Stacey Abrams: My ‘plan’ is to be president within next 20 years

Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams says she plans to be president in the next two decades.

In a FiveThirtyEight interview published Friday, when asked if she thought the American people could elect her as president in the next 20 years, she responded: “Yes, I do.”

“That’s my plan, and I’m very pragmatic,” she added with a smile.

Abrams has been floated as a potential vice presidential pick in 2020, and said in November that she would be “happy” to run as a vice presidential candidate.

Asked in the FiveThirtyEight interview about the prospect of being on a general election ticket with a white male, Abrams said she was “proud” to be “in the conversation.”

“I accept that I exist in the political zeitgeist in a very specific way,” she said. “And that we as a nation have very binary notions of politics. You’re a Democrat or Republican, you’re a man or a woman, you’re black or you’re white … we don’t do a lot of nuance.”

“I am a very accomplished person who has experience in a realm of issues and has the capacity to do this job,” she continued. “While I may chafe a bit at what spawns the question, I’m very proud of why I’m even in the conversation.”

Abrams, who now runs Fair Fight, a group that advocates for fair elections, is the former minority leader of the Georgia state house who lost her bid for the governor’s office by just over 1 percentage point in 2018.

The election increased Democrats’ hopes for running competitively in statewide races in the state, which has two Senate elections this year.

In the interview published Friday, Abrams also spoke about what she called a “laziness” surrounding coverage of her gubernatorial bid.

The interviewer noted that a local columnist had described her Democratic primary race, in which she ran against a white woman, as a “feud between Beyoncé and Taylor Swift.”

“I think it is a curiosity of people,” Abrams said.

“When something new is on the horizon, we are usually both equally curious and afraid. Race and gender have such contextualized meaning in our society, that I don’t begrudge the question, but I resent an answer that doesn’t accept the wholeness of who I am,” she said.