Time Magazine’s Hard Hitting Piece On Stacey Abrams & Media Discuss Her On Seth Meyers

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Stacey Abrams had hardly arrived on stage when late-night host Seth Meyers hit her with a question about why her campaign strategy focused on energizing liberal voters rather than trying to flip Donald Trump supporters. Her response, to laughs, was simple: “Math.”

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As the GOP candidates snipe at each other over policy and politics, Abrams has tooled her message around public school education, bolstering the economy and expanding Medicaid. And after her whopping primary win, she’s tried to consolidate her party by winning over her former rival’s highest profile supporters. At the same time, she’s earned the endorsements of 2020 Democratic presidential prospects who seem likely to campaign for her as November nears.

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Unlike Kemp, Abrams is a staunch advocate of gun safety, aiming to limit access to assault rifles and expand government regulation over the sale of other firearms. But, unlike Kemp, she says, she also knows how to behave with a gun. “As someone who learned how to shoot when I was growing up in Mississippi, the first thing you learn is you don’t do that. That Firearm 101 is you don’t do that,” Abrams told Meyers. “That Firearm 101 is don’t point it at people, because Firearm 102 is you go to prison.

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She has just returned from a whirlwind trip to New York City and San Francisco, appearing on Late Night With Seth Meyers, fundraising and hawking her new book, Minority Leader, because what better does a businesswoman-novelist-lawyer-activist-politician have to do with her time, really, than write a memoir and go on tour?

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Describe someone as “commanding the room” and you generally conjure an image of gravitas–a man, likely white, in a suit, emitting soaring oratory. Abrams is a big-boned, natural-haired, youthful-looking woman with a quizzical smile

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She’s as likely to geek out about tax policy or Star Trek as she is to summon the spirit of justice. Yet when she speaks, all kinds of people–from black folks in rural communities to yuppie “resistance” moms around Atlanta to this crowd of rough-handed electrical workers–go quiet and listen. In a Democratic Party divided and desperate for fresh faces, Abrams is already becoming a national star.

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People tend to remember the first time they heard Stacey Abrams speak, and it’s easy to see why. On a Friday afternoon in May, the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia is at a union hall in Augusta, telling a story about her father, a college-educated black man who was relegated by his race to working at a shipyard in southern Mississippi in the 1970s. The family had one car, so Robert Abrams would sometimes hitchhike home in the middle of the night. When he didn’t come home one time, the rest of the family set out to pick him up and found him half-frozen by the side of the road, having given his coat to a homeless man. They asked why he, a poor man on a lonely road at night, would do such a thing. And Robert said, “Because I knew you were coming for me.” This kind of moment is one reason why Abrams, 44, has a chance to become America’s first black female governor.

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“I know talent when I see it,” says Valerie Jarrett, a former top adviser to Barack Obama

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Abrams could show the wilderness-wandering Democrats a new way, says Ilyse Hogue, head of the abortion-rights group NARAL. “We’ve seen women run like men a lot, and Stacey is not doing that,” Hogue says. “The script of how you run for office has been determined for eons by white men telling everybody else what to do, and Stacey Abrams said, ‘No, thank you.'”

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Abrams’ campaign is built on the proposition that a compelling candidate can get elected in the South with a progressive message that attracts liberal whites and minorities to the polls in greater numbers.

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“If she challenged you on a point, she was going to be right,” says Carolyn Hugley, a 25-year house veteran who became one of her mentors.

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Early in her tenure, when a Republican legislator was struggling to explain the details of his own bill, she passed him a helpful note, and then another, and another. Finally he sat down next to her and let her explain it for him, she recalls. At the end of the hearing, she was the only one on the panel to vote against the bill, a minor regulatory measure. The Republican was shocked; why had she helped him? “I said, ‘Look, I think your bill is a bad idea. I just don’t think it should be bad law,'”

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In 2011, as one of the Democrats appointed to a commission to study the state’s tax system, she argued that the Republican proposal to cut income taxes while raising a sales tax on cable service would increase the amount most people paid. When the committee ignored her, she asked the chair for an electronic copy of the fiscal model used to construct the bill. “He said yes, because he did not know what that was,” she tells me with a grin. Abrams took home the data and reorganized it by income level to show that 82% of Georgia families would see their taxes go up. She organized her findings by legislative district, put it into a color-coded spreadsheet and left a copy on every desk in the house. The tax overhaul failed, and on the campaign trail Abrams can credibly boast of having single-handedly stopped the largest tax increase in Georgia history.

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Her campaign raised $2.75 million in the last quarter from over 30,000 donors; the state’s software rejected the file containing her campaign-finance report for being too large.

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Her campaign signs are popping up in affluent white suburban neighborhoods, and some early polling has shown her ahead of Kemp.

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