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Stacey AbramsAmerican politician, lawyer, activist and publicist
Date of Birth: 09.12.1973
Country:  USA |
Content:
- Stacy Abrams: A Political and Activist Trailblazer
- Legal and Business Career
- Political Career
- Georgia General Assembly, 2007-2017
- 2018 Gubernatorial Campaign
- Post-Gubernatorial Election
- 2022 Gubernatorial Campaign
- Personal Life
Stacy Abrams: A Political and Activist Trailblazer
Early Life and EducationStacy Abrams was born in 1973 and raised in Mississippi. She earned her bachelor's degree in interdisciplinary studies from Spelman College in 1995. As a college student, she worked in the youth department of Mayor Maynard Jackson's Atlanta office and interned at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Abrams then pursued a Master's degree in public policy from the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, which she completed in 1998. She went on to earn her Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 1999.
Legal and Business Career
After graduating from law school, Abrams worked as a tax consultant at Sutherland Asbill & Brennan in Atlanta. She specialized in tax-exempt organizations, healthcare, and government finance.
In 2010, while a member of the Georgia General Assembly, Abrams co-founded and served as Senior Vice President of NOW Corp. (later NOW Account Network Corporation), a financial services firm. She also co-founded Nourish, Inc., a company specializing in infant and toddler beverages, and is the founder and CEO of Sage Works, a legal consulting firm that has represented clients including the Atlanta Dream of the Women's National Basketball Association.
Political Career
Abrams began her political career in 2002 when she was appointed Deputy City Attorney for Atlanta at the age of 29.
Georgia General Assembly, 2007-2017
In 2006, Abrams ran for the 89th District seat in the Georgia House of Representatives. She faced former Georgia state representative Mable Maddox and political consultant Dexter Porter in the Democratic primary. Abrams won with 51% of the vote.
In November 2010, the Democratic caucus elected Abrams Minority Leader to succeed DuBose Porter, replacing Virgil Fludd. As Minority Leader, Abrams' first major action was to work with Republican Governor Nathan Deal's administration on reforming the state's HOPE scholarship program. She supported a 2011 law that preserved HOPE but reduced the amount of grants given to Georgia students and funded a 1% low-interest student loan program.
Abrams has also been credited with single-handedly stopping the largest tax increase in Georgia's history. In 2011, Abrams argued that a Republican proposal to reduce the income tax while increasing cable TV taxes would result in a net tax increase for most. She conducted an analysis of the bill, which showed that 82% of Georgians would see a net tax increase. She left a copy of the analysis on every House member's desk, and the bill subsequently failed.
Abrams also worked with Deal on criminal justice reforms that reduced prison costs without increasing crime rates, and with Republicans on the largest state transportation funding package in history.
Abrams resigned from the General Assembly on August 25, 2017, to focus on her gubernatorial campaign.
2018 Gubernatorial Campaign
Abrams ran for Governor of Georgia in 2018. On May 22, she won the Democratic primary, becoming the first African American woman in the U.S. to be nominated for governor by a major party.
Following her primary victory, Abrams received endorsements from several high-profile figures, including former President Barack Obama.
As Georgia's Secretary of State, Brian Kemp oversaw elections and voter registration during the election. Between 2012 and 2018, Kemp's office canceled over 1.4 million voter registrations, with nearly 700,000 cancellations in 2017 alone. In a single night in July 2017, half a million voters were purged. According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, voting rights experts said it "may represent the largest mass disenfranchisement in U.S. history."[9] Kemp oversaw the purge while still Secretary of State, eight months after he announced his intention to run for governor.
An investigative journalism group led by Greg Palast found that out of approximately 534,000 Georgians whose voter registrations were canceled between 2016 and 2017, over 334,000 were still living at the addresses where they were registered. Voters were not notified that they had been purged. Palast eventually sued Kemp, alleging that more than 300,000 voters had been purged unlawfully.
By early October 2018, over 53,000 voter registration applications had been put on hold by Kemp's office, with over 75% of them affecting minority voters.
U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg found that Kemp's office violated the Help America Vote Act in the lead-up and immediate aftermath of the 2018 midterm elections. In a ruling against Kemp, Totenberg ruled that his office had violated the "Help America Vote Act."
Abrams ultimately lost the election by 50,000 votes and did not contest the results. In her concession speech, she announced the creation of Fair Fight Action, a voting rights nonprofit organization that sued the state's secretary of state and election board in federal court, alleging that they had suppressed the vote.
After her loss, Abrams has repeatedly stated that the election was unfair, arguing that Brian Kemp had a conflict of interest as Secretary of State and suppressed voter turnout by purging nearly 670,000 voter registrations in 2017, and that nearly 53,000 voters were waiting to be registered at the polls a month before the election. She has said, "I do not have empirical evidence that I would have won. But I do have legal proof that the process was not fair."
Post-Gubernatorial Election
On January 29, 2019, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced that Abrams would deliver the Democratic response to the State of the Union address on February 5. She was the first African American woman to deliver the rebuttal, and the first and only non-incumbent to do so since the State of the Union (SOTU) response began in 1966.
On April 30, 2019, Abrams announced that she would not run for U.S. Senate in 2020, feeling it was necessary to focus on ending voter suppression.
On August 17, 2019, Abrams launched Fair Fight 2020 to provide financial and technical assistance to Democrats in building voter protection teams in 20 states. Abrams serves as the chair of Fair Fight 2020.
During the 2020 presidential primaries, Abrams actively promoted herself for consideration as Joe Biden's vice presidential nominee. Biden later included Abrams on his short list for the position. Kamala Harris was officially announced as Biden's running mate on August 11, 2020. Abrams was selected as one of 17 speakers to give a prime-time keynote address at the 2020 Democratic National Convention.
Following Biden's victory in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, The New York Times and The Washington Post credited Abrams with significantly increasing Democratic turnout in Georgia and estimated that she helped register 800,000 new voters.
2022 Gubernatorial Campaign
On December 1, 2021, Abrams announced that she would run for Governor of Georgia again. If she wins the Democratic nomination, she will likely face a rematch with Kemp. The election will be held on November 8, 2022.
Personal Life
Abrams is the second of six children born to the Reverend Carolyn and the Reverend Robert Abrams Sr., who are from Mississippi. Her siblings include Andrea Abrams, U.S. District Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner, Richard Abrams, Walter Abrams, and Jeanine Abrams McLean.
In April 2018, Abrams wrote an op-ed for Fortune in which she disclosed that she owed $54,000 in federal taxes and had $174,000 in credit card and student loan debt.[80] She was making installment payments to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on a payment plan after defaulting on her 2015 and 2016 taxes, which she says were needed to pay for her family's medical bills. During the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election, she loaned her own campaign $50,000. As of 2019, she had finished paying off her IRS debt in addition to other outstanding credit card and student loan debts reported during the gubernatorial campaign.
