Stacey Abrams plans on being elected U.S. president in the next two decades, the former Democratic gubernatorial candidate for Georgia said in a recent interview.
“Yes, I do,” Abrams, 46, told FiveThirtyEight when asked whether she thought the country would elect her president in the next 20 years. “That’s my plan, and I’m very pragmatic.”
Abrams, who is black, also commented on how she feels about being discussed as a vice presidential candidate as a way to balance out a Democratic ticket with a white presidential candidate.
“I accept that I exist in the political zeitgeist in a very specific way,” the former minority leader of the Georgia House said.
“When something new is on the horizon, we are usually both equally curious and afraid,” she responded when asked about the discussion around whether the country is ready for black woman executives.
Rumors swirled earlier this year that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has considered tapping Abrams as his running mate.
Abrams shot to notoriety in 2018 when she ran in Georgia to become the country’s first black woman governor. She lost the election by 1.4 percentage points to her Republican opponent, Georgia’s secretary of state at the time, Brian Kemp, who enforced one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country while he was running against Abrams. Abrams has refused to concede the election ever since, alleging that Kemp engaged in voter suppression.
Her campaign later accused the state ethics commission of having a “political vendetta” after the commission filed a lawsuit demanding the campaign’s personal records. The Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission expressed concerns about “unlawful coordination” between the Abrams campaign and a number of groups including Fair Fight Action, Abrams’s national campaign against voter suppression, which worked to expand voting access.