Stacey Abrams says she's "just as capable" to become president as anyone running in 2020 race
Stacey Abrams, a rising star in the Democratic party, who narrowly lost her race for Georgia governor in November, didn't explicitly rule out joining the already packed Democratic field of 2020 presidential contenders, telling "CBS This Morning" on Wednesday that her successes in "transforming the electorate" in her home state shows she'd be "just as capable of becoming the president of the United States as anyone running" right now.
Abrams said she was "deeply appreciative" of those encouraging her to run for various political offices, but said her "responsibility, though, is to make sure I'm running for the right reasons and at the right time and this is not the conversation I was having with myself last year."
Speaking at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival earlier this month, Abrams said she had previously considered 2028 to be the earliest she would run for president, but later tweeted she's now considering a 2020 run.
"[Twenty] years ago, I never thought I'd be ready to run for POTUS before 2028," she wrote. "But life comes at you fast ... Now 2020 is definitely on the table."
Abrams told "CBS This Morning" that she's been holding meetings with nearly everyone running in 2020, including former Vice President Joe Biden. She attempted to shoot down speculation of a possible joint ticket with Biden in the 2020 race.
"We talked about a lot of things but that was not the core issue," Abrams said when asked about filling a potential VP slot.
She said that the presidential race right now is about "reasserting who we are as a nation, our capacity for cohesion and our ability to talk about marginalized communities and those who are outsiders without excluding the majority."
Abrams, who faulted the "mismanagement and malfeasance" of the Georgia election process for her loss, explained her rationale for not immediately conceding the election to Republican Brian Kemp due to concerns over voting irregularities. "In my mind the first responsibility was to not concede because that validated a system that I do not believe was proper, but I also have the responsibility to take action because it's insufficient to simply complain about what you don't like if you're not doing something to fix it."
Abrams, who formerly served as minority leader in the Georgia state Assembly, has since been courted by Democratic activists to run for Senate or make another bid for governor. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer recently told The Associated Press he was encouraging her to challenge Georgia Republican Sen. David Perdue in 2020.
She said she now has an obligation to think about what she can do better next time. "My job and my takeaway is that I have more work to do and my next responsibility is to figure out how that plays out in the electoral space.
"We have to start evolving what the face of leadership looks like," said Abrams. "It's not enough to dream to want to be things, you have to have a pathway there."