Stacey Abrams is focused on ensuring fair elections in 2026 : NPR

Political strategist Stacey Abrams is not currently running for office — but she’s also not ruling out a run sometime in the future.

“Politics is a tool and it’s a very important one for getting good done, but it’s not the only one,” Abrams says. “I am really focused right now on the other tools in my toolbox. … My focus right now is on sharing information.”

A former minority leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, Abrams ran for governor of Georgia as the Democratic nominee in 2018 and again in 2022. Though she lost both races, she drew national attention to issues of voter suppression in the state, particularly during the close 2018 campaign.

After the 2018 election, Abrams founded Fair Fight, an organization credited with boosting voter turnout in Georgia and contributing to Democratic victories in the 2020 presidential and Senate elections. She warns that voter suppression is “all around us” — though it’s taken a new form in the 21st century. She says excessive restrictions on mail-in ballots, student voting and early voting can all be examples of voter suppression.

“Many of us grew up with the stories of the civil rights movement and voter suppression of the ’60s, guns and dogs and hoses,” she says. “The voter suppression in the 21st century is administrative.”

Abrams discusses current politics and her concerns about the democratic process on her podcast, Assembly Required. She’s also the author of several novels. Her latest thriller, Coded Justice, is the third installment in a series that centers on Avery Keene, a former Supreme Court clerk turned corporate investigator, who steps into the world of AI to examine a system designed to revolutionize veteran health care.

Abrams says she chose to focus on AI because it seems, on its face, like a neutral technology. “I wanted to write a book where the lines are blurred, because sometimes there’s good intention, just problematic execution,” she says. “This tool that we intend to use for good can be misapplied. … I wanted to think about what happens when even the intentional pursuit of good can lead to challenges and murder.”

Interview highlights

On deciding to write about AI in Coded Justice

I’d been fascinated about it because my niece was using it. My niece lived with me before she went off to college. And I was trying to understand how she was able to use AI and that line between it being a helpful tool and it being cheating. And Faith was raised with a very strong morality and she knew that she wasn’t going to be allowed to misuse it. And one day we had a conversation: “Talk to me about this.” And that really became part of the spark for Coded Justice.

On writing books as a kid

My first novel was published right after law school. But my parents will tell you, I started writing a lot earlier. My first attempt at a novel was when I was 12. It was called The Diary of Angst. I was a very tortured 12 year old. And I had to explain why this boy didn’t like me and why my friends were cruel. And it was very, very full of angst and gestalt. My mom actually had it bound for me when I was 25 as I think both a gag gift and a Christmas gift. But I grew up with parents who loved storytelling and loved books, but they both understood in their way that they could expand our worlds, even if they couldn’t afford to give us the world. And so we grew up in Mississippi. My mom used to call us the “genteel poor.” We had no money, but we watched PBS and we read books.

On how her faith guides her

I watched my parents live those values that education matters, that faith matters, and that helping people matters. And for me, those are the values that guide me, my faith first and foremost. I cannot call myself a Christian and not believe that it is my responsibility to help the stranger, to help immigrants, to help the dispossessed. I cannot say that my faith justifies the venom that has been turned against the LGBTQIA community, the way we have demonized the transgender community. I cannot be a woman of faith who has read the Bible and just conveniently pick the passages I like. …

Education is part of my faith because I’m not expected to simply blindly behave. The notion of free will exists because faith is when you have the information and you make the decision to do anyway, to do the things you need to do. And then ultimately, what ties it all together for me is the responsibility to serve others.

On her fear that America is moving toward autocracy under Trump

The two most stunning moments for me were the decision to deploy the Marines in Los Angeles. That is a violation of every precept of democratic rule under a civilian leader that we have in this country. We do not use the military against our own people, and yet that was violated with such nonchalance that it was stunning to me. The second was the arrest of Mayor Ras Baraka. The mayor of [Newark] New Jersey, because he stood outside an immigrant detention center. He didn’t do anything, but they felt very comfortable arresting a mayor for simply questioning the actions of leadership, and that, again, should be so chilling.

For me, the most important piece, though, was the number of directives, the executive orders that came out at the very beginning against DEI. And people dismissed it as, “Oh, well, this is just stopping quotas,” or “This was an HR thing.” But no, he was intentionally setting up a system of belief that the protection of the vulnerable, that the corrective actions this nation has taken for 249 years, that those things were somehow inherently wrong. And it was designed to allow for the later attacks that we have seen on all of these different communities. Because if you can demonize at the beginning, it becomes a lot easier to dehumanize when it matters.

On Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson‘s dissents  

I think where Justice Jackson stands out is that she is laying not just the groundwork for what we hope will be the resurgence of democracy and the rule of law, but she’s also leaving breadcrumbs. She is telling us how we will end up where we are. But she’s also reminding us of why we are not there now. She comes from a tradition of Thurgood Marshall, of the Warren Court. So she understands that it is the responsibility of the judiciary, yes, it is to interpret the law, but you cannot interpret a law you do not believe has the right to exist. …

The law is hard. It is complicated. It is uncomfortable. And we have judges because we want them to grapple with that discomfort. We want them to point out the sharp edges and tell us that we might need to ask the congressional bodies to fix them, to address them. But we never, ever are right when we are complicit in eroding justice. And that is what she keeps calling out. That is what keeps pushing back against. And every time others are willing to join her, those are moments where we become a better nation, at least on paper. And it becomes a paper trail for us to follow when it’s time to rebuild what they are breaking.

On whether she’ll run for office again in 2026

I truly have not made any decisions and that is in part because there’s an urgency to 2025 that we cannot ignore. My focus right now is on how do we ensure that we have free and fair elections in 2026? There’s a lot of hope being pinned on the ’26 midterms.

Sam Briger and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.