just that we lived in different cities and I have a complicated calendar. So I'm open to other offers."
Now, under her own name, she has written a legal thriller, While Justice Sleeps. My first question is: how? "I can usually get about 3000 words done in a day. I'm very structured. I have my synopses and my storyboards. I don't get opportunities for writer's block."
Her latest novel is a twisty, pacey page-turner set in the corridors of political and judicial power. She had the initial idea over lunch with a fellow lawyer in 2008 and wrote the first scene, but then got waylaid helping get Obama elected. When she finished the draft, she shared it with agents at various points, first in 2011, when it didn't fly, because, she says, the publishing industry pigeonholed her as a romance writer. Then again in 2015, when, she says, they "were dismissive of the idea that a president would be cavalier about American justice and felt that the Supreme Court just wasn't that interesting to readers". Then, she says, she "literally forgot" about the manuscript until 2019, when she was having conversations with Hollywood producers about adapting one of her romance novels and she mentioned it in passing.
By then, Brett Kavanaugh's controversial election to the Supreme Court (after being accused of sexual assault in his youth, an accusation he has always strongly denied) had upped the public's interest in the institution and an American president with a cavalier attitude towards justice perhaps didn't sound quite so implausible any more.
The characters also draw without apology on Abrams' own experiences. The eminent, cantankerous Justice Howard Wynn is "every curmudgeon I've ever worked with in politics and law and activism", while Avery Keene, Wynn's brilliant young Black clerk, bears more than a passing resemblance to Abrams herself. At her white-shoe Atlanta law firm, Abrams was one of only two Black lawyers in its tax practice. "Having been in places where people question why you're there, question who picked you, why are you the person who has this decision-making power but no authority – that is something I drew from experience."
It worked. Abrams is the second of six children. Her elder sister, Andrea, is the vice-president of a college. Her younger sister, Leslie, is a federal judge. Richard is a social worker and Jeanine is president of Fair Count, Abrams' organisation that works to ensure all Georgians are counted in the census. Her youngest brother, Walter, attended Morehouse College, a prestigious HBCU (one of America's Historically Black Colleges and Universities). He has a long history of addiction and mental health issues and has spent time in prison but is in recovery now. "It's an addiction, so it's always going to be a battle. Right now he's in a good place."
She wrote her first novel at 12. At 16, she attended a "nerd summer camp for high-achievers" in New York. At 17, at high school in Atlanta, where the family had relocated for her parents' work, she was hired as an intern on a local congressional campaign, "basically a typist and a gofer". When given the candidate's speech to type up, she rewrote it and was formally hired as his speechwriter. "He didn't win, but I don't think it was the speeches," she says.
At 18 and an undergraduate at Spelman College in Atlanta, when her boyfriend dumped her, she took herself off to the computer lab and plotted out her professional future on a spreadsheet. "He thought I was too goal-oriented and not focused enough on him in our relationship and, in retrospect, he was right," says Abrams. "But I was 18. I was much better at doing stuff than I was at dating. So, I decided, fine." She lets out a soft chuckle. "You think I'm too ambitious now? Just wait. And then I started laying out all my ambitions."
These included becoming the author of a bestselling spy novel by 24, a "millionaire running a corporation" by 30 and mayor of Atlanta by 35. The spreadsheet has been tinkered with but never cast aside. "Any time I hit one of the major goals, I'd keep track of where I thought I would be, where I am and then I update it to say where I'm going."
There was also a column for personal relationships. Abrams was to meet the man of her dreams and have two kids by the age of 28. When she missed the deadline, she shifted it to 32, then 41. Now, at 47, she keeps the column on the sheet but the deadline is blank.
She won a place at Yale, forged a career as a tax lawyer and was elected to Georgia's state Congress, only resigning her seat in 2017 to run for governor. She is expected to stand again against Kemp in 2022. Her opponents have already set up a group called Stop Stacey.
But Abrams' rapid rise has ruffled feathers. When there were whispers about her becoming Biden's vice-president and she made it clear she would be keen, a Washington Post op-ed said Abrams was "embarrassing herself by openly campaigning for the job".
"The presumption that people need to read your mind in order to grant you access is just absurd," she says. "As a young Black woman growing up in Mississippi, I learnt that if you don't raise your hand, people won't give you attention."
Meanwhile, her Republican critics noisily dispute her claim that she lost the 2018 gubernatorial race because of voter disenfranchisement (over the previous six years, 1.4 million Georgia voters had been expunged from voting records). Last month, the right-wing US magazine National Review put her on its cover, accusing her of "dishonesty and hysteria" and calling her "divisive" and "one of the great founts of disinformation in American political life".
And there is a broader backlash brewing, not just against Abrams herself, but against the work she has done to expand voter access. Along with Georgia, Fair Fight has worked in 20 US states – including key battleground states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and Pennsylvania – on absentee ballots, voting by post and early voting, all of which contributed to a turnout of more than 159 million in November, the highest turnout in US presidential history.
Now, in the wake of that turnout, several states have brought in laws to restrict voter access again, cutting early voting times and restricting postal votes. "Republicans are gaming the system because they're afraid of losing an election," Abrams said last month. And, she believes, "These laws are a direct response to the same animus that led them to the Capitol on January 6."
The violent insurrection that day at the US Capitol came as no surprise to Abrams. "I'm certainly dismayed by the level of treachery that we saw but I wouldn't say that is new. I grew up in Mississippi, where the Confederate battle flag was the state flag. I moved to Georgia, where the Confederate battle flag was incorporated into the state flag. I don't have the capacity for surprise at this."
But don't misinterpret her lack of surprise as acceptance or negativity. "People ask if I'm an optimist or a pessimist and I say that I'm an ameliorist," she says. "I say, 'Look, the glass is half full and it's probably poisoned.' " Her job, she says, "is to try to find the antidote".
Abrams grew up "working poor" in Mississippi, where her father was employed in a shipyard and her mother was a librarian before both became Methodist ministers. There was an emphasis on civil rights. Her parents and grandparents had been active in the civil rights protests of the 60s in Mississippi, who – after African Americans won the right to vote in 1965 – were able to vote for the first time in the 1968 presidential election.
"You would hear all these stories about what it meant to be in the midst of that movement, what it meant to be a young person in Mississippi during Jim Crow [laws enforcing racial segregation that were in place until the mid-60s]," she says.
A similar emphasis was placed on reading and on watching public service television. "They expected us to want more."
Written by: Jane Mulkerrins
© The Times of London
While Justice Sleeps, by Stacey Abrams (HarperCollins, $33)
