Stacey Abrams says she's open to being any 2020 Democratic nominee's vice presidential running mate
- Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams told The New York Times she'd be "honored" to be a vice presidential running mate to any Democratic presidential nominee.
- This comes after the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial candidate announced this week that she wouldn't launch a bid for president and instead is focusing on promoting voting rights across the country.
- "I've just come to the decision that my best value add, the strongest contribution I can give to this primary, would be to make sure our nominee is coming into an environment where there's strong voter protections in place," she told the Times.
- Abrams told The Times that she declined to challenge Republican Sen. David Perdue in Georgia because the other Democrats in the race are "the right people for that job."
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Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams told The New York Times that she'd be "honored" to be a vice presidential running mate to any Democratic presidential nominee.
"I would be honored to be considered by any nominee," she said.
This comes after the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial candidate announced this week that she wouldn't launch a bid for president. She said she doesn't expect to endorse any candidate in the primary field.
"I've just come to the decision that my best value add, the strongest contribution I can give to this primary, would be to make sure our nominee is coming into an environment where there's strong voter protections in place," she told the Times.
Abrams narrowly lost her race against Republican Brian Kemp amid allegations of widespread voter suppression. She has since founded a nonpartisan voting rights group called Fair Fight Action.
Her high-profile bid for governor launched her onto the national political stage. In February, she delivered the Democratic Party's rebuttal to President Donald Trump's State of the Union address.
After declining Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's request that she run for Senate in Georgia, media reports emerged that former Vice President Joe Biden was considering asking Abrams to join his presidential ticket before he entered the race.
Abrams denied the reports, and during an interview on "The View," she quipped, "I think you don't run for second place."
She told The Times that she declined to challenge Republican Sen. David Perdue in Georgia because the other Democrats in the race are "the right people for that job."
"I appreciate the importance of that role," she said. "But I am not so arrogant as to believe I'm the only one who can win [the Senate race]."
She insisted her top priority is fighting voter suppression in Georgia and in other battleground states across the country leading up to the 2020 election.
"As I think about my next step, my first responsibility is to ensure that when the primary is done - when the nominee decides to choose their running mate - that they are choosing based on knowing that we are in a country where we have built the infrastructure in those battleground states," Abrams said.
The first black woman nominated to be governor of any state, Abrams refused to deliver a traditional concession speech when she withdrew from her race 10 days after last year's election. She hasn't backed off of her charge that Kemp and Georgia Republicans successfully suppressed the vote, particularly of black Americans, by closing polling places, purging voters, and slowing over 50,000 voter applications.
"What I regret every day is that we could not stop [Brian Kemp] from bastardizing this whole process, from denying the franchise to those who had earned it by being Americans and tried to use right to vote to set the course of their futures," she told the Times this week. "And I will always be deeply, deeply hurt that we live in a nation that permitted that to happen."
Kemp, who oversaw elections as Georgia's secretary of state between 2010 and 2018, denied engaging in intentional voter suppression throughout the course of the campaign. He vigorously defended Georgia's "exact match" system of voter verification. And Republicans have criticized Democratic members of the US House for opening a congressional investigation into the allegations of voter suppression earlier this year.