NOTE: This story was written in December, 2019 for my beat reporting class.
Stacey Abrams, the first black woman to be nominated for governor in 2018, said at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy Library on Dec. 3 that she would consider running as vice president in the 2020 election impending the Democratic nominee for president.
Crowds packed into the JFK Library on Tuesday to watch Abrams be interviewed by Washington Post opinion writer Jonathan Capehart. The conversation mostly focused on the 2020 election, voter suppression, and her run for governor of Georgia in 2018. Towards the end of the interview, Abrams mentioned her interest in running as vice president.
When Capehart asked Abrams why she is not running for president in the 2020 election, she said she believes she would be of most value as vice president.
“As a vice presidential nominee, I think I could be a very effective ally to the nominee in turning out voters of every stripe. I increased voter participation in Georgia for Democrats to the highest level of any candidate as a Democrat in our history,” Abrams said.
Abrams touted the statistics of her voter turnout in the Georgia governor race as a benefit to any candidate who may select her as vice president.
“I tripled Latino turnout, tripled Asian-Pacific Islander turnout, I increased youth participation rates by 139%, increased black participation by 40%,” Abrams said. “My campaign helped increase the white share of the Democratic vote for the first time in 30 years. I can help win with anybody.”
Capehart asked Abrams if her meeting with presidential candidate and former vice president Joe Biden was to discuss her interest in vice president. Abrams dispelled all rumors that she has already picked a nominee, clarifying she has not yet signed on with any particular candidate.
“I am a black woman who’s in a conversation about possibly being second in command to the leader of the free world, and I will not diminish my ambition or the ambition of any other woman of color by saying that’s something I wouldn’t be willing to do,” Abrams said.
While discussing voter suppression, Abrams emphasized that this issue could cost the Democrats the 2020 election if politicians do not take action to prevent this.
“In 2016, we lost by 77,000 votes across three states,” Abrams said. “Voter suppression was part of it, foreign interference is part of it, we can argue about the campaign tactics, but fix one of those things, you’ve won the election of 2016. And so for me, fixing voter suppression, being that I am a current expert in it, became my mission.”
Abrams explained more specifically that her interest in vice president comes from the influence that position holds.
“The reason the job would be cool is it’s a job that allows you to be second to the leader of the free world and making our nation safe, strong, and effective again,” Abrams said. “It helps restore out moral leadership, allows you to engage in the conversations we need to have, including how we structurally reassess who we are and fix the broken pieces to make our democracy whole.”
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