Stacey Abrams: “Either You’re a Patriot or You’re Not”

This election season is such an intense stress test. So much is at stake, and with early voting underway in many battleground states, time is of the essence for the candidates’ ground game. But also underway are efforts by Republicans to suppress voting rights before Election Day and sow chaos after.

Americans are on the edge of a precipice, says voting rights activist Stacey Abrams, where what’s in danger is democracy, and a lot more people are ready to retreat and move back toward sanity. “We have the ability to say we have seen what the other side looks like, what the fall looks like,” she says. “We want to return to the time when this country held its leadership accountable, valued its people, and granted autonomy and civil rights as a matter of course, and not as an exception.”

Abrams, who served in the Georgia state House of Representatives for a decade and ran for governor twice, was on the latest episode of Inside the Hive to discuss Kamala Harris’s chances this November inside the swing state and her plans this election cycle to help salvage democracy. Abrams’s playbook and organizing power in 2020 helped Joe Biden deliver Georgia—a red, now purple, state that hadn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in nearly 20 years—and a trifecta in Washington with the state’s 2021 runoffs. Part of her strategy in the state has been to find voters who wouldn’t otherwise turn out and encourage people to participate in the democratic process even if they don’t plan to vote for the Democrat. “We talked to people who had been excluded from or ignored by the political process,” says Abrams. “For many of them, they said it was the first time someone asked them to show up. We also went to places that weren’t going to vote for us, but where they needed to hear from us.”

The changing demography in the US also means that more people who traditionally have been excluded are now demanding inclusion and demanding access, says Abrams. Republicans “are really good at naming things that don’t actually mean what they say.” For instance, they’ll outlaw food and water while you’re waiting in line to vote and call it “election security.” Her self-proclaimed mandate is to ensure access isn’t impeded amid GOP voter suppression efforts. Voter ID is nothing that has ever been debated, she says. “We are not arguing the premise of showing who you are. What we are arguing is requiring such complex compliance that it becomes impossible for certain voters,” Abrams says, citing a myriad of laws across the country obstructing marginalized groups of Americans from their right to vote.

Donald Trump and his allies also appear to be setting the stage to spew chaos after the election as they did in 2020, but Abrams notes that Trump is just an avatar, “the figurehead for an entire apparatus that has covered this entire country.” Regardless of the outcome of this election, she warns, the people disassembling democracy will still be around. “Either you’re a patriot or you’re not. And that means that we can’t tie everything simply to Trump,” she says. “He may have been the instigator. But he is not the sole implementer.”

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