IT'S AN INTOXICATINGLY HOT June afternoon in Atlanta, and scores of attendees at the African American Leadership Council Summit are watching Stacey Abrams, in a simple black-and-white shift dress, take the stage. The air, under twinkling hotel chandeliers, is crackling: Congresswoman Maxine Waters has just declared to the crowd that she is ready to impeach President Trump (to wild applause). Now it’s Abrams’s turn.

“I have an announcement to make,” she says, and the room is hushed, expectant. “We won.” The audience erupts into cheers, and Abrams takes a moment before adding, “I realize I’m not the governor of Georgia.”

“Yes, you are!” several people shout back.

“I’m not taking the oath of office. I’m not moving into the mansion.”

“OK, OK,” says a woman in the audience. “They’re saying that because I didn’t get all the numbers I needed, that somehow we failed in our mission. We didn’t fail. In the state of Georgia, we transformed our electorate.”

There is more cheering, and an air of reverence in the room. Abrams’s run for governor in 2018 ended in a loss of just 54,723 votes—a stunning, public blow. And yet she emerged from it as a kind of bellwether Democrat, a vision of her party’s future. She tripled Latino, Asian-American, and Pacific Islander voter turnout and doubled youth participation in her state. She inspired 1.2 million black Democrats in Georgia to vote for her (more than the total number of Democratic gubernatorial voters in 2014). And she gained the highest percentage of the state’s white Democratic voters in a generation. All of this despite widespread reports of voter suppression and a Republican opponent, Brian Kemp—Georgia’s then secretary of state—who oversaw the purging of about 670,000 registered voters in 2017 alone. Some 53,000 voter registrations were still pending a month ahead of the election.

Abrams refused to concede at first. “I sat shiva for 10 days,” she tells me. “Then I started plotting.” Many thought her next move would be a run for the Senate (there was the idea that Joe Biden was courting her as a vice presidential pick, rumors she has dismissed). But Abrams says her attention shifted to something more vitally important: saving American democracy itself. To this end, Abrams set up two nonprofits: Fair Count, devoted to making sure minority and poor communities are counted in Georgia during the census, and Fair Fight Action, an organization that works to secure voting rights of everyone in her state. Fair Fight Action sued the Georgia board of elections and secretary of state over charges of voter suppression in Abrams’s 2018 race. The state has unsuccessfully filed a motion to dismiss. Since then, Abrams has been traveling around the country to give speeches on her new life’s cause.