Fair Fight Action

Stacey Abrams is one of the most consequential democracy organizers of our time.

She's a New York Times bestselling author, the founder of Fair Fight Action and a constellation of organizations dedicated to expanding power for people locked out of it, and the first black woman in US history to receive a major party gubernatorial nomination.

She joins me today to talk about her 10-point plan to defeat authoritarianism and why, even now, especially now, voting is an act of resistance.

Thank you very much, Stacey, for joining us.

Here are two suggestions for good trouble.

I am currently spending this rainy Colorado Tuesday alternately text banking for Fair Fight Action and the ACLU.

Fair Fight Action is asking for comments on the Election Assistance Commission's website.

The EAC is a federal agency that provides guidance to states on election and administration.

On July 16th, 2025, the Election Assistance Commission, EAC, received a petition for rulemaking submitted by America First Legal Foundation asking the commission to amend their regulations and the national mail voter registration form to require documentary proof of United States citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.

Like this gets into voter suppression, policy suppression.

How do, I think you came from Fair Fight, right? So as you were thinking about building this place that we can hopefully trust, how do you see your work helping to create a better democracy? Oh, I love that smile.

I appreciate that question because it gets into the work that I, the whole purpose of this, right? You're exactly right to link this to voter suppression.

You're exactly right to link this to policy, to progress suppression, because that's the point of this kind of propaganda.

Even in the blackout report, we were very, very, very explicit that it was no coincidence that we were seeing what we call and what we believe to be the largest rollback in Black progress since the nadir, since post-reconstruction, at that point, only a few months before, we were very likely to see the end of the Voting Rights Act.

We made that distinction very clear in the Blackout Report because it was important for folks to know that this is about gaining illegitimate power at the end of the day.

At Fair Fight, I saw up close and personal how hard our communities work to participate, to stand in line for hours, to organize their neighbors, to do what needed to be done, as we are always asked to do, and how quickly that power can be blunted with an information environment that is poisoned.

Right.

In 2018, she became the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia, in which she was the first Black woman to become the gubernatorial nominee for a major party in the United States, and won more votes than any other Democrat in the state's history.

Over the course of her career, she has founded multiple organizations devoted to voting rights, including Fair Fight, Fair Count, and American Pride Rises.

Abrams is a New York Times best-selling author and host of the podcast Assembly Required, which you should listen to.

And right now, as lead organizer of the Ten Steps campaign, she is laser-focused on mobilizing to curb the rise of competitive authoritarianism in America through the Ten Steps to Autocracy and Authoritarianism framework, and equipping folks with the tools to fight back through her Ten Steps to Freedom and Power.