Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

by Stacey Abrams

Whether it’s the civil rights acts of the early ’60s or the advance of women’s rights or marriage equality, we are a better country when we defend the weakest among us and then empower them to choose their own futures.

Our nation’s core narrative can be summed up in the disconnect between the Constitution’s pledge of equality and the rampant disregard for that ambition that has plagued the United States of America ever since. Though the Founding Fathers gave a nod to universal equality in the Declaration of Independence, they abandoned the aspiration by the time they penned the country’s organizing documents. Let me be clear here: the codification of racism and disenfranchisement is a feature of our lawmaking—not an oversight. And the original sin of the U.S. Constitution began by identifying blacks in America as three-fifths human: counting black bodies as property and their souls as nonexistent.

Literacy tests were a favored tool borrowed from the Northeast, and they were particularly popular because both immigrants and freed black Americans often had limited education. Connecticut pioneered literacy tests in 1855 to limit access to the ballot and exclude Irish immigrants.

Similarly, Southern states levied poll taxes, a requirement of payment for the right to cast a ballot. But these also existed in the North, including in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, where the goal was to price immigrants, the poor, and people of color out of the vote.

To fight voter suppression, we must understand what things look like post-Shelby. Voter suppression no longer announces itself with a document clearly labeled LITERACY TEST or POLL TAX. Instead, the attacks on voting rights feel like user error—and that’s intentional. When the system fails us, we can rail and try to force change. But if the problem is individual, we are trained to hide our mistakes and ignore the concerns.

“Relative to entirely-white neighborhoods, residents of entirely-black neighborhoods waited 29% longer to vote and were 74% more likely to spend more than 30 minutes at their polling place.” (They utilized smartphone data from the 2016 presidential election to account for biases based on self-reporting or overreporting.) One key issue that could explain the disparity is how well-resourced polling locations are for black versus white voters.

Benign neglect as much as malevolent intent harms voters facing obstacles to participation.

Suppression may target a select group, but when the process breaks down, we are all at risk.

Our demand should be federal rules that require county election officials to increase resources at locations with historically long lines, regardless of the county average. Long lines can occur in locations with the same number of machines and voters for a number of reasons.

Historic underinvestment in these instances is not solved by equality. Instead, federal law should maintain that to have equity among the precincts, each polling location must have its needs carefully considered—and that may mean more resources to those with less.

Broadly speaking, identity politics describes when people, rather than using traditional categories like political parties, give priority to their racial, gender, sexual orientation, social, cultural, economic, or other identity affiliation when approaching political decision making.

Indeed, most people have never heard of the conservative Thomas Hofeller or his daughter, Stephanie, the political independent. Fewer have visited the website she set up, known as The Hofeller Files, where she has published thousands of pages and spreadsheets of her father’s work despite legal threats and accusations of theft. The documents she uncovered in her father’s records, compiled over several years, tell the story of how the GOP has fixed itself on a singular goal: aggregating and maintaining Republican dominance in state and federal politics regardless of the will of the people.

Hofeller taught a master class to lawmakers and lobbyists on how to use statistical data and legal tactics to block efforts to increase civic participation by people of color. He composed memos and reports on limiting the decennial count of nonwhite residents in the United States, as part of the nation's makeup.

More than a simple head count, the U.S. census steers more than a trillion dollars for critical services like health care and education, guides the drawing of lines for political districts and school zones, and informs businesses and employers about opportunities for economic development.

Partisan gerrymandering was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2019, which will allow politicians to pick their voters rather than protecting the right of citizens to pick their leaders. And then there is racial gerrymandering—the drawing of districts to “pack” communities of color together or “crack” them into small groups too insignificant to affect elections, as redistricting experts describe the two practices. Right now, the only protection is in Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which Republicans are also challenging. But until the Supreme Court strips away this last protection, race cannot be used to diminish the voting power of minority communities. However, only an accurate census count can provide the necessary evidence to challenge a racially discriminatory map in court. Hofeller and his ilk gave Republicans the tools to rig the maps in 2010, and, as a result, the composition of the courts, the legislature, and every level of government has been affected. What they know, and we must guard against, is an undercount of people of color.

The process is an antiquated, racist, and classist gerrymandering of the nation’s elections.

Electoral College

For blacks in the South, the terrible twisting of voter intent continues, and in areas where blacks comprise 25 percent of the population, five of the six states have voted against the will of Democratic-leaning black voters in the recent elections.

Nearly 70 percent of all the general-election campaign events in the 2016 presidential race occurred in six states and 94 percent took place in twelve states. The Electoral College was never designed to protect small states against the tyranny of larger states—not at its inception and not today. Instead, it served to protect slaveholders from a loss of power then and to advantage a small coterie of states deemed competitive today.

Our identity politics can work to fix the plight of the working class, but the working class must expand beyond the prototype of a white guy in manufacturing. Today’s effective, efficient campaigns see his Latino wife, who works as a nurse, and their next-door neighbors, a black couple surviving on a teacher’s salary and a beat cop’s pay.

Victory must begin to mean more than winning a single election.

Will was right that any leadership in America must understand the international approach to global questions as well as the intersectionality of our policies. Plainly said, we have to understand the effect we are having on the world, and vice versa.

Populism challenges and pushes into relief the tensions that exist in a democracy; taken to extremes, it tends to presage a slide into flawed democracy and then into authoritarianism.

Winning in 2020 and beyond depends on candidates who recognize that they are not running against Donald Trump or the darker impulses he represents; they are running for America.

Fear is a given, but fear is not a reason to vote. Hope is a reason to vote: a visible, visceral compassion for those who worry for the future and fret about the now. The triumphant candidate weaves together these reasons without casting fellow citizens as villains.

Democracies rarely fall today because of military coups or foreign invasion. Instead, their death is gradual, coming slowly and over time with an erosion of rights and an accumulation of attacks on the institutions that form their backbone. From Hungary to India, from the Philippines to Venezuela, the corrosive power of populism wielded by authoritarians—an illiberal political current that tramples on democratic institutions while claiming to speak in the name of the people—has made deep inroads across the globe. And what is so pernicious about populism is that it arrives in disguise. While it comes to fruition through democratic electoral politics, it simultaneously has an utter disregard for liberal institutions or norms. The authoritarian populist succeeds at the ballot box but, once in power, chips away at the very architecture of democracy.

When people self-select out of participation, that is actually a much more effective consequence because increasing difficulty is one thing, but making participation seem irrelevant has a much more pervasive and permanent effect.

One of the ways to reclaim our moral center is for America to show that we want something better.

My mission is to remind us that it is not about getting a job. It is about helping the voices of our people be heard. And that’s what democracy is. The power and the purpose of our system is to enable the people with the ability to have their values represented and to select their leaders. Any time we erode that capacity, we are eroding the very republic we seek to protect.