“If you could reach it, you could read it,” she says. Yet she reminded me more of the writers I’ve met through the years: a chatty listener.Ībrams grew up in a house full of readers in Gulfport, Miss. (She wrote the first Selena Montgomery book while still a student at Yale Law School.) After 10 minutes, I wanted to be lifelong friends with her, which is of course a reaction the best politicians are famous for inducing.
In conversation, Abrams is warm, funny, curious and unpretentious, though also precise, giving answers of a legal clarity. This record has made Abrams, along with Katie Porter, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren and others, the face of the reborn left - tough, pragmatic, even-keeled, results-oriented. But in important ways, her work led directly to Biden’s ability to pass a $2 trillion stimulus package in March and possibly even pass HR1, the sweeping voting rights legislation named for the late Georgia Congressman John Lewis. The highest office Abrams has held in government is minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives. Six weeks later, Abrams came through again: Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock swept a pair of Senate runoffs, defeating two heavily funded incumbent Republicans and handing the party 50-50 control of the Senate. 3, Joe Biden carried Georgia by scarcely 10,000 votes. It was the kind of hard, detailed political work you can’t perform on Twitter. In the next two years, the voting rights organization she started, Fair Fight, mobilized around 800,000 newly registered voters in Georgia, many of them from Black communities.
After Abrams narrowly lost the 2018 Georgia governor’s race to Brian Kemp, in part thanks to restrictive voting laws Kemp had implemented as secretary of State, she set about not to capitalize on her new fame but to fix the problem.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Fair Fight directly registered voters - it mobilized newly registered voters - and mis-stated the last name of the protagonist of “While Justice Sleeps.” It is Keene, not Steele.Ī lot of people on the left feel the same way.
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