In 1971, Maddox was succeeded by Jimmy Carter, but even Carter, who would become an icon of Southern liberalism, was not immune to the contortions of Georgia politics. He had lost a bid for the governorship in 1966, when he was a state senator, in part for appearing insufficiently conservative on matters of race. (He had worked to repeal voter restrictions.) In 1970, he courted the support of white conservatives, and Maddox, who was running separately for lieutenant governor, endorsed him. But Carter announced, in his inaugural address, that “the time for racial discrimination is over,” and set about integrating the state government. In the 1976 Presidential election, he carried every state of the former Confederacy except Virginia, winning just forty-five per cent of the white vote, but ninety-five per cent of the black vote.

Beginning in the nineteen-seventies, Georgia—particularly Atlanta—became a destination for a growing number of educated African-Americans repatriating to the South. Between 2000 and 2010, the state’s black population grew by twenty-five per cent, and the Latino population almost doubled, to nearly nine per cent. By 2010, Asian-Americans accounted for three per cent of the population. But those changes were not entirely reflected at the polls. In 2016, six hundred thousand African-Americans who were eligible to vote remained unregistered. Many people viewed this fact as a reflection of the Democratic Party’s pessimism toward the potential of the black electorate in the state. In 2008, Ben Jealous, then the director of the N.A.A.C.P., told me that Democrats were ignoring a political bounty by failing to allocate sufficient money to organize and register black Georgians.

Shortly before Abrams announced her candidacy, she told me, in a phone conversation, that, if she ran, her campaign strategy would rely on registering those six hundred thousand people. During our Brookings discussion, I said that she probably could have heard my eyebrow raise over the phone. “More like I could hear your eyes rolling,” she said. In her public appearances, Abrams often rattles off statistics about the election. But one statistic stands out: nine hundred and twenty-five thousand African-Americans voted in the 2014 gubernatorial race; in 2018, 1.4 million African-Americans voted—ninety-four per cent of them for Abrams.

The fact that her campaign had conceived of a plan that, at least in theory, made Georgia look like a purple state has not gone unnoticed. “The path to victory as a Democrat here is you have got to build a multiracial, multiethnic coalition,” Groh-Wargo told me. “You have got to get super intellectually curious about African-American voters, about Latino voters, about Asian-American voters, about millennials, and white suburbanites.” When I asked Abrams if the national Party had invested too heavily in those communities in 2016, at the expense of the lower-income white electorate, ushering in Trump’s victory, she rejected the framing of the question. “I think where the Democratic Party has gotten into trouble is that we’ve created a binary, where it’s either the normative voter we remember fondly from 1960”—the working-class white male—“or it’s the hodgepodge. The reality is that we are capable as a society of having multiple thoughts at the same time. That’s one of the reasons why I went to the gay-pride parade,” she added. “I know that, as an ally, I’m responsible for making certain that the L.G.B.T.Q. community is seen and heard.” Most elections are framed as a referendum on the future; Georgia’s race was about how much of the past had been dragged into the present.

All this leaves open the question of what Abrams will do next. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, tried to persuade her to run against David Perdue, Georgia’s junior senator, who is up for reëlection in 2020. In May, she announced that she would not run next year, a decision that was met with disapproval from observers who think that it’s incumbent on prominent Democrats to help the Party win control of the Senate. Abrams defended her decision to me by saying, “I was following the protocol that I set for myself, making sure that I take on jobs and roles because they are the right thing for me, and not simply because they’re available.” Strategists thought that she could beat Perdue; Trump’s approval rating in Georgia has dropped seventeen points since his Inauguration, and Perdue’s close ties to the President may make him vulnerable in the suburbs, where Abrams fared well. She was less sanguine about the part that would come next. The prestige of the Senate does not, in her estimation, offset its torpid pace of change. “It is a more indirect approach than the one I see for myself,” she said. “When I thought through who would be the best advocate in the U.S. Senate for Georgia, under the structure of the Senate, that was not me.”

Yet Republican control of the Senate has been key to some of the issues that most concern her. If it weren’t for the confirmation of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, an imminent challenge to Roe v. Wade would be much less likely. Similarly, the Supreme Court ruling in Shelby County v. Holder left open the possibility that Congress could create an updated standard for voter protection. One such effort is the Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2015, which was co-sponsored by John Lewis, the longtime Georgia congressman and civil-rights leader. The bill, among other things, calls for any jurisdiction that’s been found to have committed repeated voting-rights violations in the past twenty-five years to be re-subjected to preclearance for ten years. Abrams has testified twice this year before Congress in support of such measures. (The Fair Fight Action lawsuit calls for Georgia to be put back under preclearance requirements.) A new voter-protection standard has almost no chance of passing the Senate now. It could, though, if Democrats gain control of the chamber.

Then there is still the question of the governorship. Abrams could run against Kemp again, in 2022, though some aspects of the past campaign are still being fought. In April, Kemp signed two significant bills that addressed some of the issues raised by Democrats and the Common Cause lawsuit, such as extending the “use it or lose it” period and insuring protections for voters using absentee and provisional ballots. New voting machines will be installed by next year, though there are concerns about security. And the new secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has opened an investigation into the forty-seven hundred absentee-ballot applications that were reported missing.

But, also in April, David Emadi, the new head of the Georgia Ethics Commission, subpoenaed financial records and correspondence from Abrams’s campaign, to investigate contributions from four groups that, according to the subpoenas, may have exceeded the limit for statewide candidates. Groh-Wargo called the move “insane political posturing,” and pointed out that Emadi was a donor to Kemp. (He contributed six hundred dollars to Kemp’s 2018 bid.) Emadi said in a statement that audits and investigations of all the campaigns are ongoing and that “all of these candidates enjoy the presumption of innocence in these matters unless and until evidence indicates otherwise.”

There is also the question of whether Abrams will run for President. Supporters have been calling on her to do so since last year. (In January, she delivered a well-received response to Trump’s State of the Union—an honor generally afforded to a high-ranking officeholder.) A few months ago, she was mentioned in the press as a potential running mate for Biden—a development that caught her off guard. She had met with him, but they did not discuss a joint ticket. When I asked her about that possibility, she promptly shut it down: “I don’t believe you get into a race to run for second place.”

Abrams defended Biden earlier this year against allegations of inappropriate behavior with women, saying, “We cannot have perfection as the litmus test. The responsibility of leadership is not to be perfect but to be accountable.” She was equally politic when I asked her about Biden’s dispute with Kamala Harris, particularly over his history of opposing busing: “While America must reckon with its past, my focus is on how the next President will address the persistent issue of inequity in public education.” Her name will likely continue to show up on various shortlists for the Vice-Presidency.

What is not likely to change, at least in the short term, is the dynamic of the contest between two political directions, one of inclusion, one of resentment. Abrams told me, “What we did in our campaign was realize that the fundamentals are true for everyone. Everyone wants economic security. Everyone wants educational opportunity for their children and for themselves.” It’s an optimistic view—a belief that people are motivated more by their common aspirations than they are by their tribal fears. Abrams’s own future, no matter what she does next, hinges on that being true. ♦