🔰Stacey Abrams: Why Republicans Are 'Hysterical' About Suppressing The Vote | The ReidOut | MSNBC

By one of the women leading the fight against such laws, Stacey Abrams, the founder of Fair Fight. And, you know, Stacey, it is breathtaking to see just the breadth and the number of laws and ways that Republicans are throwing bricks in front of voters. And I wonder if when you look at it as somebody who's been a politician, who's been an elected official, is this more straight up just sort of racist attempts to reconfigure the electorate or is it more GOTV? Because part of me thinks that at least some of it is GOTV, an attempt to get their voters to vote at all because their voters no longer believe in the system because they don't always get their way. I actually think it's more of an existential panic and cowardice and laziness. What they realized in the last election was that a confluence of possibilities came into being. Communities of color that had largely not fully recognized their power became part of the electorate. Young people who had largely kept themselves at a more diminished capacity participated in elections. And because of COVID, more Americans, especially those Americans who were the most vulnerable and disadvantaged, understood that there were alternatives for participating in elections. And they did so. And rather than confront and grapple with what it means to have a more engaged and expanded electorate, they are instead working as hard as they can to not only throw up those bricks, but also to, to your point, to use this GOTV strategy to create a new boogeyman for their own people, for their constituents. But at the same time, they're expressing their hostility towards those communities that changed the outcome in 2020 and 2021. And those are largely communities of color. And so racial animus is absolutely a part of it. But I think overall, it's an existential crisis and an existential panic that is leading to the tactic that has worked well for so many other parties, and that is voter suppression. You know, what's so fascinating is that, you know, as a country, we're sort of trying to modernize everything, right? We've made it easier to watch movies. You can just get Netflix. We've made it easier to do everything. We try to. And voting was going in that direction. One of my favorite parts of your exchange and that the hearing was all fascinating with Senator Kennedy was when you said they did 15 years of vote by mail and thought there was nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with it. And it's convenient until black people use it. And then they said, oh, we got to get rid of that. You know, I mean, so it's in a sense, I'm going to show you some polling automatically registering all eligible citizens to vote. Sixty one percent of people agree with that, allowing convicted felons to vote after they've served their sentences. Seventy percent requiring government issued photo ID. OK, 76 percent want that making early in-person voting available for at least two weeks. Those things that that go to convenience other than the I.D. part are popular with most voters writ large. Things that are unpopular are the things they did in Georgia. Only a third support allowing the state to take over these county election offices. Only 30 percent support a ban on giving out food. Going on and on and on. Seventy two percent believe the laws are just about Trump. At some point, is there a diminishing return in your view to what Republicans are doing where they make it so hard that even their own voters get constricted from voting and they start to lose among independents and others who say you're gone too far? And I think they are reaching that inflection point today in Arizona. We saw the rejection of SB 1485, which had the exact purpose of eliminating their permanent early voting list. And it was going to disproportionately harm communities of color. But apparently they realized that their voters are on the list, too, and they risk the likelihood of losing access to voters. But the challenge I see and the reason federal legislation is so necessary is that we don't know what that inflection point is in every single state. And as long as states have the ability to engage in voter suppression, to react to communities of color, increasing their participation by putting up these barriers, then we are all in danger and our democracy is in danger. And, you know, I think hysteria is not too strong a word to talk about the way Republicans seem to feel right about electorates of color who demographically are just coming. You know, five year olds are already in a majority nonwhite world. And so there is a hysteria, but I wonder if on the Democratic side, there's not enough alarm. We're still seeing people like Kyrsten Sinema not in favor of removing the filibuster to put a federal law in place that would stop this. And I wonder if you think that there's not enough urgency on the pro-democracy side at this moment. Well, I will say that Senator Sinema has actually co-sponsored S-1, which is the For the People Act. And Senator Manchin has signaled that he is interested in and understands the importance of voting rights. He was secretary of state in West Virginia. He was governor in West Virginia. And so I think that there is an understanding. I think this is a broader conversation about how to make this urgency converted into action. But I do think that where we stand today is a vast difference than where we were in 2016, 2018, when voter suppression was really picking up steam and we were still trying to convince people that they could use that language out loud and create change. What we saw happen in Georgia in 2020 and again in 2021 has indeed led to hysteria from Republicans. But the reaction should not be to hold on to power by diminishing the power of citizenship. It should be let us evaluate our policies and do our best to convince these voters that they can join us. Voters of color are just like any other voter. We will pick the people who will represent us best and deliver for our needs. And what we have failed to see from Republicans is a willingness to confront that reality and adjust accordingly. And so instead, we're seeing voter suppression, which is the coward's tactic when it comes to winning elections. I want to ask you about Georgia specifically, because one of the things that I feel that Republicans, I mean, 306 bills, part of it feels like they're trying to exhaust the nonwhite electorate, exhaust the liberal white electorate and say, we're just going to exhaust you with just throwing so much at you. How exhausted do you feel Georgia voters are at this point? They've already essentially delivered an election, you know, to Joe Biden, two Senate seats. And now people are going to go back to them again and say, you want to keep Warnock in there? You got to go back again. You want to get rid of, you know, Margie, the QAnon lady green. You got to go back in there. There's so much on Georgia's plate right now. How much exhaustion do you think? And also there might have a governor's race with maybe you in it, my friend. How much exhaustion do you think has kicked in in your home state? I think there is resignation. They were voters were exhausted in twenty eighteen when we had hours long lines and when we had a secretary of state who with impunity took over, you know, conducted his own election for governor. We had exhaustion in twenty twenty. We had exhaustion in twenty twenty one as we had to fight over and over again to make certain that votes were cast and counted after eight hour lines in June of twenty twenty. But what is so remarkable about Georgia's electorate, about voters of color in particular, is that that exhaustion has been met with success and victory as a way of reinvigorating you and preparing you to stay in the fight. And we've seen the Asian-American community suffer this horrific attack. You know, obviously we've seen ongoing police brutality issues. There's still cases that are open there. And these communities are facing these multiple stressors. Right. And I'm wondering how you think that winds up intersecting as people like you from Fair Fight and others are coming in and saying, get back and get into the political process. Well, one of the most important ways to engage voters, there is absolutely the responsibility of registration, but it's connecting the dots. It's making certain, as we saw with these horrific murders, that if we do not have the right people in power, then they will not stop men from murdering women of color. If we do not have the right people in power, they will not take action to protect our environment. If we do not have the right people in power, district attorneys will not charge and police officers will be left to immunize themselves from accountability for their actions. What we are seeing happening, especially in Georgia, is that people are connecting the dots between here's why we vote and here's what we get. I fight for voting rights, not simply for the act of casting a ballot, but for the act of being able to craft my future. And that can only happen if I'm allowed to participate fully in our elections. And that's the message that we carry to every community of color, to every disabled community, to all young people, to any voter who seems marginalized and disadvantaged, because we have proven to them in 2020 and 2021 that if we try it, if we work hard enough, it can work. Stacey Abrams from the heroic state of Georgia, who also happens to be a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, which I won't embarrass you by making you talk about that. But we're going to be looking at how that trajectory goes to Stacey Abrams. You've been doing this a long time, sister. Keep it up. Thank you very much. Today.