Exclusive: Stacey Abrams on Trump's Existential Threat to Voting
The Mother Jones Podcast
Mother Jones
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2020
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On today’s show, an exclusive, wide-ranging interview with former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, the Democratic powerhouse who launched voting rights initiative Fair Fight after her 2018 loss to now-Gov. Brian Kemp. Mother Jones’s voting rights reporter Ari Berman asks Abrams if the coronavirus crisis will add even more obstacles to voting in America. Abrams holds fast to her belief that there’s no reason for elections in November to be disrupted by the pandemic. “We were able to vote during the Civil War, we were able to vote during the Spanish flu of 1918, there is no excuse for not holding our elections in 2020,” Abrams says. Berman also asks about the challenges to the 2020 census, Kemp’s response to COVID-19, and the dangerous attempt to suppress voters during the Wisconsin primary in April. Abrams is also crystal clear about how she sees the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed 25-year-old Black man in her state in February: It’s “murder,” she says. Watch the full interview on our Mother Jones Youtube channel, Facebook or Twitter pages, or at motherjones.com.
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| 0:00.0 | This is the Mother Jones Podcast. |
| 0:03.0 | I'm Jamila King in Brooklyn. |
| 0:05.0 | On today's show, on today's show, our exclusive interview with Stacey Abrams, Democratic Party |
| 0:20.8 | powerhouse from the great state of Georgia. |
| 0:24.4 | And wow, there's so much to talk about. |
| 0:27.5 | How will the coronavirus affect elections? |
| 0:29.8 | Will it be safe to go to the polls? |
| 0:31.9 | Will Trump sabotage voting by mail? |
| 0:34.8 | Will the pandemic skew census results? |
| 0:37.9 | The 2020 elections were already going to be contentious. |
| 0:41.2 | Now, it's a pitched battle for participation and yes we ask |
| 0:46.3 | about the Joe Biden beepstakes. Stick around. Stacey Abrams knows what voter suppression looks like. |
| 1:04.0 | She was the first black woman gubernatorial nominee in US history, |
| 1:09.0 | a race she lost narrowly for reasons that she'll get into on this podcast. |
| 1:15.4 | Over the past two years, she's thrown herself into voting rights work, |
| 1:20.0 | founding the organization's fair fight and fair count. |
| 1:23.3 | And so there's no one I'd rather discuss this with than Stacey Abrams. |
| 1:27.6 | Last Thursday, Stacey Abrams joined Mother Jones voting rights reporter Ari Berman for an exclusive |
| 1:34.4 | interview about her voting rights work. |
| 1:37.1 | They get into the contentious Wisconsin primaries that just happened, the census, and so much more. |
| 1:47.0 | Today, we're bringing you an edited version of this live-streamed conversation from Zoom, which went out last week to our viewers across |
| 1:55.9 | Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. We'll let Ari take it away from here. |
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