Stacey Abrams wears several hats. She is a political leader, a lawyer, the CEO and founder of several civic and non-profit organizations, and an author. In 2018, she ran to become the governor of Georgia. While she narrowly lost to Brian Kemp, then secretary of state, she garnered more votes than any other Democrat in the state’s history. Abrams also made history as the first Black woman to become the gubernatorial nominee for a major party in the United States and the first Black woman and first Georgian to deliver a response to the State of the Union. Before her run for governor, Abrams served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 2007 to 2017, including a stint as minority leader from 2011 to 2017. Her discontent with how the 2018 race for governor was managed led her to launch Fair Fight Action, a voting rights non-profit organization seeking to end voter suppression. The mission of Fair Fight is to ensure every American has a voice in our election system. Abrams’s immediate goal was to fund and train voter protection teams in 20 battleground states in preparation for the 2020 elections. While focusing on Georgia, Abrams saw a path to victory many others missed. Democrats, she said, would not close a gap measured in the hundreds of thousands by changing the minds of white perennial voters. They would do it by reshaping the electorate, by exciting the expanding universe of potential Democratic voters like the youngest native white Georgians, Black voters who cast ballots sporadically, Black voters moving to Georgia from other regions, and a growing Latino and Asian American population. As Dubose Porter, the former Georgia Democratic Party chairperson and an Abrams mentor, puts it, "Stacey had the vision for getting to new voters, registering them, talking to them—and then giving them a reason to vote."2 In simple terms, Abrams’s strategy was to focus on disengaged voters of colour, as opposed to continuing the focus on persuading undecided, moderate, often white voters. This headline in Politico, "How Stacey Abrams and her Band of Believers Turned Georgia Blue," says it all. She is not only a team builder and leader but also a visionary. Georgia’s rapidly changing demographics in the Atlanta suburbs made the state’s shift to "blue" or "purple" a reality. Excitement and engagement of Black, Latino, and Asian American voters, along with a larger share of young white voters leaning Democratic, had the makings of a winning coalition. These trends were not lost on Abrams. To cap what once seemed an improbable outcome in a deep-red state, runoff elections on January 5, 2021, for Georgia’s two Senate seats resulted in victories by the Democratic candidates, Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, giving their party full control of Congress. Undoubtedly, many credited one person widely seen as being most responsible for Georgia’s new status as a Democratic state: Stacey Abrams.3 Team leadership is about focusing the team on a common mission, vision, core values, shared objectives, and strategies for achieving the objectives. Abrams wrote that the key to winning Georgia "was engaging new voters, establishing strongholds in Georgia’s demographically changing suburbs and protecting voters’ access to the polls."
Opening Case Questions
In what way has Stacey Abrams shown that she understands the connection between team leadership and team success?