The U.S. Capital. Photo courtesy of Darren Halstead/Unsplash.
Unlike many politicians who have lost big races, Stacey Abrams has made it clear that she isn’t leaving the national spotlight any time soon. One of those rare politicians whose stock has actually risen after a defeat (think Beto O’Rourke), Abrams is becoming a leading voice of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing. Since her defeat in Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial race to her Republican opponent, Brian Kemp, by a 50.2% to 48.8% margin, Abrams has emerged as an outspoken critic of voter suppression — which she attributes to her opponent’s slim margin of victory. She has received public attention for refusing to concede the race and, instead, forming a political action committee dedicated to pushing for changes in Georgia’s elections system. In the latest indication of her rising star power, Abrams made history as the first African-American woman to deliver the Democratic response to a State of the Union address when she spoke to the nation after President Trump addressed the U.S. Congress earlier this year.“Let’s be clear: Voter suppression is real,” Abrams asserted in Atlanta where she was surrounded by supporters as she delivered her response. “From making it harder to register and stay on the rolls to moving and closing polling places to rejecting lawful ballots, we can no longer ignore these threats to democracy.”
Abrams delivered this same compelling message to another very different audience — a group of leading historians — on April 5 during an invitation-only conversation in Philadelphia moderated by Connecticut College Professor Jim Downs. The program was attended by several Conn students as well as major media organizations like The New York Times, which also reported on the event. Joining Downs and Abrams were historians Carol Anderson, Heather Cox Richardson, Heather Ann Thompson, and Kevin M. Kruse. Anderson has gained widespread recognition for her book White Rage, which earned her the National Book Critics Award in 2016; Richardson co-hosts the NPR podcast “Freak Out and Carry On”; Thompson is the recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in History; and Kruse has attracted substantial attention for his Twitter threads that contextualize timely political issues. The talk will be published next year by the University of Georgia Press as part of its new History in the Headlines series.
Downs began by asking participants to share their own early memories of voting. Kruse recalled voting for Gerald Ford in a preschool mock presidential election because Ford, like his father, played golf. Richardson recounted having opted against voting in the 1980 presidential election and thereafter needing to process President Reagan’s victory. Abrams imparted that voting for her has been a family affair–even before she herself was old enough to vote. As a child, she and her six siblings would travel with their parents to the polling station and watch them personally engage in democracy. The strength of her political convictions was apparent as early as the second grade when she actually had a “physical altercation” with a classmate who had labeled candidate Jimmy Carter a communist. “I got into my first fight–Democrat versus Republican,” she observed. A fight, Abrams noted with apparent satisfaction, that “I won.”
During the nearly two-hour program, the panel of historians defined voter suppression as policies directed at specific populations intended to prevent voting or to increase the challenges faced in exercising voting rights. To the panel, the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which invalidated portions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, has precipitated subtle yet pernicious barriers to the ballot box. Most conspicuous have been state-level efforts like voter ID laws or cutbacks in the availability of early voting, which critics say disproportionately affect minorities and the poor. Less evident, but often just as contentious, have been numerous voting changes enacted at the local level by counties and towns across the South and elsewhere around the country.
In Sparta, Georgia, for example, the Board of Elections and Registration that oversees elections systematically questioned the voter registrations of more than 180 of its black citizens in 2016. The board dispatched deputies bearing summonses that commanded these black citizens to appear in person to prove their residence or face losing their voting rights. Abrams directly attributed the treatment of black Georgians to the relaxed federal oversight of elections ushered in by the Shelby decision. “The fact that you can have a divergent democracy within each state–that’s a problem,” she contended.
Moving to a discussion of the 2016 presidential election, Thompson insisted that historically marginalized groups remain politically engaged–even if they tend to vote less often than their more privileged peers. “In the election, there was all this talk about how white voter turnout is up and black voter turnout is down. We somehow confuse [turnout] with who cares about the race,” she observed. This year alone, nearly six million African-American citizens are disenfranchised. In Kentucky, 25% of African-Americans lack the vote. Thompson holds these citizens out as examples of “voters who you literally don’t see but are immediately assumed to be apathetic.”
In a question directed to Abrams, Downs asked how she had reached the decision to end her campaign for governor without actually conceding. Abrams recalled that, even into the early hours following election night, The AP had not yet called the race. She believes that Andrew Gillum–the Democrat running for governor of Florida last November–received “bad advice” when he conceded his race despite allegations of voter suppression. Abrams says she “could not even say the word [concede] out loud” when she heard Gillum deliver his concession speech. The use of the word concession, she believes, confers legitimacy to an election. “Politicians are supposed to be stoic,” Abrams articulated. “They are supposed to stiffen their backs when [the system] is beating them. I was not going to do that with an election speech.”
Abrams urged the historians and journalists in the room to use their platforms to correct faulty narratives that circulate about disenfranchised populations. “Part of the historical challenge is that there aren’t a lot of moments when you don’t have to call into question the whole of democracy to say that the process may not have been valid,” Ms. Abrams stressed. “The candidates who are either the victims or benefactors [of voter suppression] are disinclined to say anything because our culture– which I think historians can help us recast–says asking the question in itself diminishes our democracy.”
