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of Representatives, where she worked on education and tax issues. After four years,
she became the House minority leader, leading her Democratic peers in policy work.
Yet again, she was the first Black person and the first woman to be appointed to
the position.

WhAt’s ON HER AgeNDA

Black people have long had to fight for their right to vote in the United States. Some
early voting rights activists were murdered, including Lamar Smith, the Reverend
George Lee, and Herbert Lee—all from Mississippi, one of Abrams’s home states.
So it’s no surprise that she has long been concerned about voter suppression. An
organization she founded while serving in the House of Representatives, the New
Georgia Project, registered two hundred thousand voters of color in two years.
When she decided to run for governor in the 2018 election, she was right to be
worried about getting a fair election. Abrams’s opponent Brian Kemp was Georgia’s
secretary of state, in charge of overseeing the gubernatorial election! He had been
criticized for failing to properly secure 6 million Georgia voters’ personal information
and faced a lawsuit for incorrectly nullifying some 340,000 voter registrations.
Former president Jimmy Carter said that if Kemp kept his seat even while running for
governor, then this was a clear conflict of interest. He called for Kemp’s resignation
before the election, but Kemp ignored Carter’s advice, citing other elected officials
who had not resigned while running for higher office.
On Election Day, many were horrified at what they saw as widespread voter
suppression. Over two hundred polling places were closed. Many majority-Black
and low-income precincts—the exact areas with the highest concentration of Abrams
supporters—found themselves without the proper number of voting machines.
Thousands more voters arrived to find that their names had been wrongly flagged as
inconsistent or incorrect.
Abrams wound up losing by only 54,000 votes. Given the large numbers of those
who had been unable to cast their vote, she questioned the legitimacy of the election
results. She had won 1.9 million votes—surpassing any other Democratic candidate in
the state’s history. After her call for a runoff was rejected, she gave a speech to end
her campaign. In it, she made it clear that she was not in agreement with the election
results. “Democracy failed Georgians,” she said. In 2019 her organization Fair
Fight Action sued the Georgia Board of Elections over the voter suppression tactics
employed in her election. Abrams was still intent on righting the system’s wrongs.
It’s not every day that you see a politician launched into the national spotlight
by a high-profile election loss, but Abrams’s resolve led to just that. There has been
much speculation about whether she would run for a US Senate seat, make another

She Represents 12