Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

Stacey Abrams, a former Georgia state legislator and 2018 Democratic gubernatorial candidate, argues that voter suppression, the rejection of identity politics, and the rise of authoritarian populism together threaten American democracy. Framing the book as a manual for action rather than a campaign memoir, she contends that a diverse coalition she calls the "New American Majority," comprised of people of color, young voters, and progressive whites, holds the demographic power to reshape the country's politics, but only if barriers to voting are dismantled and civic engagement is sustained.

Abrams opens with a story about her grandmother, Walter Abrams (known as Bill), who in 1968 was paralyzed by fear on the day she could first vote in Mississippi, terrified by the violence she had witnessed during the civil rights era. Only after Abrams's grandfather reminded her of the sacrifices made by younger activists did she find the courage to go to the polls. Abrams uses this anecdote to illustrate voter suppression's dual function: It creates direct obstacles and convinces potential voters to forfeit participation altogether. She reinforces the point with a story about her sister Jeanine's friend, who after the 2018 election declared she would never vote again because the process seemed rigged. Abrams connects these decisions to policy consequences, arguing that suppressed votes translate into underfunded schools, higher maternal mortality for Black women, and a substandard minimum wage.

Abrams then recounts her 2018 gubernatorial campaign against Brian Kemp, Georgia's secretary of state, who simultaneously oversaw the election he was contesting. Her campaign tripled Latino and Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) voter turnout, increased youth participation by 139 percent, and drew over 1.2 million Black voters. Despite these achievements, she lost by 54,723 votes. She refused to concede, not to subvert the democratic process but to challenge a system she argues was manipulated through voter purges, registration holds, and ballot rejections.

To establish historical context, Abrams traces voter suppression from the nation's founding, when only white men held citizenship and voting rights, through the brief gains of Reconstruction (1865–1877) and their reversal through Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses. She chronicles the rise of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965, whose Section 5 preclearance mechanism required jurisdictions with histories of discrimination to obtain federal approval before changing election laws. After the 2008 election of Barack Obama produced the most diverse electorate in American history, the Republican Party worked to win state legislatures to control redistricting and then challenged the VRA itself. The Supreme Court's 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision effectively eliminated preclearance, allowing formerly covered states to impose new voting restrictions immediately.

The book's middle chapters document how voter suppression operates across three stages: registration, ballot access, and ballot counting. On registration, Abrams recounts founding the New Georgia Project (NGP) in 2013, initially to help poor Georgians navigate the Affordable Care Act after the governor rejected Medicaid expansion, then converting it into one of the largest voter registration efforts in the state since the civil rights movement. Of the nearly 86,000 forms NGP collected, approximately 40,000 were never processed. Secretary of State Kemp accused NGP of fraud and deployed the "exact match" system, which rejected voter applications for minor data-entry discrepancies such as missing hyphens, disproportionately affecting people of color. Abrams also documents felon disenfranchisement and aggressive voter purges that removed millions from rolls nationwide.

On ballot access, Abrams debunks the voter fraud rationale, citing that out of one billion votes cast between 2000 and 2014, only 31 instances of impersonation occurred. She distinguishes between basic voter identification and restrictive voter ID laws that narrow permissible documents and disproportionately burden marginalized communities. She tells the story of Leslie and Clark Peltier, members of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in North Dakota, who were unable to vote because the address on their government-issued IDs did not match the assigned 911 address for their home. The residential address requirement systematically excluded Native Americans on reservations who lacked street addresses. She documents widespread polling place closures after Shelby, with an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis estimating that closures prevented 54,000 to 85,000 Georgia voters from casting ballots, with Black voters 20 percent more likely to be affected.

On ballot counting, Abrams describes her own experience voting early in 2018, when a poll worker informed her the system showed she had already cast an absentee ballot she never requested. She details how signature mismatch laws allow untrained poll workers to reject absentee ballots, how provisional ballots intended as safety nets are used to shunt voters aside, and how broken voting infrastructure forced residents of predominantly Black neighborhoods to wait 29 percent longer to vote.

Having documented the problem, Abrams proposes solutions. She advocates for automatic voter registration, same-day registration, prohibition of voter purges based solely on nonvoting, restoration of the VRA, federal standards for early voting and absentee ballots, hand-marked paper ballots, and making Election Day a national holiday. She describes founding Fair Fight Action for litigation and advocacy on voting rights, Fair Fight PAC for nationwide voter protection, and Fair Count to ensure accurate census counts of hard-to-reach populations. She also advocates for statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.

Abrams defends identity politics as essential to democratic participation, tracing its history from class-based movements like the Know-Nothing Party through the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black feminists in the 1970s who originated the term. She argues that acknowledging difference strengthens rather than fractures coalitions, and connects identity to the mechanics of political power through the U.S. census, which steers over $1.5 trillion annually in federal funding and shapes political districts at every level. She details the Trump administration's attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, citing files from Republican redistricting consultant Thomas Hofeller revealing the question was designed to benefit Republicans and diminish the political representation of communities of color. Abrams calls for abolishing the Electoral College, advocating instead for the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, a pact among states to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote once enough states join to constitute a majority.

Abrams presents a three-part electoral strategy: rejecting the myth that investing in voters of color requires abandoning white voters, investing early in outreach to unlikely voters rather than prioritizing a small pool of swing voters, and supporting authentic candidates who refuse to change their positions based on audience. She cites her own 2018 results, which produced both historically high turnout among voters of color and the highest percentage of white support for a Georgia Democrat in a generation.

The book's final argumentative chapter addresses authoritarian populism as a global threat. Abrams outlines the populist playbook, drawing on examples from Brazil, the Philippines, India, Hungary, Venezuela, and Turkey, and argues that domestic voter suppression weakens America's credibility to advocate for democratic norms abroad. In her concluding chapter, she reflects on the emotional aftermath of her loss, recounting how her brother Walter's call from prison finally broke through her composure, and how encounters with grateful strangers clarified that her anger stemmed not from personal defeat but from systematic disenfranchisement. She issues calls to action: ask strangers about voter registration, contact local elected officials, and volunteer to reach unlikely voters. She argues that winning must be redefined to encompass ensuring that those who believe they do not matter come to believe their voices count.

In an afterword written during the early COVID-19 pandemic, Abrams connects the book's arguments about institutional erosion to the crisis, tracing America's unpreparedness to a forty-year conservative project of undermining trust in government, defunding public systems, and replacing scientific fact with profit-driven opinion. She insists that elections and the census must proceed, advocating expanded vote-by-mail and in-person voting options, and frames the 2020 elections as a referendum on restoring competent governance.