Stacey Abrams Is Just Getting Started

Asymptotic.

- Brittney Cooper

This is the word Stacey Abrams chooses to describe her phenomenal rise as an overachieving black woman from a “genteel poor” family in the Deep South. For someone who had considered physics as a major, it is a term that perfectly captures how the Georgia governorship and other major accomplishments (she was a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship too) have, despite valiant effort and a singularly impressive résumé, eluded her. “I call it my asymptote of success,” she tells me, while I wonder what such a word could possibly mean. “An asymptote,” she explains as if she were the coolest college professor ever, “is a curve that comes close to the line. It’s infinitesimally close but never actually crosses the line. That’s sometimes how I feel my life has gone—that I come incredibly close to these things, but that barrier has yet to be crossed. I have understood for a long time that my trajectory was always going to be asymptotic, but my mission is to break the plane.”

The scientific way that Abrams, 45, parses her life’s path is indicative of how she ran the governor’s race. By all measures, the former Georgia House minority leader’s run for the Georgia governorship as the first African American female nominee by a major party was historic. More than 1.2 million African Americans voted in the race, exceeding the total number of Democratic Georgia voters in 2014. Abrams got more votes than Barack Obama (who campaigned for Abrams, as did Oprah Winfrey) and Hillary Clinton did during their respective presidential campaigns in the Peach State. Even more impressive is that she received this number of votes in a midterm-election year. Her campaign tripled voter turnout among Latino and Asian American voters. White voters supported Abrams more than any recent candidate in history. And she received more votes from white women than Hillary Clinton did. But in the end, the official r