On Thursday night, in Carrollton, Georgia, near the Alabama line, Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor, spoke to a crowd of two hundred and fifty supporters. Abrams stood inside a community center built by the Works Progress Administration in the nineteen-thirties, three decades before the Voting Rights Act insured that African-Americans, including Abrams’s parents, could vote. Abrams told a story from another three decades later, in the early nineties, when she was a high-school valedictorian, and was invited to the governor’s mansion. She took a city bus with her mother and father, and they were rebuffed, she said, by a disbelieving guard at the mansion’s gates. “He looked at me and my parents and said, ‘I told you, this is a private event, you don’t belong here,’ ” she told the diverse crowd. She added, “I remember the sneer on his face, this look of disparagement, because he couldn’t imagine that someone who came off the bus could walk into the governor’s mansion.” Abrams, now forty-four, hopes that soon she will walk into the mansion to stay. Outside the event in Carrollton, a conservative town west of Atlanta, a few Georgians waved Confederate flags, rooting against her. On Thursday, they were well outnumbered.

Abrams has positioned herself as a progressive candidate in a state that Donald Trump won by five points in the 2016 Presidential election. She promised the crowd in Carrollton that she would be the “public-education governor” who saved HOPE, a financial-assistance program for Georgia college students. She said she would expand Medicaid. She asserted, “climate change is real.” She insisted that she is the candidate for governor who understands all of Georgia. “My opponent and I have both been to all one hundred and fifty-nine counties,” she said at one point, referring to the Republican candidate and current secretary of state, Brian Kemp. “But the difference is, I think I was the one who was listening when I was there.” The crowd roared. She and Kemp are in a statistical tie, according to recent polls.

I boarded Abrams’s large campaign bus an hour later and rode with her to Newnan, another conservative-leaning town, closer to Atlanta. The bus has a mini-kitchen, a flat-screen TV, a shower, and bunks for naps that no one seemed to be taking. Abrams’s press secretary and her digital strategist, both women in their twenties, sat at a small table near stacks of takeout food. A makeup artist was touching up Abrams in the back of the bus. Up front, the driver was looking at a map on his phone. (Earlier, he’d used it to film the Confederate-flag wavers.) Considering the thousands of miles she’s driven around the state, and the increased pace of attacks from her opponents, Abrams seemed rested, and upbeat. Also: unrelenting. As the bus idled by the curb, she said to a staffer, matter-of-factly, “What are we waiting for?”

“For you to be done, Leader,” a staffer said. Her staffers generally referred to her as Leader, a title she held from 2007 to 2017, when she was Georgia’s House Minority Leader. (“Minority Leader” is also the title of her recent memoir.)

Photograph by Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New Yorker

Sitting down on a couch with Abrams in the back, I mentioned a young man I’d met outside the Carrollton rally, a Trump supporter named Justin Purchase, who wore a MAGA hat and yet professed to be undecided in the state’s governor’s race. (Trump has endorsed Kemp.) Purchase had said to me, of Abrams, “I like her as a human being. She’s a very humanitarian person, from what I’ve seen. She’s very kind. A very nice lady.” In order to make a decision about the race, Purchase said, he planned to watch Abrams’s recent debate with her opponents, Kemp and the libertarian Ted Metz. He was curious about the rally, he told me, but he’d decided not to go inside, “because I feel like I’d get stared at, maybe judged.” He dismissed the Confederate-flag wavers, saying, of them, “I’m like, ‘Y’all are wasting your time.’ ”

“We’re going after all voters,” Abrams told me, when I described my conversation with Purchase. “I’m going to Republican-leaning places like Carroll County because there are people in these counties who will vote for me, even if they’re not Democrat by inclination.” As for Purchase, she said, “I’ve had a number of conversations with guys like him”—Trump voters, she meant, who’ve never voted for a Democrat—“who want Medicaid expansion, who want better jobs, who like my education platform, and they’re gonna vote for me.”

Abrams also mentioned places like Thomasville and Chatsworth, where there might be only a handful of Democrats. “Places you can’t turn blue,” she said, “but you can take from maroon to pink. Or you can create some little blue dots.” Relative to the campaigns run by Georgia Democrats in the past, Abrams’s campaign has been notable in its emphasis on the whole state—on “reaching into every community rather than cherry-picking votes,” as she put it.

In such a polarized election, conventional wisdom says that there aren’t many people left in the middle. But Abrams is still seeking them. “People have many issues they give primacy to,” Abrams told me. “Some give it to their ideology. Some their economics. Some their health. My responsibility is to give them a frame that lets them decide that I can meet enough of their interests and needs to vote for me. I’m not going to try to dismiss what they believe or change who they are. My job is to say, ‘Here’s who I am, here’s what I can do, and if you cast a vote for me, here’s what will be there for you.’ ”

But no candidate, not even one as well funded as Abrams, can get to every neighborhood in the country’s eighth most populous state. On recent travels in the poor, rural southwestern corner of Georgia, in counties like Clay and Crisp, I met a number of voters, including many African-Americans, who had never heard of Abrams. A woman at a rural health clinic, in desperate need of Medicaid, told me, “I’ll vote for whoever is gonna help me get health care.” She didn’t know that Abrams, not Kemp, had made expanding Medicaid a priority. In the back of the bus, Abrams mentioned the loss of rural hospitals as one of the things Georgians should be most concerned about under a potential Kemp Administration. If Kemp were elected, she said, we could “have a health-care crisis that will take human lives. That’s not only dangerous,” she added, “it’s immoral.”

I asked Abrams if she saw herself the way some in the press see her—as part of a broader surge of black Democrats running for governor, along with Florida’s Andrew Gillum, and Ben Jealous, in Maryland. Abrams mostly agreed, but she added the Mexican-American David Garcia, the Democratic nominee for governor of Arizona, to their cohort, as well as the Hispanic Michelle Lujan Grisham, the Democratic nominee for governor of New Mexico, emphasizing that it was a multifarious wave. “We have a shared belief in the necessity of having voices that aren’t normally at the table,” she said. “We’ve all focussed on how we help people who are disadvantaged because of income, or because they aren’t considered the norm. I’m proud to be in coalition running with them this year.”

Abrams went on, “Andrew and I both grew up in families where—he’s first-generation college, I was second-generation. Ben understands education access from having led the N.A.A.C.P. We’ve all worked in communities where lack of economic equality is real and corrosive. We share a belief in criminal-justice reform.” Ultimately, she said, it’s about their common belief “that everyone should have opportunity. It sounds pithy, but that’s truly what drives each of us,” she added. “And we’ve been talking about this together and separately for more than a decade.”

On Saturday, I checked in with Purchase, to see if he’d watched the debate, and to ask what he thought of it. He hadn’t watched it yet, he told me. He wished he’d gone in to see Abrams speak, he said. He’d found a one-page “voter's guide” in the trash at work, which broke down the candidates by issue, and he had read it over. “Her tax plan and her stance on abortion bother me,” he said, of Abrams. “I just don't know.”