🔰Stacey Abrams on Future Hindsight | Reclaim Democracy’s Power (FULL VIDEO PODCAST)

Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast on a mission to spark civic action. I'm your host, Mila Atmos. I'm a global citizen based in New York City, and I'm deeply curious about the way our society works. So each week, I bring you conversations to cut through the confusion around today's most important civic issues and share clear, actionable ways for us to build a After all, democracy is not a spectator sport. Tomorrow starts right now. We love to have citizen changemakers on the show to inspire the audience. And one of the most impactful citizen changemakers in this time is Stacey Abrams. She's a host of a new podcast, Assembly Required, and also an author, serial entrepreneur, nonprofit CEO, and political leader. After 11 years in the Georgia House of Representatives, seven of which as minority leader, she was the 2018 Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia, where she won more votes than any other Democrat in the state's history. Welcome, Stacey. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. So I don't think we need to warm up at all for this conversation. I think we're good. We're good. We're good. No need to set the table. So let me just ask you, how do we meet the moment? Because on the podcast recently, we just had a conversation about the history of citizenship schools and how the fight to vote continues. We spoke to Steve Phillips, who argued that the Civil War never ended. And in the intro of your own book, Our Time Is Now, you share your grandmother's story about being afraid to vote in 1968, and your sister's friend who voted for you for governor but thought it was totally rigged and pointless. So in this arc, where are we? And how do we meet the moment? We have to reclaim the narrative of democracy as a tool for delivery, not just a tool for defense. We're asking people to be engaged in a country that doesn't always feel like it wants them, and that sometimes can feel so distanced from lived reality that democracy sounds like a fairy tale. And so if we want people to defend democracy, democracy has to deliver. And that means we have to lead with our shared values. We have to talk about fairness, about dignity. We have to talk about freedom, but we have to link that to community. And we have to show how these values help us deliver. For me, my work in Georgia, my work across the country, has been grounded in my growing up in Mississippi, watching my parents do the work that should have been done by elected leaders for communities that were left out and left behind. My parents were not political people. They voted, but they didn't spend all of their time volunteering on campaigns. They spent their time delivering the services that people needed because the people who should have done the work weren't showing up. And I think that's the space where democracy can be reclaimed and strengthened when people know that democracy is for delivery of services, not just for defense of a theory of the case that they've never actually experienced. Yeah. I'm curious about this because last year in 2024, we were told again that this was the most important election of our lifetime. And so I'm wondering, what are the most salient issues for Americans today? And I feel like it's not democracy, because what you were explaining just now, I don't think that people put those things together. We know of course that a large part of what Americans care about is the economy, the price of eggs. But why do you think that the messaging failed last year about democracy, about the 2024 election being the most important election of our lifetime? And really what I'm trying to get at here is that liberal messaging didn't work, but also it feels to me that the deliverables were not somehow made concrete in our lives. There was the Inflation Reduction Act, there was the Build Back Better Act, but I think people didn't understand what that did for them. And really, I also think that if we had had higher turnout last year, the election would have been a different outcome. So as we look forward, how do you think about what really matters and connecting that to democracy? So I want to start by level setting 2024. 77 million people voted for the current administration, 75 million people voted for Vice President Harris, 90 million people did not vote. And that goes to your point about turnout. We don't know if all 90 million people, had they turned out, what the outcome would have been. But I don't want us to overlearn the lesson of 24 as a reason to jettison what 75 million people wanted. So you had a 2 million person spread, and letting 2 million people redefine values and intention is problematic. That is not to say that Democrats don't have the responsibility to evaluate what they did, how they did, and what should happen next. But I think what we should learn from it is not about the 75 versus 77, it's the 90. And I think that's the crux of the issue. Democracy is a tool. It is the way society engages citizenry in the decisions about how we're all going to live together under the social contract. There are lots of different ways to go about it. Democracy is one of them. You have autocracy, which is where we seem to be headed if we don't reclaim democracy. You have other processes that are somewhere in between. You have monarchy. But fundamentally, we have to remember that democracy is a tool. So what we were supposed to be talking about is how was that tool servicing the needs of the people? And the problem was the tool itself became the metric. So instead of talking about what the tool was supposed to help us get, we spend a lot of time just talking about the tool in and of itself as this idealized idea. And part of the work that I've done in Georgia has been grounded in recognizing that most people don't care about the idealized, they care about the reality. I like to say people don't care about your politics, they care about their lives. And that's why the conversation of the price of eggs and the economy had the greatest salience, but those weren't the only issues. And often when we're talking about the economy, it is incredibly superficial to ignore all of the underlying issues that determine your ability to participate in the economy. The economy does matter. The price of eggs does matter. But are you being pushed out because you're deciding between eggs and medicine? Because then you're having a separate conversation. Is it that you're concerned about the economy because you can't get a job because you are a returning citizen and you're pretty much pushed out of the economic situation? Is it because you are a mother who cannot find childcare? All of those are economic issues that have underpinnings that we have to talk about. And the way we talk about it is through democracy. We come together, we have conversations, we hire people. And so when I think about all of that, I worry about the 90 million who think that none of those conversations include them. That's why they didn't vote. And so instead of rehashing which term of art we should have used and which ad slogan might have been more resonant, I want to talk about what do we need to deliver in this moment and in the next moment in order to convince those 90 million people that this country can work for them too. As a person who is aligned with the Democratic Party, I argue aggressively that we cannot compromise on our values. We cannot abandon our values trying to pick up new votes. Instead, we have to fight for our values and show how our values have lived in their experiences and how it could be even better because that's how we build trust and that's how you win over voters. We've been talking about this on Assembly Required quite often. We had Senator Cory Booker on, we had Rachel Maddow on. But part of my intention is for us to connect the dots between democracy as a tool for delivery versus this notion that if we just defend the idea of democracy, we've done our work. Yeah, well, you just talked about fighting for our values. And there's a lot of hand-wringing right now about how to fight back against the Trump administration and what probably you and I can agree are not our values. And there are so many things to fight about, like whether that's unlawful detentions and deportations, dismantling federal agencies, or outright corruption. We're thinking about the big plane from Qatar. So beyond a long-term strategy of reform of the party, let's say, how would you like our electeds to meet this moment and really be vocal about what our values are? Because I think that's sometimes not obvious. And how to stand up for that, to stand up for those values? Much of my work has centered around state and local government. I entered government as an adult, as Deputy City Attorney for Atlanta. And in that role, I was part of tackling issues from how water services got delivered to housing costs. I worked on economic development, but I also worked on how we helped to address the issue of homeless veterans. So I had a very broad ambit that fit within my work. After that, I ran for the state legislature. And so my first answer is that the solution to our local problems will not always come from Washington, D.C. We are putting a lot of attention, a lot of pressure, and a lot of expectation on Congress as we should. But let's understand that we have a complicit Republican majority that is suborning tyranny and championing the rise of autocracy. And we have a fairly neutered judiciary that has not yet decided if it wants to be a defender of Americans or a defender of a Republican party. So D.C. is a place that we should put our attention. We cannot abandon it. We have to call our representatives. We have to demand that they speak up. But there are other layers of government where we can get more done. If you have a school board where you live, they are making choices about the next generation right now. We should be showing up at those school board meetings. In Virginia just this week, they tried to dismantle DEI. And they did so because they want to abandon our values. They want to tell children that they should not know their history. They want to suborn the idea that racism has some kind of native good. And therefore, if we have the value system that diversity, equity, and inclusion are values we hold to be true, then we should be talking about it at the local level, at the state level. I believe and understand why we put so much onus on the federal government, but there is so much work and opportunity at the state and local level. And I can prove it, because the reason we have the Republican Party we have today was that 50, 60 years ago, they started infiltrating at the state and local level, changing the values that their party used to believe in to arrive at the narrative they have today. We can do the same, but we don't have 50 years to wait. We've got to do the work right now. Right, right. Well, speaking of the Republican Party, there are a lot of questions about how the Democratic Party should reform itself, right? And if you think about the Republican Party, like you mentioned, they have radically transformed themselves. And so if the Democratic Party were to transform itself, and I'm not sure that it is going to in this moment, it doesn't look very promising. I'm going to say May 2025, it doesn't look terribly promising. Maybe in a few months that will change. But in your mind, what do you believe are the most urgent structural reforms within the Democratic Party that we need or that it needs? As someone who has run for office in the South, I want to be really clear that what constitutes being liberal or progressive or conservative in the South looks very different than the Midwest, is completely divorced from what happens on the West Coast, which has absolutely no mirrored image on the East Coast. And so as a nation of 330 million people, we have to recognize that there is a spectrum of ideological purity that exists. And the reality is we cannot be a party of the people if we expect every person to meet the litmus test of purity from our standards. So that's the first place. And if you accept that ideological purity isn't your metric, then what is? And I think that's where values come back into the conversation. And it's why I keep using those terms. I've been doing a lot of work recently on diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI. And part of the way you reform is to understand your foundations. We cannot compromise on our values. We have to fight for them. If we are willing to fight for them, if we're willing to be vocal about it, we are willing to challenge those who would try to erode those values, that's one of the ways we get people to come back or those who are with us to stand up and speak up. But they will not if they don't think that we mean it. And so what I hope doesn't happen in this process is that we try to reform ourselves by jettisoning who we are and what we believe. Democrats have always been the party of the people, and that means all of the people. And sometimes it means telling members of our party the answer is no, that what you want, which will lead to a fast win, is going to harm so many, we cannot countenance it. And that's why I go back to fairness, to dignity, to freedom, to community. But it's why diversity, equity, and inclusion are under assault, because the Republicans know what we don't seem to believe, which is that it's working, that as a nation that has situated DEI as our guiding force, we have become an extraordinary nation. And that's terrifying to those who want uniformity, who want inequity, and who want exclusion. And so part of our responsibility as we proceed towards reform is to not reform to win elections, it's to reform to win voters. Those are two different dynamics. And I'll close with this. It took me 10 years in my role as minority leader in the state of Georgia to help evolve our party. And it was a joint effort, and I don't want to take any credit away from anyone else. But the work that I did starting in Georgia when I became minority leader in 2010, November 2010, after the worst shellacking our party had seen in 130 years, that work took a long time. If we think we can solve the challenges facing our nation, facing our people in a single election cycle, then we are going to compromise our values. But if we think that this is long-term where we need to be to build an infrastructure and to build a delivery system that actually serves the people, then we're going to have patience of engagement, not patience with the destruction. But we can be patient with how long it takes people to agree with us. But we cannot get there if we put victory over values. Well, I think that was really well put, that it's not that you want to win elections, but that you want to win voters. You, of course, have been a pioneer in voter engagement and mobilization, like you just said, and you changed Georgia politics with your organization, the New Georgia Project. Notably, of course, there are now two Democratic senators representing the state of Georgia. In fact, I will tell you here that Steve Phillips told us all about the long game that you've been playing and getting people to support the Democratic Party and Democratic candidates in the state of Georgia, and that Texas should take note. I have a question. We're talking about parties a lot here. I have a question about, how are we missing the mark? Should we be focusing on building a grassroots movement instead, something that's a little bit more like the civil rights movement, to get people to really understand the power of their vote, for example? And if so, how do you think about that? I absolutely agree that it's got to be both and. Those we oppose in ideology, those we oppose in practice and in policy, they don't just pick one tool and that's all they go with. So I've used tool to talk about democracy, but let's talk about tactics then. They don't pick one tactic. The civil rights movement wasn't just about bus boycotts. It was about religious engagement. It had components that were in the corporate space. It fought about transportation policy. The civil rights movement understood that there had to be multiple tactics to meet overarching strategy of engagement and transformation. Some of it was political. You had candidates who ran for office under the banner of political parties, so they had the political capacity to push forward the policies that could only come from the state or federal government. But you also had grassroots movements that engaged voters to make sure they got elected. One of my favorite speeches by MLK, by Dr. King, was his Mother's Day speech where he said that we had to march on ballots because he understood that as much as the march on Washington was about gaining the conscience of America, marching on ballots was about gaining the power of America. And so I've always tried to approach the work that I do from multiple vantage points. You can't just use one thing, one tactic, and hope that it works. And so in this moment, this idea that in order for a party to rise, you have to crush certain aspects of grassroots movements is absolutely inherently wrong. And the corollary is that the rise of grassroots movements have to have a political apparatus that can help turn ideation into policy. Because if it doesn't become law, then the laws that fold are the laws that govern. And those laws that govern may not be to our benefit. Right, right. Well, as Maurice Mitchell told us from the Working Families Party, that the thing to do is to get governing power, because otherwise it's all pointless. So as I mentioned earlier, yes, tell me. Well, I'm going to push back. I don't think it's all pointless. I love Maurice. But it's not pointless. But it's not as effective. And part of what happens in our narrative about politics is that we divorce politics from people. And I think what Maurice is doing is extraordinarily important. And absolutely, political power is the most effective tool to change the law and therefore to change governance. But we can't ignore that there are very real gaps in the delivery of service that require people to be in the trenches doing the work every day, irrespective of who gets elected. It is easier to do that work if good people get elected. But I don't ever want us to think that if we win enough elections, we don't have to do the rest of it. Democracy doesn't work like that. Democracy isn't a panacea. It's again, it's a way to get things done. But it is not the solution in and of itself. For sure. Totally agree. So I mentioned earlier that the fight to vote continues. And right before Georgia's 2021 U.S. Senate runoff election, a far-right anti-voting group called True the Vote tried to disenfranchise over 364,000 voters and facilitated over 250,000 voter challenges using a Georgia law that allows any resident to challenge the right to vote of an unlimited number of their neighbors. That sounds totally crazy. So the challengers, of course, used the list of voters provided by True the Vote, which was created with outdated and unreliable data. And of course, no surprise, black, brown and first-time voters were disproportionately targeted. They are, of course, the very communities whose record turnout flipped the Georgia election in the 2020 presidential election just weeks before. So Fair Fight, which is actually an organization that you launched, it fights voter suppression and protects voting rights, sued and argued that the mass challenge scheme was illegal voter intimidation under Section 11B of the Voting Rights Act. In 2024, a judge ruled against Fair Fight. That sounds wrong, but also at the same time acknowledged that True the Vote's approach was reckless, which is a big word, and that its data was unreliable. So this case is now headed to the appellate court. And since you're both a lawyer and a voting rights expert and you're from Georgia, what do you make of this latest development and what would be the impact nationwide? Well, Mila, I appreciate you laying out the background. I want to dig in on a couple of pieces. So let's talk about the scope, first of all. We're talking about 364,000 voters who were targeted initially by True the Vote, and over 250,000 were formally challenged. The last election in Georgia, the presidential election in 24, was decided by about 75,000 votes. You're talking about three times the number of voters would have been challenged and possibly taken off the rolls because of True the Vote. Number two, what the lower court said was that it did not believe that it had the ability to take action. So the ruling was very narrow, and that's why the 11th Circuit actually heard the case, and they are now considering the evidence that were brought forward. And this is important to note because it's being spun as though TTV won the case. They didn't. It was a narrow ruling. The judge said that their tactics utterly lacked reliability. And the reality is, irrespective of the outcome, the responsibility that Fair Fight has, the responsibility that Americans have, is that we should not allow voter intimidation in any form to go unchallenged. You referenced the civil rights movement earlier. If people recognized and knew the sheer number of cases that were brought to attack Jim Crow, to attack the architecture of racism in this nation that were lost, it would be overwhelming. And unfortunately, because we are losing history by the day, because they're banning books and banning truth-telling, we may never get the full story. But let's understand that losing a case does not mean the case didn't have merit. Sometimes the way you fight is simply showing up. It's why protest matters. Protest isn't about the person that you're fighting changing their mind in the moment. It's about them knowing that you refuse to let them operate with your silence as consent. And when it comes to true the vote and their tactics, Georgia has long been a testing ground for voter suppression and voter intimidation. The current governor of Georgia was once noted as the person who purged more voters in a single day than any secretary of state in American history. So let's understand that Georgia and the South, this region, my state, unfortunately, has been engaged in being a testing ground for far-right voter suppression activities. And we have to fight back because the absence of a fight is complicity in the outcome. And they have been testing their anti-voter playbook in Georgia, and we cannot let it happen. We cannot let it go unchallenged. And we have to remember why the challenge matters at the most core narrative. You mentioned my sister's friend that I talked about in Our Time Is Now. When a voter does their part, when a person takes the time to engage in the system, and the system fails them, and the system scares them, and the system lies to them, we don't just lose their vote. We lose their trust. And when you lose their trust, it is contagious. Communities start to distrust. And the answer to distrust is often inaction. We have to make certain that the people of Georgia, that the people of the South, that the people of America, that the voters who have been challenged and have been confused by why they were called on and picked on, who've been discouraged, that they believe that they have the right to come back. Because voter suppression doesn't look like it did in the 1960s. It is not about physical violence anymore. It's about the administrative challenges. It's about death by a thousand cuts, death of democracy by a thousand cuts. And so our responsibility is to fight not only against Truth or Vote, but to fight against the SAVE Act, to fight against state-level copycat laws, to fight against executive orders that seek to strip our ability to participate in elections. These things come together. They are not being done in isolation. And therefore we have to fight because fighting is what's right. Indeed. You know, one of the things, because you are from the South and you are on the front lines where voter suppression has never abated, basically, it was always going strong, despite the Voting Rights Act in 1965, there was always an effort to curtail voting. And from your race for governor and from your experience in the Georgia legislature, what did you learn from these years that may not be obvious from the outside? My parents were active participants in the civil rights movement as teenagers, and they raised me and my siblings with this very strong belief that you don't get to just watch, you have to act. When you run for office, there is the very real risk that you won't win. And one of my greatest lessons is that while victory would have been fantastic, what I gained from the engagement has transformed how I understand the work that I'm called to do. Too often we see politics as the end goal. We see the title as the end goal. Not getting the title doesn't exempt you from the work. And what my experiences have taught me is how important the work remains and how important it is that I remain in the work. Because if I believe in our democracy, that's good. If I believe in our people, that's more important. That's foundational. My parents went from being a librarian and a shipyard worker to becoming pastors. I have studiously avoided ever being called to the ministry. But there is a ministry of government, a ministry of service that comes from having government work for everyone. When democracy can deliver, it is not just transformative in a person's life, it's transformative in their spirit. And that's the place where I am the most excited. It's why the work I've done has been so critical to me. And it's work that came into even sharper focus when I wasn't successful on one aspect because it highlighted how much there was to be done and how many ways I could be engaged in doing it. Thank you. So every week on Future Hindsight, I ask my guests to share a civic spark, one small step we can all take to be more empowered and ignite collective change. So what's a good way to turn the insights that you've shared with us into action? Right now, we are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of assault on our lives. And one of the most effective things that we can do comes from refusing to precapitulate. We don't have to give in before they do it to us. And part of the intention is that if you do enough and it's loud enough, people just give up and they say, fine, I'm not going to fight because I'm not going to win. I need every person who is listening to this podcast to pick the one issue that they will not capitulate on and make that the thing you do at least once a week. If it is on the issue of child hunger, do one thing every week that shows that you are not going to let that stand, that despite the attacks on SNAP benefits on the congressional level, you're going to show up and make certain that the food bank near you is getting what they need, that you're donating to an organization that provides access to mitigate child hunger. But pick one thing, the one thing you refuse to give in on. If we all pick one thing, that's a lot of stuff. That's a lot of power. Power isn't about the big moments. It's about the consistency. It's not about whether your lights come on. It's about whether the electricity is running to your house every single day so that when you need the light, you can turn it on and we can be the lights in this moment. Good advice. So last question, looking into the future, what makes you hopeful? My nieces and nephews. I have six nieces and nephews who range in age from 8 to 19. And they are smart and they are savvy, but they are the first generation to lose rights, have rights taken away since reconstruction. And what makes me hopeful is that they know they are entitled to more. And they know that they are entitled to fight for more. I know I'm not done fighting, but what's so critical to me and makes me hopeful is that they know they're not done fighting and that they believe that their vision for tomorrow is their given right and they're going to fight to make it so. Hear, hear. Hear, hear. I have a lot of hope. I have children who are definitely motivated to be in the fight. My younger one is a first-time voter this year. It's very exciting. Thank you. Thank you. And he's already, you know, scoping out what he's going to do this summer to canvas for mayoral candidates in New York City and also to vote. So Stacey, thank you so much for joining me on Future Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you for having me. And I of course want to encourage everyone, if you want to learn more about any of these topics, listen to Future Hindsight. And once you're done, head on over to Assembly Required, where we talk about all of these things and more. Thank you. Stacey Abrams is a host of Assembly Required, the author of multiple books, a polymath, and ultimate citizen changemaker. Remember, civic action doesn't have to be complicated. It's about small steps that spark progress, like sharing this episode with a friend. Let's recap this week's Civic Spark and fire up our collective power. Don't give in to the falsehood that you can't do anything or make any significant change by yourself. It's true that it takes collective action, but it all starts with you. Find out what matters to you the most and make the decision to fight for it. At least once a week, every week. This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.