Stacey Abrams has a big imagination. She’s used it to expand Georgia’s electorate, be the first Black woman to be a major-party nominee for governor and write 16 books across multiple genres. This week on the show, Stacey sits down with Errin to share how she imagines American policy and democracy shifting — from tax policy to electrical grids to galvanizing non-voters.
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On today’s episode
Our host
Errin Haines is The 19th’s editor-at-large and writer of The Amendment newsletter. An award-winning journalist with nearly two decades of experience, Errin was previously a national writer on race for the Associated Press. She’s also worked at the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.
Follow Errin on Instagram @emarvelous and X @errinhaines.
Today’s guest
Stacey Abrams is a political leader, business owner and New York Times bestselling author. A tax attorney by training, Abrams served eleven years in the Georgia House of Representatives, seven as Minority Leader, and became the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia in 2018 and 2022.
Over the course of her career, she has launched multiple organizations devoted to democracy protection, voter engagement, tackling social issues, and building a more equitable future in the South. Committed to the pursuit of equity, she works to break barriers for young people, people of color and the marginalized through her work in the public, nonprofit and corporate sectors.
Follow Stacey Abrams on X @staceyabrams and Instagram @staceyabrams.
Episode transcript
The Amendment podcast transcripts are automatically generated by a third-party website and may contain typos or other errors. Please consider the official record for The Amendment podcast to be the audio publicly available wherever you listen to podcasts.
Stacey:
When you start with curiosity, which is an important part of imagination, you start to create new realities.
Errin:
Hey y’all. Welcome to The Amendment, a weekly conversation about gender, politics, and power from The 19th News and Wonder Media Network. I’m your host, Errin Haines. So today, I am really excited to be joined by Stacey Abrams. She was the first Black woman in the nation to win a major party’s nomination for governor, and for years she worked to expand voting access and ensure marginalized groups are included in our democracy. That work propelled multiple Democrats into office over the last few years. Now recently, Stacey also started teaching at Howard University as their inaugural Ronald W. Walters Endowed Chair for Race and Black Politics, and she’s the senior counsel at Rewiring America, an electrification nonprofit. Yes, that is a thing. So Stacey and I actually first met way back when I was covering the Georgia legislature, and she was in the House as Democratic leader and was a rising star in the party. I watched her expand my home state’s electorate and create the literal blueprint — see what I did there? — that gave Joe Biden a victory for Democrats in Georgia for the first time in a generation, and helped to elect two pioneering U.S. senators delivering the party a crucial majority in 2020. Now, as if that wasn’t enough, Stacey is also an author. She has published over 15 books including children’s books, romance novels, nonfiction and two political thrillers. Her latest political thriller, “Rogue Justice,” came out in late 2023.
Errin:
Our political reality is actually starting to feel more and more like a political thriller, which is why I wanted to talk to somebody with a big imagination who can help us to think through innovative political solutions. I really couldn’t think of anybody better to have that conversation with than Stacey Abrams. So welcome, Stacey.
Stacey:
Thank you so much for having me.
Errin:
Thanks for being here. Not a moment too soon. So I wanna start this conversation at the intersection of the two careers that I talked about. Right now, in a lot of ways, politics is really just feeling stranger than fiction, but it also feels like the imagination that you use as a fiction writer could be translating into your political life. So I guess I just wanna start by asking you where that imagination comes from, and also just what are some of the most imaginative, even borderline unrealistic politics that we could implement to keep our democracy functioning now?
Stacey:
Well, I appreciate the question. So let’s start with my imagination. I am the daughter of two United Methodist ministers who are retired, but when I was growing up, my mom was a librarian and my dad was a shipyard worker. My mother used to read us bedtime stories and she read from the whole of the library. My dad used to tell us stories. He used to make up these wild fictional stories for us that had to accommodate six different children in all of our various imaginations. And what I watched happen with my parents, what I learned from them, was this ability to pull from another person’s reality and turn it into a narrative of fiction that could be both compelling but could also invite others in. Separate from that, my parents were very, very intentional activists in our family, in our community. My mom and dad, despite, you know, being on the edge of working class, working poor, were very committed to issues like prison, ministry and serving the poor.
Stacey:
They believed that our jobs were to, you know, we had three jobs: Go to church, go to school and take care of each other. And so I also watched my parents take very little and turn it into as much as they could for others. And that took imagination. My mom once was concerned about literacy rates in a public housing development, and she couldn’t get anyone to support the effort. And so we just held a vacation Bible school there, and that became an opportunity for us to bring this reading capacity but also to engage these children and to do so in a way that helped get it funded. My dad built the first place of faith on the grounds of a jail in Mississippi because he wanted anyone who wanted to seek faith to be able to use that facility. And so he built this chapel, and we traveled around the state as my dad raised the money for this, and I watched him have conversations with different denominations and different faith traditions.
Stacey:
So that’s a very long way of saying that I come by my imagination honestly, both on the activism side and on the creative fiction side. Where that leads us today is that we have to have the intention of imagining more for our democracy and public policy is why we have democracy. It’s not the inverse. Politics is a tool for policy. Policy should not be a tool for our politics. And too often what we see play out in our democracy is that we treat it like a spectator sport — or worse, a blood sport — that only comes about every two to four years, instead of thinking about democracy as this ongoing living organism that requires care and feeding and that is through good public policy. So my very long way to your question is this: The most imaginative, borderline realistic policy I would argue we should start thinking about is related to our tax policy.
Stacey:
I’m also a tax attorney by training. And for me, tax policy is some of the most interesting policy we have because very few people understand it. But it pervades everything we do. And we have an opportunity, as we watch this country, as we watch this globe, transition from a traditional dependence on labor to a database, technology-driven, capital-driven society, where we’re watching the most massive wealth transfer in anyone’s recent imagination. We should start re-imagining our tax policy so that we are giving primacy to labor. And we are also recognizing that the value-add in our society is no longer simply how many hours we put in at work; It’s the shares we own in a company; It’s the conversation about what we do with data; It’s all of the things that have been cordoned off as capital. And I think we should start examining it.
Stacey:
We should start having conversations. It shouldn’t be this very didactic “Who do we tax?” conversation. It should be a much more engaged, “How do we, why do we and for what do we tax?” And I think if we could start that conversation, we can start to transform our engagement with democracy because most people vote because something happens to their lives. They don’t care about your politics. They care about their days. And if they know that by participating in our body politic, they have the chance to actually build a better future for themselves and their families because they’re not worried about 25, 30 percent coming outta their paycheck, and instead we have a different way of imagining how we do this, I think we can start to strengthen democracy everywhere.
Errin:
Wow. I mean you guys did not have the benefit of me just now seeing that meme where you have the numbers literally flashing across your face. Stacey, right now, like as you are describing the Stacey Abrams verse where there’s like this Venn diagram of the economy and imagination and politics and democracy, I’m just like, “Okay, mind is already blown.” But I think, you know, you having this imagination and maintaining this political imagination, like how do you do that without succumbing to cynicism? We have so many conversations, especially going into this year, this political narrative about cynicism, about apathy. How do you recommend our listeners maintain their imaginations?
Stacey:
One: We have to recognize that there rarely is an actual case of apathy. People are rarely apathetic. They’re often either despairing or satisfied. And so their decision to act is either driven by a often-learned belief that nothing will change if they do, or by a deep satisfaction that they’ve gotten what they want and they don’t want anything to be different. And so when we are thinking about engagement, when we’re thinking about why people aren’t moving, if we come at it from a place of lecture — “Let me tell you why you’re wrong” — we’re gonna change nothing. It doesn’t work on me, it doesn’t work on you, it’s not gonna work on them. But if we approach it with a sense of curiosity — “Why don’t you, what do you want? How can I help?” — that place of curiosity creates not only dialogue, but intention, and not that sort of deep-seated dismissal of another person’s truth.
Stacey:
“Well, I can’t believe you think that.” That’s not curiosity, that’s judgment. Curiosity says, “What is it that you think you’re going to get from making this decision? And how can we work together to think about alternatives”? And when you reshape it, when you start with curiosity, which is an important part of imagination, you start to create new realities. You referenced the number of people that we were able to engage in voter registration, but registering to vote is only the beginning. It’s like giving someone the keys to a car without teaching them to drive. The work that we did in Georgia — and it wasn’t just my groups, but the groups that I supported that had been at this long before I got here and will be doing it long after I’m gone — those were the groups that actually engaged voters with curiosity, that asked them questions, that listened to their answers, and then worked together to find solutions. That’s what changes the dynamic of democracy. Not vitriol, not haranguing and not lecturing.
Errin:
You know, I agree with you, but it’s also making me wonder why aren’t we then more curious in our politics?
Stacey:
Because we’re absolutely certain we’re already right. And this goes back to how we think about politics as a sport, where we think of elections as the game. And that’s like saying, “I’m not gonna participate all year long, but I’m gonna go to the finals and that’s gonna change the outcome.” If I haven’t practiced, if I haven’t learned the rules, putting me on the court’s not gonna change anything. Democracy is an active engagement that takes time and that is never done. And so part of our curiosity has to be a sustained engagement. We don’t have to think about it every day, but we can’t just think about it every four years. And more importantly, we can’t tell people, “Trust us, ignore us until we need you again.” We have to stop treating elections and politics like events and treat them like movement because movement requires continuous action.
Stacey:
The other way I frame it is this: We tend to treat voting like magic. “I’m gonna show up. Ta-da! Something changes.” It’s not. Voting is medicine. We have ills in our society, we have challenges and we have injuries. And the only way to provide correction is to take the medicine. Sometimes it’s bitter, sometimes it feels worse than the actual disease we’re trying to cure. But the medicine has to be taken over time to have effect. And the thing to remember is if you stop taking your medicine before it’s done, its work, whatever you had is coming back and it’s bringing friends.
Errin:
Can y’all tell that Stacey loves a metaphor? But I mean, sticking with the hospital one, right?
Stacey:
Sure.
Errin:
That also requires a doctor to listen to the patient, right? And every patient — patients as voters — has a story. I feel like so much of what I learned from you about the idea of persuasion had a lot to do with the power of story: The story that you were able to tell, but also the stories that you gathered from people who both were already participating in the political process, but also non-voters who maybe just weren’t voters yet. And that requires imagination, right? To see them as a future voter.
Stacey:
Absolutely. So if we’re gonna use the metaphor of a hospital: Do you have the right pharmacy? Once you get the prescription, do you have the ability to actually implement it? It’s not that we don’t know the answer to a lot of our challenges, it’s just that we don’t have the mechanisms in place or the resources in place in the places where they need to be to actually get our prescriptions filled. We know, for example, in Georgia that if we wanna save rural hospitals — if we want to save lives — expand Medicaid. It’s worked in more than 40 other states. And yet our pharmacist, who happens to be the governor, refuses to fill our prescription, refuses to do the right dosage. And so it’s not just what is, it’s what can we do with it once we know what the answer is. And all of those come together in engaging people in democracy.
Stacey:
And so the way you transform a non-voter into a voter is to give them a reason to change. You’ve gotta show them either that their diagnosis was wrong, that sitting still or not voting is not going to actually solve the problem. You’ve gotta give them someone else to go and see if the doctor’s the problem. You gotta give them another doctor, give them another candidate, give them another set of policies. And then you’ve gotta hold the person who is responsible for implementation, that pharmacist, accountable for actually making sure they fill the prescription properly. They don’t, you know, substitute it. They don’t shortchange you and they make sure they get you your refill on time.
Errin:
You may be the queen of metaphors. I don’t know.
To talk about your writing, your first thriller, “While Justice Sleeps,” centers around this woman, Avery Keene. As the book goes on, Avery’s uncovering these details of this international scheme that the president is involved in. I’m not gonna spoil the whole thing, y’all should read it. You’ve talked about how you wrote this book back in 2010. Was there something in the political environment back then that kind of made you think that an abuse of power at the highest level was possible or even likely?
Stacey:
Yes. I grew up during the Iran Contra scandal, and I have a very deep fascination with foreign policy. So I’d read about other nation states and other, you know, intrigues, and that was enough. I just needed to know it could be. I knew it hadn’t been, but I needed to know it could be. And that, for me, was enough to be off to the races and off to the pages.
Errin:
To run with it. So then looking ahead, what are the political problems that you anticipate becoming flashpoint issues in the next five, maybe 10, years?
Stacey:
So Avery Keene made a second showing called “Rogue Justice.” That was the second book. And she, in that book, thought about, “What does it mean to have an electrical grid that’s not actually connected to anything?” We tend to think, in this country, that we have this giant electrical grid. We actually don’t. We have several different grids that are all privately owned. There is no American electrical grid. Now, they are regulated by various components, and nations — various components of the state and three nations. So we’ve got Canada, the U.S. and Mexico that share part of what we call “the American electrical grid.” And so my question there was, “What can happen to the electrical grid?” And that was premised on some things that have happened. But, you know, I like to stretch the possibilities, and also what does cybersecurity look like in the 21st century when it becomes more accessible? And now I’m working on book three. So Avery’s coming back and I encourage everyone to catch up before she gets here. And now she’s thinking about AI.
Errin:
Yes. AI’s got its own imagination, but we definitely need your imagination to tell us where we are going with that. That could be a whole separate episode. But I wanna talk to you about your role as the Ronald W. Walters endowed chair for race and Black politics at Howard, particularly because I feel like you’re in this tradition of HBCU educators who’ve helped prepare the next generation Black small-d democratic leadership that has helped to make our country more equal. What does it mean for you to be doing this work at an HBCU? I know that you are an HBCU graduate. I’ll let you talk about some of that too.
Stacey:
Yeah. I matriculated at Spelman College, and actually during my first few years as a tax attorney I moonlighted as an adjunct professor at Spelman as well. And so this is my second turn at teaching an HBCU and it’s always a fantastic opportunity. When I was at Spelman, I actually taught traditional courses. What I’m doing at Howard, to me, is exciting, in part because it allows me to touch multiple disciplines. It allows me to think about issues across the scope of that university’s capacity and knit together a larger imagination for ourselves about what constitutes Black power and Black politics. Too often it’s relegated to a very specific space or a single discipline, and I know that it’s broader than that. I know that if we want people to be engaged, if we want to solve the problems of our communities, then we have to be facile in our imagination.
Stacey:
But we also have to be intentional about who we bring to the table. And so one of the pieces that we’re undertaking at Howard, I have a speaker series. So in fact, in April I will be having a conversation with a dynamic woman, Kemba Walden, who was the acting director for cybersecurity for the White House. Talking to Kemba about what it means to understand cybersecurity and AI in this day and age, especially for communities that are underrepresented, is a fantastic way to bring to the table communities that don’t necessarily hear themselves or see themselves. But when we are left out of the conversation about AGI — about artificial generative intelligence — when we’re left out of data sets, then the biases that are baked into a community and a society that we already see become hardened in the very technology that is driving so much of our future.
Errin:
I wanna come back around to politics because we have talked enough for me to know that you always kind of foreground the wins. Even in times where you are not winning. So what are the most recent wins that you have been reflecting on? Like what have you learned from those?
Stacey:
I frame my world in terms of another mantra, which is “I learned my lessons, not my losses.” And that has different iterations. One of them that really frustrated people was after 2018, I looked at the voter turnout and declared a victory for voters. And I did so because when people change their behaviors, when you shift from not inactivity, but disconnection, to connection, that is a victory when more African American, more Latino, more Asian American Pacific Islanders, more young people show up and engage. That is progress and that’s small-p progress. But that is dynamic progress. And I celebrate it. I may not have gotten the seat, but the transformation of our electorate matters. And so when I tell people, “I learned my lessons, not my losses,” yes, I acknowledge there are titles I haven’t gotten. There is money I haven’t won. There are jobs I will not hold. But that is not the same as losing everything.
Stacey:
And so often we become so fixated on that point of diminution that we ignore all of the other places where we rise. And so I don’t ignore it, I excavate it. I wanna understand, “What could I have done differently? What did the other person do better or worse that I should have called out or, you know, glommed onto? What did the people say and what did they mean?” But I use those as lessons, not as ways to castigate myself for not having achieved what I wanted. In stoke philosophy, there’s this notion that it is the effort that you measure, not the outcome. We cannot control outcomes. We can do our best to manufacture, to manipulate and to an engineer, but you cannot guarantee it. The only thing I can guarantee, the only thing I can control, is my effort. And so as long as I am putting in my effort, that is a victory, that is a win. And I also know that the work is not done. And so I don’t rest on my laurels and say, “Well, I got that done, so I’m good.” No. As long as poverty remains persistent, as long as disadvantage in marginalized communities remain unseen and unheard, then my work remains. And so I’m constantly learning my lessons and trying to drive forward. And every day when I can do that, that’s a victory as well.
Errin:
Yeah. The clarity that you have around what those moments have meant for you, I think that’s really important because I have watched some people kind of paint you as this messianic figure, right? Saving us all from the collapse of democracy. And I just, I wonder how you feel about that narrative. I mean, what do you think it gets wrong about your role in the Democratic party? In our politics? And how does that kind of impact the role that the rest of us have to play in our democracy?
Stacey:
Human instinct is to create an avatar — to create a central totem or figure that we can direct our energy towards for two reasons. One: It’s just easier to visualize, it’s easier to imagine. And it is helpful to organize around a central construct, a central figure, a central idea. I am part of a sort of universe of folks who do this work, and it just so happened that there was a moment where my name was the more prominent because I was louder. And I see myself as an avatar for this conversation. It’s not about me, but if using my name and leveraging work I’ve done helps move other people, then that’s all for the good. I’ve met me; I’m not overly impressed. So I’m not gonna be swayed by the panegyrics that may be sent my way.
Stacey:
I’m appreciative of them. And it is nice for people to know, it is nice for people to know that good can be, and that I was a part of making good possible. But I go back to, you know, my responsibility is effort, not outcome. And if I’m going to believe that to be so, whether the outcome is positive or negative, my measure has to consistently be, “What did I do?” And when you do that, you create space for other people to say, “What can I do?” The danger of messianic figures, the danger of totems, is not that they are an organizing principle. It’s when they become the only thing. And my job is to constantly be building up and engaging so many across these issues that they feel that they have ownership and therefore they can become a totem in their own way for getting more people to come with them to get more done.
Errin:
One last thing — I mean, talk about imagining things — As we sit here today, still have never had a Black woman governor of this country. Still have not had a Black woman president, or any woman president. I mean, I’m just curious if you think that that has to also do with the limits that some people have on their political imagination. Is a Black woman governor — is a woman president — something that voters can or want to imagine?
Stacey:
Absolutely. Imagination is a starting place. It is not the end. And much of my work has been about not just imagining what’s possible, but then trying to build the infrastructure to make it so. I’ve raised a lot of money into the state of Georgia. I’ve created a number of organizations. I’ve supported even more organizations. Part of what drives me is the belief that it is possible, but possibility needs help. It needs tending, it needs care. And it’s not always going to give you what you want in the moment you demand it. But because it’s always possible, our responsibility is to broaden the imagination, but to also put in place the infrastructure to support it. It costs money to run for office. It takes changing people’s perceptions of what Black women are capable of. It is the demand of my moment that we have a conversation about DEI — about diversity, equity, and inclusion — in part because in this current moment people seem to forget that this isn’t just something that happened today or in the last five years.
Stacey:
DEI is the descriptor of the last 240 years of this country. From the moment we had a Revolutionary War, and we said all men are created equal. We had two things in that sentence we had to start dealing with: One, it wasn’t just men. And two, we had to make sure equality was actually a possibility. And that meant removing barriers that were embedded in our founding documents and in our founding imagination to get to what we said we thought we could be. And so we have watched — whether it’s reconstruction or suffrage, the women’s movement, the Chicano movement, the Native American movement, the disability movement, L-G-B-T-Q-I-A-U, insert movement there, labor movements — all of those movements have been part of our progress because fundamentally we want an American dream that is accessible to all. And that accessibility requires diversity — everyone gets to participate; It requires equity—
Stacey:
Everyone has the ability to participate; and it requires inclusion. We are not going to stop you because we don’t understand you. And DEI is a descriptor that’s been reduced by some to one single thing they don’t like. But we have to reclaim that DEI is how we build the America we believe in. It is our superpower, it is our strength and it is our right. And so yes, we will have a Black woman governor. Yes, we will have a woman president. And we will have things we don’t have words for yet because we have limited our imagination for some. But there is someone listening to this, there’s someone out there dreaming right now who knows more is possible. And my job, your job, the job of voters everywhere, the job of Americans is to make certain we defend the right to that American dream — that we remove those barriers, and that we create those pathways so that we can have the best version of ourselves every single time.
Errin:
I think this may be the first time I’ve heard DEI framed as the unfinished business of our democracy. But again, you’re the one with the political imagination. So thank you for bringing some of that here. I think I also know what it would look like if Octavia Butler was governor or president of the United States. So thank you.
Stacey:
That is an extraordinarily high compliment.
Errin:
Stacey Abrams, thank you so much for stopping by The Amendment. This has been a great conversation and I’m just really glad that we got to think through some of 2024 and beyond today.
Stacey:
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Errin:
And now for this week’s asterisk. So we just heard from Stacey Abrams, someone with a huge political imagination, but I wanna talk about somebody whose imagination was arguably even more wild, especially given the era in which she lived and got involved in politics. I’m talking, of course, about the trailblazing Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress in 1968, and the first Black woman to run for president as a major party candidate in 1972. A creative lawmaker, when Chisholm was assigned to serve on the House Agriculture Committee as a representative from an urban district, Chisholm used that assignment to help feed the hungry and expand the food stamp program and to help create the special supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children — WIC for short. Now, Chisholm’s candidacy came at the end of the Civil Rights Movement and at the dawn of the feminist movement. She sat at the intersection of these identities, but would not be limited by them.
Errin:
In her announcement speech, Chisholm boldly declared, “I’m not the candidate of Black America, although I am Black and proud. I’m not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman and equally proud of that. I am a candidate of the people, and my presence before you symbolizes a new era in American political history.” More than a generation ago, Chisholm understood that both representation mattered and that she was running to represent all Americans. There were many challenges: She didn’t have enough money, she had trouble getting on the ballot in some states. And even though she didn’t become the Democratic nominee that year, she didn’t necessarily see her defeat in terms of a loss, saying that she ran “in spite of hopeless odds, to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo.” Chisholm’s historic campaign has inspired countless people to run for office, whom others might not consider electable.
Errin:
Many of them have gone on to become trailblazers in their own right, expanding our electorate’s political imagination about who should have power and who gets to participate in our democracy. This year, we celebrate the 100th anniversary of Chisholm’s birth and are reminded of the legacy she’s part of and left behind: The Black women who have rejected the status quo and use their political imagination to help usher in a more inclusive and representative democracy. Her example is now a biopic, “Shirley,” that you can watch on Netflix. I plan to watch this weekend, and I hope you will too.
So that’s my asterisk for this week, and that is this week’s episode of The Amendment – which is also a newsletter, by the way, that I write. You can subscribe to it for free by going to 19TH news DOT org. That’s where you can also find all of our great journalism around gender, politics, and policy. For the 19th and Wonder Media Network. I’m Errin Haines, talk to you again next week.
The Amendment is a co-production of the 19th News and Wonder Media Network. It is executive produced by Jenny Kaplan, Terri Rupar, and Faith Smith. Our head of development is Emily Rudder. Julia B. Chan is The 19th’s editor in chief. The amendment is edited by Jenny Kaplan, Grace Lynch and Emily Rudder, and was produced by Adesuwa Agbonile, Grace Lynch, Brittany Martinez and Taylor Williamson with production assistance from Luci Jones. Our theme music was composed by Jlin. I love my theme music.
