Stacey Abrams Won’t Run for President, ‘Would Be Honored’ by VP Pick

Democrat activist Stacey Abrams said Tuesday she will not run for president in 2020 but signaled she is “open” to being the running mate to “any” of the White House hopefuls seeking to oust President Donald Trump.

“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,” Abrams said in an interview with the New York Times.

“I would be honored to be considered by any nominee,” she added.

A confident Abrams previously said she believes she could still win the nomination even if she mounted a bid in the fall and missed two rounds of presidential primary debates. The Georgia Democrat was the subject of rumors that former Vice President Joe Biden could select her as his running mate before Biden formally kicked off his campaign — an idea she and her allies rejected publically.

“I think it is deeply problematic that there would be a discussion of relegating any woman to the role of second when the primary has yet to fully take shape,” Abrams told the Guardian. “I think it’s a reflection again of this notion of what leadership looks like.”

Tuesday’s development comes after Abrams announced that she would not run for Senate against incumbent Sen. David Perdue (R-GA). “I appreciate the importance of that role. But I am not so arrogant as to believe I’m the only one who can win that,” she told the Times. Top Democrats on Capitol Hill, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) met privately with Abrams to urge her to run for the seat.

Despite losing her 2018 gubernatorial bid against Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA), Abrams still refuses to concede the race, accusing her opponent of suppressing black voters to win. Abrams, who delivered the Democrat Party’s official response to President Donald Trump’s 2019 State of the Union address, recently launched Fair Fight Action, a group aimed at combatting voter suppression.

The progressive darling made headlines Tuesday for floating an evidence-free conspiracy theory — that the Republican National Committee (RNC) may station off-duty police officers in minority communities to “scare voters, particularly voters of color.”

“For the first time since 1981, the RNC will be allowed to cheat and lie and go into polling places and scare voters, particularly voters of color,”  she told MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show. “Fair Fight 2020 is designed to anticipate all those challenges, but not just worry about them, work against them, and that’s what we learned from 2018. We cannot wait for the cavalry to come. We have to be the army, and we have to stand up now.”