Why Stacey Abrams Would Like to Be Vice-President

Stacey Abrams.
Abrams’s lack of experience in statewide office is commonly cited as a point against her readiness for the Vice-Presidency.Photograph by LaToya Ruby Frazier for The New Yorker

Last March, before Joe Biden had formally announced his candidacy for President—but not before questions were raised about his prospects in what was certain to be a crowded primary field—his team floated the idea of picking Stacey Abrams as his running mate. It was a move that seemed to concede that, despite having served eight years as Barack Obama’s Vice-President, Biden’s appeal to black voters, particularly black female voters, was not guaranteed. Abrams, who had just narrowly lost a gubernatorial bid in Georgia, in a race that was beset by controversies, had become one of the most visible and popular Democratic politicians in the country. But she was reportedly considering her own Presidential bid, or a run for the Senate, and she demurred, noting, memorably, that “you don’t run for second place.”

The ensuing thirteen months have been wildly disruptive and unpredictable even by the standards of the Trump era. Biden, after listing through the early primaries, surged in South Carolina and the Super Tuesday contests, largely on the strength of African-American support. More recently, Brian Kemp, the victor in the Georgia governor’s race, has become a target of widespread criticism—including, surprisingly and more than a little hypocritically, from Donald Trump—for his accelerated schedule for reopening the state’s businesses, following a stay-at-home order driven by the coronavirus pandemic. Kemp’s plan, Abrams told me last week, was “dangerously incompetent and deeply callous.” She added, “We do not have the testing capacity, we do not have the public-health infrastructure, and we do not have the leadership necessary to reopen now.”

Given this recent history, it is perhaps not surprising that Abrams has become the focus of renewed national attention—or that she has been very publicly conducting what some have termed a “campaign” for the same V.P. slot that she declined last year. She explained her recent actions to me, saying, “I’m the daughter of two ministers, and I’m also a black woman who has had the opportunity to navigate spaces where I am usually the only one. And I understand a few things.” Those things include the importance of speaking up and not being afraid to ask for what you want. “I have been brought into this national conversation since last year,” she said. “And, at each phase of the conversation, I always answer directly, because I know that people of color, that young girls, are watching me and how I respond. My obligation is to be who I am, and to not allow traditions to continue and perpetuate the consequences.”

Nevertheless, on a podcast last week, Representative William Lacy Clay, a Democrat of Missouri, called Abrams’s candor “inappropriate.” He added, “You know, at the race track, you cannot show up at the winner’s window with loser’s tickets. You haven’t won anything. You can’t show up at the winner’s window with loser’s tickets and demand anything.” It was a strange criticism, given that the Biden team had been aware of the outcome of Abrams’s 2018 bid when it first floated the idea of choosing her. As Abrams put it to me, “We need a man who believes in telling Americans the truth and not lying to protect his own ego. And if the question is, would I be willing to help him not only win an election but to govern? Yes. Because I believe in what he can do for America.”

Biden himself was once accused of blatantly auditioning for the V.P. slot. In May, 2008, President George W. Bush, during a visit to Israel, criticized politicians who would “negotiate with terrorists.” It was a clear shot at Obama, who had said that he would be willing to meet with even unsavory world leaders. Biden, who had dropped out of the Democratic Presidential primary just a few months earlier, called Bush’s comments “malarkey” and “bullshit.” He later apologized for the scatological reference, but his message was clear: he was advertising that he would handle the more pugilistic aspects of the campaign, as V.P. candidates often do, and was more subtly highlighting his decades of experience in foreign policy in the Senate as an asset for the comparatively inexperienced Obama.

Abrams is not the only of Biden’s potential V.P. picks to dispatch with coy, noncommittal answers when questions about the job arise. Representative Val Demings, of Florida, stated outright that she would accept the offer if it was made to her. Senator Elizabeth Warren affirmed that she would, too, and Senator Kamala Harris said that she would be “honored to serve” with Biden. The position of all these women has been complicated, through no fault of their own, by Tara Reade’s allegation, in late March, that Biden had sexually assaulted her nearly thirty years ago—a claim that he publicly denied last week. On Monday, Warren said that she found Biden’s denial “credible and convincing.” Abrams told CNN, “I believe that women deserve to be heard and I believe they need to be listened to, but I also believe that those allegations have to be investigated by credible sources. The New York Times did a deep investigation and they found that the accusation was not credible. I believe Joe Biden.” In fact, the Times did not specify that Reade’s claims were not credible, but said that it could not further corroborate them or find any other allegation of sexual assault or a pattern of sexual misconduct on Biden’s part. But it goes without saying that, whichever woman Biden chooses as his running mate—and he has committed to picking a woman—she will be called upon to defend him on this issue.

Yet Clay’s remarks echoed, albeit harshly, a point commonly made against Abrams’s readiness for the Vice-Presidency: she has no experience in statewide office. (She served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 2007 to 2017, and was minority leader for six of those years.) To the extent that this is a concern for Biden’s newly formed V.P.-vetting committee, it compounds the impact of the 2018 governor’s race. Kemp was Georgia’s secretary of state—a position he did not relinquish during the campaign—and in that capacity he enacted policies that were widely seen to favor Republicans. A fair number of Democrats in the state and beyond, including Biden, have said that voter suppression and, particularly, the prodigious removal of black and Latino voters from the state registry are the reason that Abrams is not now governor of Georgia. If that’s true, and if Abrams’s lack of a statewide position removes her from consideration for the Vice-Presidential slot, it would mean that Kemp will have succeeded in foreclosing not one but two offices in her career. This would make for a bitter footnote, given how central an issue voter suppression is ahead of the November elections—it is as yet unclear how people in some states will even be able to vote—and has been to Abrams’s political work for the past year and a half, primarily through the organization Fair Fight.

There are other factors that mitigate—or, at least, complicate—Abrams’s suitability for the V.P. pick. A key question is her ability to deliver Georgia’s sixteen Electoral College votes. The state has not voted for a Democrat in a Presidential election since 1992. But, during an off-year election and despite all the obstacles facing it, Abrams’s campaign employed voter-turnout strategies that brought her within fifty-five thousand votes (out of nearly four million cast) of becoming Georgia’s first black and first female governor. That performance has been studied by Democratic strategists across the country, and it makes winning Georgia this year a tantalizing prospect—particularly as a hedge against losing one of the traditionally Democratic Midwestern states that voted for Trump in 2016. Biden currently leads Trump in both Wisconsin and Michigan, and both states have Democratic governors, yet the lesson of the 2016 election is that nothing can be taken for granted.

That prospect is further enhanced by Kemp’s rapid and unpopular reopening of Georgia, despite the fact that the number of COVID-19 cases is still rising. In addition to Trump, Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, also disparaged the move, tweeting that “what happens in Georgia will impact us in South Carolina.” Business leaders, meanwhile, have expressed reluctance to open their doors while the virus continues to rage across the state. Abrams told me last week, “We have the fourteenth-highest infection rates, we have the seventh-lowest testing rates, and we’re the eighth-largest state.” She added that “what Kemp is doing is putting those who are the least resilient, those who are the most economically vulnerable, in harm’s way in a method that is not likely to have a meaningful effect on our economy.” On Friday, the day that the stay-at-home order expired, Georgia reported a thousand new cases of COVID-19.

We are only beginning to see the social consequences of COVID-19—and political implications generally lag behind social ones. “The pandemic will pass. We don’t know when, and we don’t know what will replace it, but the most important message I want to deliver is that leadership matters,” Abrams told me. “Leadership that tells the truth, leadership that has competence and the skills and the proven deliverables. That’s what I see in Vice-President Biden, and that’s why, regardless of the choice that he makes, my choice is going to always be to do what I can to help move our country forward.” It’s not unrealistic to suspect that the incompetence and the ignorance that have marked the Trump Administration’s response to the virus will reverberate through our politics and reorient the traditional forecasts. None of this means that Joe Biden will select Stacey Abrams as his Vice-President, or, necessarily, that he should. But it does mean that Abrams warrants consideration for more reasons than the ones that prompted Biden to consider her in the first place.