Who is Stacey Abrams? Georgia Democrat to deliver response to Trump’s State of the Union address

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Stacey Abrams, who recently ran as the Democratic candidate for the hotly contested Georgia gubernatorial election, will be delivering the Democratic response to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech next week.

“Three weeks ago, I called Stacey Abrams and asked her to deliver the response, I was very delighted when she agreed,” New York Senator Chuck Schumer told reporters on Tuesday. “She has led the charge for voting rights, which is at the root of just about everything else.”

The State of the Union addressed is scheduled for February 5. After initially revoking his invitation during the government shutdown, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reinvited Mr Trump to deliver the annual address on Monday.

Ms Abrams served as the Democratic leader in the Georgia state General Assembly from 2011 to 2017.

The 45-year-old trailblazer became a rising star among Democrats when she won the Democratic primary against Stacey Evans, a member of Georgia’s House of Representatives, making her the first black woman to become the gubernatorial nominee of a major party in the United States.

Ms Abrams star factor continues despite unsuccessfully running against Republican Brian Kemp for governor amid speculations of voter fraud in the election. She lost to Mr Kemp, who was Georgia’s acting secretary of state at the time, with 1.4 per cent of the vote.

Here is everything you need to know about the progressive Democrat giving the State of the Union response.

Ms Abrams, like 2018 Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum and Mississippi Senate candidate Mike Epsy, is among a rising wave of southern progressives of color seeking seats in deep-red statehouses and congressional districts.

In the governor’s race, Ms Abrams had a progressive campaign emphasizing on civil rights—primarily voter suppression—opposing proposals for stricter voter ID laws like “exact-match.” Under “exact-match” laws, voter registration forms and state IDs to match exactly in order to place a ballot, arguing that it is designed to “scare people out of voting,” specifically minorities and working-class people.

She also has campaigned on criminal justice reform, calling for the end on cash bail for poor defendants, opposing the death penalty and arguing for the decriminalisation of marijuana possession.

Ms Abrams, the daughter of Methodist ministers, first got into politics when she was in highschool. At 17, she was hired as a typist for a congressional campaign and then as a speechwriter. Before graduating Spelman college magna cum laude, Ms Abrams worked in the office of then-Atlanta Mayor Maynard Johnson, interned at the Environmental Protection Agency, and made her mark as an civil rights activist by taking part in a protest burning of the state flag—which had incorporated the Confederate flag then—of the Georgia capitol in 1992.

In 1998, She received her master’s degree in public policy at the University of Texas at Austin as a Harry S Truman Scholar, and then graduated from Yale Law School in 1999.

Ms Abrams worked as a tax attorney for an Atlanta firm often representing tax-exempt organisation and specialising in health care and public finance. She also co-founded NOW Corp., a financial services firm, in 2010 before eventually becoming the CEO of Sage Works, a legal consulting firm with high-profile clients like the WNBA team Atlanta Dream.

Although Ms Abrams frequently penned op-eds on public policy and wrote an autobiography detailing her long-standing political career, she also wrote several award-winning romantic suspense novels under the pen name Selene Montgomery. She reportedly sold more than 100,000 copies.

Under her pen name, Ms Abrams won the Reviewer’s Choice Award and the Reader’s Favourite Award from Romance in Color for Best New Author. Some of her book titles include Hidden Sins, Secret Lies, Reckless and Deception.

Ms Abrams—who received high-profile endorsements from former President Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and even Will Ferrell—won 48.9 per cent of the vote, losing just by a hair against Mr Kemp in an election that received numerous reports of voter suppression.

In October 2018, Mr Kemp—who served as Georgia’s chief elections officer at the time—ordered for 53,000 voter applications to be suspended indefinitely. More than two-third of the applicants were black. Later that month, an investigation discovered that Mr Kemp incorrectly removed more than 340,000 voters from the registration rolls.

And then on Election Day, 200 of the polling precincts in Georgia were closed.

Following the election, Ms Abrams is continuing to fight against voter suppression. In partnership with Fair Fight Action, a nonprofit civil rights organisation started by the Georgia Democrat, Ms Abrams filed a lawsuit to reform Georgia’s election system. The suit, filed in November 2018, names the state board of elections and then-interim Georgia Secretary of State Robyn Crittenden as the main defendants. But the true target of the lawsuit is Mr Kemp, who refused to resign from his position as chief elections officers until two days after the election, indicating a clear conflict-of-interest in the race.