Harry Litman [00:00:07]: Welcome to Talking Feds. I'm Harry Litman. Today, we present another in our series of interviews of prominent political figures in the mix to be presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's running mate. And we're really pleased to have the opportunity to talk with Stacey Abrams. Abrams, of course, burst onto the national scene during the highly contested 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race, where she built a broad coalition of voters, the likes of which Georgia had never seen, but came up just short to Republican Brian Kemp amid allegations of voter suppression. Since then, she's remained visible on the national scene, delivering the Democrat's response last year to the State of the Union and starting three separate public policy organizations. And three weeks ago, she published our Time Is Now Power, Purpose and the Fight for a Fair America. It's a remarkable book that is at once a personal memoir, a scholarly account of the slow and staggered march of voting rights in the United States since the Civil War and a blueprint for Democrats to increase the franchise going forward. Abrams has a long history of civic engagement dating to her teens. She registered people to vote before old enough herself to do so. She served as the minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives, a deputy city attorney of Atlanta, a tax attorney, an entrepreneur, and an author of 10 books, including eight romance novels under the name SalinaMontgomery. That latter experience shows in the prose in Our Time is Now, which is assured, nuanced and occasionally soaring. Stacey Abrams, welcome to Talking Feds.
Stacey Abrams [00:01:53]: Thank you so much. I appreciate being invited.
Harry Litman [00:01:56]: I'd really like to try to focus on the book, which I say has several facets. Let's start toward the end, which contains your detailed prescription does the final section for growing the base of Democratic voters. Republicans have for some time used the term identity politics as a kind of code for bean counting and singular focus on race and gender. You embrace the term and seek to restore it to its good connotations and kind of historical use. Can you explain?
Stacey Abrams [00:02:28]: Certainly. The original phrase identity politics was coined by black women who wanted to speak about the intersection of race and gender and how their opportunities were either advantaged or more often disadvantaged by their participation in politics. And so when you expand out that lens, identity politics is nothing more revolutionary than saying, I want to be seen. I want to be heard. And I want those who are elected to lead me to understand the barriers to my participation and to be willing to work to fix them.
Harry Litman [00:03:04]: And you see those barriers it sounds like in part, as a matter not just of individual weapons, but rather as a matter of impediments directed at identities, identities of race, which, as you note, is the strongest predictor of political affiliation and identities of gender and the like. Is that fair?
Stacey Abrams [00:03:26]: It not only is it fair, but it's historical. We have as a nation engaged in identity politics from our inception. I mean, the founding documents of our nation questioned the humanity of Blacks, made Native Americans invisible, silenced women, and then through the Naturalization Act of 1790, said that any new comers would be suspect and the likelihood of their joining as citizens was going to be made privy to this very rigorous analysis of whether they seemed like the right kind of people. And so our politics from the beginning have leveraged identity to determine who had full citizenship and who did not. And therefore, I find it deeply disingenuous that in the 21st century we suddenly recoil from this idea that identity has some bearing on how we behave since our nation has been spending the last 240 years trying to remedy in particular the laws that we put in place to limit access based on identity. [57.8s]
Harry Litman [00:04:25]: Well, so is it your sense that, in fact, everybody or what-- let's cut to the chase Republicans engage in identity politics? They just do it under cover of a different name?
Stacey Abrams [00:04:37]: Yes. They call it patriotism. [00:04:39]I mean, that's fundamentally the challenge. They seek to appropriate this idea that there is a generic identity of American and that it should not be hyphenated or at all investigated because we are all just American. But when you look beneath the surface, what they mean is that American is typically a white male prerogative and everything radiates from that fulcrum. And the problem is, even that narrative is flawed and it's disingenuous because there has never been this prototypical person, as I talk about in the book, the working class white guy in Kansas might be married to an Ethiopian refugee and their daughter might be--they might be lesbian daughters who are married now living in Georgia. I mean, we've got to have this broader understanding about the complexity of our society. And this notion that anything that questions that very disentangled notion of what it means to be an American ignores why we are so good at being who we are. And my response is that rather than letting ourselves be pulled into this defensive posture where we have to explain why identity is real and true and an important marker, we should embrace how it helps us be better at what we do. It is why we have an Americans with Disabilities Act. It is why we were willing to take the steps necessary in the Supreme Court just this year to include the LGBTQ community and the Civil Rights Act. It's why we have civil rights laws to begin with, because there isn't the single strand identity. And it is mythological, in fact, is a lie to say we do.
Harry Litman [00:06:15]: Yeah, I mean, you make an important historical point it seems to me. Now identity politics centers around arguably hot button characterizations of race, sex, gender, sexual orientation. And yet, if you were a student in American political history 101, you would study the labor movement of the 19th and 20th century, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement and all those really were historic exercises in identity politics under perhaps a different name.
Stacey Abrams [00:06:46]: Exactly.
Harry Litman [00:06:47]: You consciously put today's efforts in terms of what reminded me of what New Yorker editor David Remnick calls the Joshua generation in contrast to the Moses generation. That is your account of the ongoing impediments draws a distinction between the tools employed in your grandmother's day. When, as you tell, earlier in the book she was literally afraid to exercise her constitutional rights. And today, what seems more like obstacles of these labyrinthine set of tools and regulation. You say in the book Americans need a robust understanding of what voter suppression looks like today. Well, what does it look like? Does it look like one thing?
Stacey Abrams [00:07:29]: Not at all. The architecture of voter suppression has three facets. Can you register and stay on the rolls? Can you cast a ballot? And does your ballot get counted? Registration and staying on the rolls is the point of entry to participation in our democracy. And we have to understand that Americans have become inured to this notion that the way we do it isn't odd. We are one of the few democratized industrialized nations that actually requires each individual citizen to investigate how to become a participating citizen, depending on where they live. [30.8s]
Harry Litman [00:08:01]: Is that right? What would be the typical model in another, you say, in Western Europe?
Stacey Abrams [00:08:05]: Most nations automatically register all their voters. You can seek to be taken off the list, but you are by your citizenship added to the list and your changes are simply administrative updates. That's not the proof of concept that we have to go through in too many states in the country that we do today. And so if you if I live in California or Washington State, I'm automatically added to the rolls. If I live in Mississippi, I've got to go through processes. I live in Florida. They made it so difficult to be added to the rules that the League of Women Voters, for the first time in 100 years, refused to register voters there because they were so afraid of the consequences of voter registration efforts. And the reality is, if I live in one county in Georgia and I moved to another county, I've got to update my registration, which may have some baseline rationale. But if I don't remember to do it twenty nine days before an election, then I am completely pushed out of the process and it's illegal for me to go back to where I was before I moved because I'd missed the cutoff date. And if I live in a different state, it may be a week or it may be forty five days. And I then have to become not simply a citizen, but an expert in election law in order to participate in the fundamental processes of democracy.
Harry Litman [00:09:18]: True. Well, let me ask I mean, do you see these various and sundry impediments in different states as generally speaking, part of a concerted strategy to suppress more often than not, the Democratic vote? Or are they just a happenstance obstacle course that we've been, we all have to run.
Stacey Abrams [00:09:37]: Voter suppression has existed as long as this country has. And the original manifestation was that we set this national notion of democracy, but then we delegated to the states, the administration of the process. So let's take that into consideration. The second issue is, can you cast a ballot? Well, one of the ways that in previous decades people were prevented from casting a ballot was poll taxes and literacy tests. Most people think of literacy tests as the province of the South because they perfected it.
Harry Litman [00:10:05]: Yeah.
Stacey Abrams [00:10:05]: But, they started in the northeast. The original literacy tests were used to keep European immigrants who were considered undesirable from being able to participate in elections. It was designed to suppress the vote and push people out of the process using administrative tools. And so one of the pieces of voter suppression and the original sin is that our nation was never designed to allow citizens to actually speak. That's why at our inception, white men who owned land were the only ones who were actually permitted to vote. And it has taken for constitutional amendments and the Voting Rights Act to enlarge it to the space where you at least have the right, if not the ability. And the targets have been, by law, people of color, young people and it tends to disadvantage the poor because in the 21st century, most of the laverntine rules tend to require you have the finances to either navigate those rules, to meet those obligations or to defend your right and get someone to grant them to you again.
Harry Litman [00:11:07]: Yeah. Now, as you say, we've got all kinds of different stratagems and laws and regulations and we can't go through them all. But you spend a fair bit of time talking about one Supreme Court decision, Shelby County vs. Holder, which essentially scrapped the most important provision of the Voting Rights Act by effectively negating the core mechanism for preventing voter suppression. This is hard, but if you had a single silver bullet for everything that's that's out there that you could reverse over the last 10 years, is that what you would use it for?
Stacey Abrams [00:11:44]: Absolutely. We need to restore the Voting Rights Act and expand its penumbra to cover every state that has behaved in a fashion that has interceded with the right to vote. There are some states that do a really good job and they have corrected most of the mechanisms used to undermine the right to vote. Anyone else should be subject to preclearance.
Harry Litman [00:12:01]: OK, let's talk for just a minute about third party registration because you cited as indispensable. But it's also the device that Republicans especially seize on to allege, at least a theoretical possibility of some kind of fraud. And in the very, very, very, very, very few instances of documented fraud, I think it does seem to be a kind of a culprit. You call it, though, the gateway to participation. Third party registration. Can you explain?
Stacey Abrams [00:12:34]: Well, as I said, we are one of the few nations that requires the individual action of a citizen to get on the rolls. And the challenge is that registration is not because it's not automatic you have to know what the rules are depending on where you live. And often when we find that people have unlawfully registered, it was not out of malice or fraud. It was out of confusion. And so one of the best antidotes to the likelihood that people will be confused by the process is to have experts help them register. We know that for communities that have been traditionally disenfranchized, voter registration through third parties are the most effective way to engage them. You're twice as likely to participate if you're invited by a third party who walks you through the process, helps you navigate the obstacles and make certain that you get on the rolls. And that is why Republicans have dramatically attacked that in the last 20 years. Now, prior to this, that really wasn't that big a deal. But as more and more people of color got added to the rolls in states that were not used to that level of diversity or that level of participation, we have seen a concomitant increase in the attacks on those processes. When Florida added those rules, it was because Florida voted in 2008 for Barack Obama and you saw a raft of laws that followed. The same thing has happened in Wisconsin and in Texas. And as I point out in great detail, in the state of Georgia. My opponent in the 2018 election, we had our first public spat over a third party voter registration effort that, as he put it, was registering too many people of color.
Harry Litman [00:14:05]: That's right. And also, people point out the many newer participants, at least for Obama, as a proof that somehow suppression isn't a problem. Let's try to zero in on a whole other big chunk of the problem that is basically unrelated to malevolent suppression devices. And you talk about it. In fact, it's something that you notably were able to overcome in your own campaign when that's the lassitude of potential Democratic voters, especially college students. As a Democrat, I'm often want to tear my hair out because they seem enthused, they're on Twitter and then they just don't show up on Election Day. When you achieved really notable success there, you had almost two million voters on Election Day, which is the highest number of Democratic votes in history, with really noteworthy spikes among certain groups. So this is a complicated story, of course, in a book in itself. But here is my question again. If I had to put to you one bigger problem and no punting here unless you truly don't know. Is it the apathy or lassitude of potential Democratic voters like college students or the array of impediments erected by state governments that is in hardcore number terms the bigger problem and challenge for Democrats?
Stacey Abrams [00:15:24]: Yes.
Harry Litman [00:15:26]: No fair. OK, go ahead.
Stacey Abrams [00:15:28]: We have to remember that these aren't standalone issues. These are intertwined. If there is a system that distance and advises your participation and when you try to participate, you face these disincentives, then your likelihood of trying again is going to be diminished. The corallary is that it's actually also a challenge that's posed by campaigns themselves, which do great lip service to critiquing young people for not participating, critiquing communities that don't participate, but then do nothing to actually warrent to their engagement.
Harry Litman [00:15:57]: Like what?
Stacey Abrams [00:15:58]: Is insufficient to say that I want you to vote for me because I care about you. But I'm not going to talk about any of the issues that animate you. I'm going to run a pablum campaign that is going to talk about things in such generic and middle aged terms that you see no incentive for your participation. If you don't have a campaign, for example, our campaign we talked about criminal justice reform. We talked about health care access. We talked about the environment, but not in these esoteric terms, but in real conversational terms about what it means. If you are a young person who has been arrested, if you have a record, you are now no longer eligible for Pell Grants, which means your future has ended because of this arrest and conviction. Your ability to get a job. Your ability to navigate and get capital if you decide to start a small business. So let's not just talk about what the challenges. Let's talk about what the consequences are, because that's how you get young people engaged. Middle aged people may not need all of this information because they've already experienced it, but if we want young people to vote, we have to connect the dots. And that means we have to actually talk about the issues in a way that actually meets them where they are in the cycle of the social contract. And so what we did differently was that we had all of these conversations. And I had them, whether it no matter how old you were, no matter what generation you were from, no matter what race you were, no matter what region you lived in. We went to all one hundred and fifty nine counties and we increased turnout across the board with every single metric.
Harry Litman [00:17:26]: Yeah, it's a really interesting point. I think you have at least the glimmer of these conversations during primary season. But then on the national scene, when the candidate turns to just trying to contrast herself or himself with the Republican nominee, it does seem to tack toward the center and a much more kind of pablum, make no mistake, approach. I want to ask you about one other feature that we put up with, even as it's frustrating. And yet every time I see it, it strikes me as completely scandalous, completely unacceptable for 2020. How in the hell does it happen that year in, year out we'll see at 10 p.m. in lower income neighborhoods, these lines stretching out of people who've been waiting for four or five hours, while in nearby more affluent communities you stroll in and out? How do you fix that? And it's amazing that it's just that it crops up again and again now. What's what's going on?
Stacey Abrams [00:18:26]: So one challenge is the challenge of polling place closures. And it's one of the reasons I talk about that in such depth. When you close a polling place for someone with a car and someone with a flexible schedule, it's no big deal. But if you rely on public transit, if you are a shift worker when the polling place is a mile from you, shuts down and you have to travel three miles and that new location is not on the route, or you don't learn about the closure until you are at the front of the two hour line you were standing in. And now it's too late to make it across town to the place you were supposed to go because you were never given notice. It makes it impossible to vote. So it's one the convenience of location matters. When convenience is one of the prerequisites for your participation. Number two, it is the complexity of the rules. Because of the labyrinth of rules in some states for how you get on the rolls, how you stay on the rolls, you may not know all of the things you were supposed to do because you didn't have to do it in the last place you voted and you didn't think to order the election law book for the state you now live in. Number three, it is an underresourced thing. There is a traditional belief that communities of color and especially low income communities are not going to participate. And so the investment that should be made is not only not made, but there's actually a disinvestment and there is an under resourcing of staffing, of training and equipment. And when there is the participation levels that candidates have been pushing for, when it's actually realized the locations can't meet the moment, and thus you see these long lines, long lines are not a signal of enthusiasm. It's a signal of the breakdown and the ineffectiveness of the administration of elections. And that is a problem, and that should be something we bemoan. Never something we celebrate.
Harry Litman [00:20:11]: Yeah, I mean, in a business or or whatever would be considered intolerable. All right. One more question about the book. You write, I think provocatively, that you no longer believe there is a bright line between domestic and foreign policy. Can you spell that out a little for us?
Stacey Abrams [00:20:28]: Certainly. When I started my most public phase of my life, when I was a grad school or just about to start grad school, and I was having a conversation with a friend about my focus on domestic policy because that is what was driving me. And he challenged me to understand how important foreign policy was. One as an absolute because we live in a global society and ignorance is especially for someone who wanted to be part of the national conversation, was inexcusable. Two, there are things to be learned from how other nations address challenges and what they are doing that could cause challenges for us.
Stacey Abrams [00:21:06]: And three, that as a leader, as the leader, the United States is obligated to to be good at what we do, to be good at democracy, to be good at the administration, not only have elections, but the administration of government. And in this current moment, the rise of authoritarianism is a direct challenge to the legitimacy of democracy. And incompetence is what is, I think, causing the greatest harm to us. And so the bright line that said that we could ignore what was happening over there was a race long ago. And for me, I've been I've spent the last twenty five years trying to make sure I understood the wholeness of policy, recognizing that domestic and foreign are often intertwined, that what happens to farmers in Georgia and Iowa is directly related to the weather patterns in China. [53.9s]
Harry Litman [00:22:01]: I guess you see this and this has really elevated in the age of Trump, but also Boris Johnson and Turkey and a new cadre of kind of authoritarian leaders that seem to be.
Stacey Abrams [00:22:13]: I wouldn't put Boris Johnson in the authoritarian regime. I mean, I think he likes to flirt, but he has never taken those real steps. But I would point to Erdogan in Turkey. I would point to in under Modi and I would put to Orban in Hungary. To Duarte in the Philippines. And what's happening in Indonesia and what's happening with gyroball scenario down in Brazil, although there re democratization luckily empowered their states enough that he has been unable to bring to fruition his goals. But he's trying really hard.
Harry Litman [00:22:43]: Is there a policy issue you feel passionate about-- you've taken sort of so much in and you synthesize so many different aspects of politics and civil society--that you're passionate about, but you're never really asked about it?
Stacey Abrams [00:22:56]: I laughed because what drives me is poverty. I think poverty is immoral. I think it's economically inefficient. I think it is too often the instrument of oppression. And my responsibility is to understand the complexity of how it exists, how it's sustained and how good public policy can serve to dismantle it. But that means I have to be willing to think about and talk about criminal justice and environmental justice, to talk about trade policy, that I need to be well versed in all of these different spheres because they all implicate this core narrative in this core mission. And the challenge for me in itself, it's self-imposed. I want to fix a really big problem. So my responsibility is to be as well versed in as many facets of how our society operates, how our global economy operates as possible. And so for me, the challenges that I'm often relegated to this one singular issue of voting and voting is important to me, not because of the act itself, but because what the the power of the act determines. I care about voting because you cannot solve the challenges of justice, of equity, of poverty. If the right to vote isn't real. And that's why I talked about the census and all these other pieces. But I've become this voting rights activist, as though the vote is the thing as opposed to what the vote represents and what the vote makes real.
Harry Litman [00:24:26]: One last question. This is really so people who listen get a better sense of you as a person than a policy maker. But on the possibility of the vice presidential nomination, you've shown really immense and manifold strengths as a campaigner, as sort of a thinker of domestic issues. The rap that you get when people have these compendia is the ability to step into office for Biden, who will be the oldest president ever as of the day he takes office. So obviously it's a big concern. So what's your answer to those folks who want to know you would be ready to be commander in chief in a heartbeat?
Stacey Abrams [00:25:07]: I think, first of all, Joe Biden will be president on day one and day two, and he is a robust and vital man who will be the president of the United States and that is why I support his candidacy. And that is why I want to see him lead our nation. If I were so privileged as to be selected as his lieutenant, I would point that titles do not tell us what a person is capable of. Their actions, their capacity and their competencey. I have run organizations. I have built campaigns. I've also built institutions. I have the executive skills and I have the legislative skills. I was not elected in easy campaigns. I yes, I won the primary to become the state legislator, but my job was to negotiate with Republicans every single day and we were good at it. We got a lot done under my leadership and I ran a fairly aggressive and very effective campaign in a red state that is now purple leaning blue because I helped build the institutional capacity of Democrats in our state to be not only competitive, but to be ready to win. And so I am good at learning. I am good at execution. And most importantly, there is only one person who has had this job. And I know that Joe Biden is going to make the decision he feels is best for him. But I would not answer the question in the affirmative if I did not believe I was capable of doing the work.
Harry Litman [00:26:32]: Stacey Abrams, thanks very much for spending some time today with Talking Feds. We really appreciate it.
Stacey Abrams [00:26:38]: Thank you.
Harry Litman [00:26:43]: Thank you very muchStacey abrams for joining us. In this latest in our series of interviews with prospective running mates for presumed Democratic nominee for President Joe Biden. Our next regular episode will be Monday, when a stellar panel will join me to analyze the latest flurry of Supreme Court opinions. That will be Dahlia Lithwick, Ron Klain and the dean of American constitutional law himself, Laurence Tribe. And you can check us out also on Patreon where we post exclusive material for subscribers. This week alone, we've published five one on one discussions on interesting and diverse topics, including Hong Kong and Florida. Thanks for tuning in. Talking Feds is a production of Deledio LLC. I'm Harry Litman, See you next time.
