Stacey Abrams, at forty-four, has become one of the most prominent black female politicians in the United States. As Georgia’s House Minority Leader, Abrams, a Democrat, was the first woman to lead either party in the state’s general assembly. Since graduating from Spelman College and Yale Law School—in between, she got a master’s degree from the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, at the University of Texas—she has worked as a tax attorney in Atlanta, co-founded a financial-services firm, and created the New Georgia Project to register hundreds of thousands of voters, particularly people of color, young people, and unmarried women. Abrams has also written eight “romantic suspense” novels, half of them published by HarperCollins, under the name Selena Montgomery. Abrams has said that she created the pen name to keep her fiction separate from the papers on tax law she was also publishing at the time; she happened to be watching a documentary about Elizabeth Montgomery, who played the lead on “Bewitched,” when she chose the name. Abrams has a book under own name, “Minority Leader: How to Lead from the Outside and Make Real Change,” coming out later this month.

On Saturday, I went to see Abrams speak at the International Longshoremen’s Association, in Savannah. Prior to her arrival, scores of dockworkers were milling about, checking their schedules, playing Ping-Pong, catching up with colleagues and friends. Of the dozen men I spoke to outside the I.L.A., all of them African-American, Wali Johnson, a man in his sixties selling watermelons from the back of his truck, was the only one who had heard of Abrams. “All I know is that she’s running for governor,” he said. Should Abrams win in November, she would be Georgia’s first Democratic governor in fifteen years, its first black governor, and the first black woman to be the governor of any state in the country. “I don’t care if they’re Republican, Democrat, black, white, or Chinese,” Johnson said, of politicians generally. “I just want them to do the right thing and don’t forget about us in the African-American neighborhoods.”

Further Reading New Yorker writers on the 2018 midterm elections.

An hour later, Abrams stood before a crowd of about eighty in the main room of the I.L.A. Thomas L. Hart, a pastor at the nearby Brownsville Missionary Baptist Church, rose to clap when she arrived. He first saw Abrams speak last fall and was immediately won over. “She’s the right person at the right moment,” he told me. Abrams gave a half-hour stump speech that was by turns moving and funny, and that managed to feel nearly spontaneous. She was born in Wisconsin, but her family didn’t stay long—she only remembers “the cold and cheese curds,” she said. She spent most of her childhood in Gulfport, Mississippi, where her family was part of what her mother called “the genteel poor,” which meant that “we had no money, but we watched PBS and read books,” Abrams said. When the family’s water was cut off, her mother would call the resulting situation “urban camping.” For a time, Abrams’s mother was a librarian, while her father was employed as a dockworker. When the family moved to Atlanta, they both became Methodist ministers—“thus guaranteeing that they would be permanently poor.” She and her five siblings were “saved by public education,” Abrams said. One of them is now a professor of anthropology. Another, who also attended Yale Law School, is a federal judge. A third is a social worker.

Abrams’s brother Walter is the exception. She described him as “a drug addict, who committed crimes to support his habit.” A few years ago, Walter, who has bipolar disorder, went to jail. He got out and promptly relapsed, reoffended, and returned to jail. A week ago, he was released again. Abrams presented his story as evidence of the need for criminal-justice reform, improved public education, and an expanded Medicaid, as well as a better understanding of mental illness. “He still can’t get a job,” she said. “He still doesn’t have health insurance. And he still has to figure out where he’s gonna live.”

When I sat down with Abrams after her speech, she told me that she’d been considering a run for a major public office in Georgia since she joined the state legislature, in 2007. She thought about running for mayor of Atlanta. “But I realized that the scale of the issues and the capacity to really address poverty and the attendant issues could only be done through the role of governor,” she said. Watching Virginia and Alabama turn blue last year, she decided that now was the time. “Georgia is not a red state,” she had told the crowd earlier. “It’s just blue and confused.”

Before Abrams can try to prove that claim, she has to defeat Stacey Evans, a former member of the Georgia legislature, in the Democratic primary, which will be held on May 22nd. Evans is white; people have been calling the candidates Black Stacey and White Stacey. (Evans was widely criticized for an ad she released in January, in which her face and Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s face are awkwardly melded.) Most of the close observers of Georgia politics whom I’ve spoken to think that Abrams will win the Democratic nomination, and believe that she has an outside shot in November, when she would likely face Casey Cagle, Georgia’s lieutenant governor, and the front-runner to succeed the Republican incumbent Nathan Deal, who has served the office’s maximum of two terms.

I asked Abrams—who became known to many Georgians last year, after white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, when she advocated removing the largest Confederate monument in the world, a two-acre carving of Confederate generals on Stone Mountain, just outside of Atlanta—whether she considers herself a progressive Democrat. Unlike Jon Ossoff, the last liberal Georgian to become nationally famous trying to win political office here, she said that she did. She added, “I’m also a pragmatist.” In a state House vote last year on HB-192, a Georgia bill that changed the liability standard for bank executives, Abrams sided with the state’s Republican majority, prompting The Intercept to publish an article titled “Georgia Democratic Gubernatorial Candidate Voted With G.O.P. to Make It Harder to Hold Bank Executives Accountable.” Abrams insisted that she does not regret this vote. “It was a bill that achieved the best outcome,” she told me, “which is to hold bad actors accountable and to hold those who operate in good faith—give them the capacity to defend themselves if something goes wrong.” The recent Atlanta mayoral candidate and former state senator Vincent Fort, a Democrat known for his work to stop predatory lending, disagrees. “Bottom line,” he told The Intercept, “the bill would allow for the same kind of abuses in subprime banking that we saw in the nineties and two-thousands.”

Abrams’s voter-registration efforts might be described as both progressive and pragmatic. The groups targeted by the New Georgia Project are likely to vote for Democrats, and expanding the voter rolls strengthens Abrams’s chances. (Abrams is no longer the organization’s C.E.O.) Georgia has a long history of voter suppression, and its current secretary of state, Brian Kemp, is a prominent proponent of voter-I.D. laws. In 2014, Kemp memorably expressed concern, to a group of fellow-Republicans, that Democrats were registering “all these minority voters that are out there,” and said that Republicans needed to register their own voters in order to keep up. A couple of months later, he launched a fraud investigation into Abrams’s New Georgia Project. The organization has also been subject to multiple tax liens, totalling thirteen thousand dollars, for unpaid employment contributions. Abrams blamed these on clerical errors.