Stacey Abrams’ journey into the unknown began in the passenger seat of a Chevy Tahoe bound for south Georgia. It’s a part of the state full of peanut and feed corn farms, and voting blocs that over the past two decades have been more favorable to Republican candidates. By the time she reached her first stop of the day, a diner in the tiny town of Fitzgerald, nearly 200 miles from Atlanta, it had been nearly two hours since she had seen the last yard sign with her name on it.

Abrams is polling in a virtual tie with Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the Republican nominee for governor, but strategists on both sides say if she is going to make history as the first black female governor in the nation, she first has to make inroads in the rural parts of the state, which tend to be whiter and more conservative. In short, she has to appeal to voters for whom a black woman with a Yale law degree from the deep-blue island of big-city Atlanta represents a major departure from their ideal candidate for statewide office.


Which is how Abrams, 44, came to be sitting at a glossy conference room table at the Valdosta Chamber of Commerce introducing herself as a businesswoman-turned-legislator and making the argument that expanding Medicaid and broadband access, providing quality child care for working parents and education for young children, are not just progressive talking points but pragmatic, pro-growth policies.

“The challenge in Georgia is that for every good thing we have, we have so many competing issues, competing needs that, I think, unfortunately, have gone unaddressed for the last 15 years,” Abrams told the 10 chamber members seated around her. “And my mission is to continue to move forward on the good and then make sure we start to pick up where we falter. For example, being one of the best places in the country to do business is a great thing, but we’re No. 22 of 25 when it comes to small businesses, to mainstream businesses. And that isn’t just an Atlanta issue, it’s a state issue.”

The first question was delivered with a polite smile … and a point.

“All that sounds great,” said Jan Brice, chairman of the chamber and executive director of a local senior living facility, who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and traveled to Washington, D.C., for his inauguration. “But, I mean, are you talking about raising taxes?”

True to her technocrat tendencies, Abrams’ answer sounded like it was pulled from the executive summary of a think-tank white paper: “You don’t have to raise taxes to do this,” Abrams said, hands in front of her as she doled out statistics about Georgia’s robust budget. “Our issue is not resources. Our issue is priorities, and having sat on the Appropriations Committee and the Ways and Means Committee in the Georgia Assembly, I can tell you that we have the resources necessary to meet the needs of the state of Georgia. We haven’t allocated properly.”

Kemp, her opponent, and his allies had been painting her in television ads as the second coming of Bernie Sanders, but Abrams touted her experience in the General Assembly finding new revenue streams that could be used to pay for her proposals, making sure to highlight where she agreed with Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, a Republican.

There was a pause before Brice said: “Good answer,” prompting chuckles from the audience.

During her three-day, six-stop swing in southern Georgia, Abrams never breathed the names of the national figures who have made her campaign a liberal cause célèbre. No Elizabeth Warren, no Kamala Harris, no Cory Booker. While the Democratic Party at large might view her as marching in lockstep with the progressive uprising embodied by the insurgent campaigns of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York and Ayanna Presley in Massachusetts, Abrams, like her counterpart Andrew Gillum in Florida, is straining to avoid the socialist mantle. She argues that the best card she can play to skeptical Republicans is to highlight her own roots in rural Mississippi and to frame her brand of progressivism as less like an American version of socialism that Republicans abhor and more like the sensible policies of any responsible governor.

“I think part of the narrative that’s started to develop is that there’s something not pragmatic about expanding Medicaid in Georgia,” Abrams told me later as we sat in her campaign SUV parked outside the Seminole County Elementary School in Donalsonville, a modest crossroads surrounded by peanut farms. “And my point is to demonstrate that regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, governors across the country have recognized the necessity of Medicaid expansion. And probably the most famous conservative governor would be Mike Pence when he served as governor of Indiana. The most liberal would be Jerry Brown, who’s governor of California, and what I do is to try to juxtapose the two of them to demonstrate that Georgia’s decision not to expand Medicaid is not grounded in pragmatism. It’s grounded in the false ideology that’s denying access to health care, especially in South Georgia.”

So far what few polls there are show that she has work to do making this case, at least in this skeptical corner of the state (“It’s part of the state that Republicans know they’re going to win, so why poll it?” quipped Republican pollster Brent Buchanan.) In the past two gubernatorial elections, Deal won the entire central and eastern part of Georgia. He won all but one of the counties Abrams visited on her recent tour—three of those five counties by double-digit margins. In 2016, the entire region preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton even though Trump carried the state only narrowly. To win the governorship, Abrams will have to dominate the reliably Democratic parts of the state farther north and also hit a respectable margin in those rural Republican-leaning counties. But, like Democratic candidates before her, she has a significant gap of enthusiasm to overcome. A July SurveyUSA poll found Abrams trailing Kemp 55 percent to 34 percent among rural voters.

She doesn’t need to win over all of them, but she needs to cut into the support that Kemp gets almost reflexively. “I would assume she needs to win somewhere between 38 and 42 percent in that part of the state,” Democratic pollster Harrison Hickman said of Abrams.

If she wins with this strategy, rather than relying on urban voters to carry her, it will offer evidence that a black woman from a liberal metropolis can win a Republican-leaning state with something approximating a bipartisan coalition. For that to happen, though, it will take converting voters like Jan Brice, and that will be a major challenge.

“I haven’t really made up my mind, because I like Brian Kemp,” Brice said after the chamber roundtable, “but I was very impressed with what she said.”

Abrams, though, even gets pushback from more conservative Democrats in this part of the state. At the stop at the diner in Fitzgerald, Pence Kaminsky, a former local official, said Abrams’ position on tearing down the massive Confederate monument known as Stone Mountain was out of touch with the region. (Indeed, driving down to one of the final stops on the tour, staffers noted a prominently displayed flag for a chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.)

“That’s just ridiculous,” said Kaminsky, a self-described “yellow dog Democrat” who was going to vote for Abrams. “That’s something that lets people know that she’s an extremist.”



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Abrams is not the first Democrat who had to win over the state’s more conservative voters. It’s just gotten a lot harder to do over the past couple of decades.

The last two Democrats to serve as governor—Zell Miller and Roy Barnes—came from outside Atlanta and were exposed to politics at an early age. But since 2003, when Sonny Perdue became the first Republican to take control of the governor’s mansion since Reconstruction, the state has moved relentlessly into the Republican column even as Atlanta’s population has surged. By 2010, every statewide office was under Republican control. Indeed, so impregnable has the Republican hold become on the state that the most recent Democratic candidate, Jason Carter, the grandson of former President Jimmy Carter, couldn’t manage to come within 8 percentage points of Deal in the 2014 election. Political pedigree means little now if it’s attached to the wrong party.

Despite his own track record, Carter says he still subscribes to the belief that Democrats can regain their former sway with rural voters.

“My belief about rural Georgia is that folks feel alienated from the mainstream elements of the economy and if you could convince those people that feel alienated to bring them back in, then you’re going to get some real votes,” he said. “If you can convince those people who are alienated that you’re the right person to bring them back in, then you’re going to get some real votes.”

The question is whether Abrams’ background—so different from those of Carter, Barnes and Miller—is an asset or a liability.

Abrams grew up poor in rural Mississippi. She attended Spelman College in Atlanta on a mix of merit- and need-based aid and graduated magna cum laude, ultimately earning a law degree from Yale (she also has a master’s in public policy from the University of Texas at Austin). While at Spelman, she emerged as an outspoken activist amid protests and riots in Atlanta after the Rodney King verdict in 1992, which put the political bug in her ear that would blossom first into a job as a deputy attorney for Atlanta and later into a seat in the General Assembly. Prior to joining the legislature, Abrams co-founded a financial services firm and a separate beverage company catering to young children. Under the pen name Selena Montgomery, Abrams wrote eight romantic suspense novels. She also founded the New Georgia Project, a nonpartisan organization aimed at registering thousands of minority voters throughout the state.

Few viable Democratic candidates for Georgia governor have been as unapologetically liberal as Abrams (during the tour, without caution, she said climate change is real and she doesn’t think assault weapons should be ubiquitous), but when she talks about her time in the state's General Assembly, where she served as minority leader in the House of Representatives, she often highlights examples of her work with Republicans. One of the bigger examples is her work with Deal to reform the HOPE scholarship program, which used state lottery money to pay tuition for needy students but ran into funding problems. In 2011, Abrams was also largely responsible for blocking what Georgia Republicans initially portrayed as a major income-tax cut. Abrams, a lawyer who specializes in taxes, analyzed the proposal and found that it would amount to a major tax increase. She brought her analysis back to her colleagues and worked to persuade them to vote against it. The proposal was defeated.

Still, she has continued to praise Deal for his work on issues that she holds dear, including criminal justice reform.

“What Nathan Deal has been willing to do—and I’ve been able to work in concert with him on this for seven years—is actually address the disconnect between a state that wants to be the best state in the nation but had some of the most draconian criminal justice rules in the country,” Abrams told me during our interview in her SUV. “So I give him entirely the greatest credit, because he did good work.”

The broader strategy behind this is similar to what other Democrats vying for statewide positions in deep-red Southern states have used. Skip the talk about divisive issues such as Obamacare, immigration and same-sex marriage and do what Doug Jones said he did in his victorious Alabama Senate campaign: focus on “bread-and-butter dinner table” issues.



***

Standing in a pair of brown Hunter rain boots at the edge of a river at a farm in Mitchell County, Abrams listened intently as peanut farmer Glenn Cox and his daughter Casey Cox explained the technical aspects of the farm’s irrigation system and moisture sensors.

Abrams mentioned she “got to learn variable rate irrigation when I went to the Stripling Center about four years ago,” a reference to the University of Georgia’s C.M. Stripling Irrigation Research Park.

“She knows all about it,” Casey Cox , 27, joked.

“She’s letting me pretend I know what I’m talking about,” Abrams laughed. The conversation then moved to what a governor could do for farmers in Georgia.

Abrams peppered Glenn Cox with the kind of questions a politician asks of a potential constituent with whom she has little in common: “So what do you need the governor to know about how we make certain there are more places for growing up and down the river?”

More attention to rural Georgia, Cox said, explaining that the region needs help with better internet connectivity (an Abrams policy point). Cox mentioned precision agriculture, a technology-focused type of farming that Abrams conceded she needed to learn more about.

“Talk to me about precision ag,” Abrams said.

After the tour, the elder Cox said Abrams’ questions seemed informed. Abrams, Cox said, could possibly change voters’ minds in the area “if they met her.” But south Georgia, Cox noted, usually favors Republican candidates.

“But you know how things work,” he said. “They got to meet her.”

But their conversation indicated it’s much more complicated than just shaking hands and agreeing on a couple of convincing answers about expanding broadband or more rural education funding. The simple math is that this is a reliably Republican region and voters need a compelling reason to change their minds.

Abrams, speaking at a packed barbershop in nearby Albany later in the day, started her remarks acknowledging her location.

“I’m here because I know Albany is the center of opportunity in southwest Georgia. I know that when Albany does well, southwest Georgia does well, but if we don’t lift up southwest Georgia, Georgia is not going to do as well as it could,” Abrams said. Albany’s unemployment rate has hovered above the rest of the state’s for more than half a decade. “I want to be clear, I’m not running to be the governor of Atlanta, I’m running to be the governor of all of Georgia.”

This stop was slightly more familiar to Abrams: a racially mixed crowd of men and women. Attendees cheered for Abrams and peppered her with questions on whether her campaign was prepared for Republican hijinks to stop supporters from voting for her. Even among her supporters at the event there was uncertainty about whether she could actually win over the region.

Bruce Capps, a retired white insurance business owner in the audience who described Abrams as “terrific,” nevertheless flinched when asked whether Abrams could beat Kemp in southwest Georgia.

“It’s going to be tough,” Capps said, saying the numbers for Abrams are there but that the question is motivation—“getting those voters registered and out to the polls.”



***

A day later, Abrams was back in Atlanta to deliver a speech at the Georgia Democratic Convention. Abrams wasn’t the only candidate promising to win over voters across the state, but delivering faster broadband to assuage conservative farmers hundreds of miles away was a much less pressing concern than making electoral history. And while bipartisanship sounds great when you’re sitting in the conference room of the Valdosta Chamber of Commerce, no one in the convention hall was interested in celebrating the accomplishments of a Republican governor.

“We have a chance to elect the nation’s first African-American woman governor,” Rep. Hank Johnson cheered in his speech shortly before Abrams took the stage.

The crowd roared. They already knew everything they needed to know about her.

