Stacey Abrams Says She’d Run For President

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Voting rights activist Stacey Abrams, who served as minority leader in the Georgia state House from 2011 to 2017 in addition to her outside-of-government work, has now told CBS that she “absolutely” has an “ambition” to run for president at some point. At present, Abrams — among other work — leads Fair Fight, a voting rights organization that describes its work on its website as to “promote fair elections in Georgia and around the country, encourage voter participation in elections, and educate voters about elections and their voting rights.”

Abrams framed her ambition to run for president in terms of overcoming the hurdles that Black Americans face. Asked about potentially running for the nation’s highest office at some point, Abrams pointedly commented as follows:

‘Do I hold it as an ambition? Absolutely. And even more importantly, when someone asks me if that’s my ambition, I have a responsibility to say ‘Yes,’ for every young woman, every person of color, who sees me and decides what they’re capable of based on what I think I am capable of… It’s about, you cannot have those things you refuse to dream of.’

In the meantime, Abrams has also appeared as a witness at a high-profile Senate hearing about voting rights issues, where she adeptly laid out some of the many problems with suppressive new election restrictions recently implemented in Georgia. During the hearing, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) asked for a list of specific provisions of the new Georgia legislation to which she was opposed, implicitly suggesting that the opposition was more about optics than substance.

As Abrams pointedly put it in response, discussing the legislation — it’s not about optics. As she explained:

‘It shortens the federal run-off period from nine weeks to four weeks. It restricts the time a voter can request and return an absentee ballot application. It requires that a voter have a photo identification or some other form of identification that they’re willing to surrender in order to participate in the absentee ballot process… It eliminates over 300 hours of drop box availability… It bans nearly all out-of-precinct votes, meaning that if you get to a precinct, and you are in line for four hours, and you get to the end of the line, and you are not there between 5 and 7 P.M., you have to start all over again.’

Eventually, Kennedy cut Abrams off, as though he realized that he’d given her a platform to outline exactly how the Georgia election restrictions are so damaging to democracy. Check out the interaction below: