Following a Monday interview at South by Southwest, Stacey Abrams confirmed she still hasn’t ruled out a 2020 presidential run.
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Abrams, who delivered the official State of the Union rebuttal on behalf of the Democrats earlier this year, clarified earlier remarks she’d given that seemed to imply she wouldn’t run until 2028.
“Twenty years ago, I never thought I’d be ready to run for POTUS before 2028. But life comes at you fast,” Abrams posted on her Twitter account Monday afternoon. “Now 2020 is definitely on the table...”
In an onstage interview with PBS News Hour’s Yamiche Alcindor (h/t NBC News), Abrams said she kept a spreadsheet mapping out her career goals since she was a young woman.
“In the spreadsheet with all the jobs I wanted to do, 2028 would be the earliest I would be ready to stand for president because I would have done the work I thought necessary to be effective at that job,” Abrams said.
Some took her comments to mean Abrams had effectively ruled out a presidential run in the next year. Her campaign staff later clarified Abrams was still keeping her options open.
Abrams, Georgia’s former house minority leader, lost a hotly-contested election for the governorship last November to Brian Kemp, who has been accused of suppressing votes to secure his win. While Abrams ultimately conceded the election, she made clear she felt the election had effectively been stolen.
“We all understand challenges and complications; however, this year, more than two hundred years into Georgia’s democratic experiment, the state failed its voters,” Abrams said in her concession speech, pointing out that despite record turnout in the 2018 midterms, “more than a million citizens found their names stripped from the rolls by the Secretary of State.”
Had she won, Abrams would have been the country’s first black woman governor.
Abrams, who met with top Democratic senators in January, has openly considered running for a U.S. Senate seat or for governor again in 2022, in which she’d once again face off against Kemp.
Previously, she said she’d given herself a March deadline to decide her next move.
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