This is Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams, and I am your host, Stacey Abrams.

And if you're listening to this podcast, you are likely reeling from the results of the election.

I know that we are exhausted, we are profoundly disheartened, and we are rightly terrified.

I've been thinking today about the fact that my siblings and I and my cousins,

we were the first to be born into the Abrams family with the right to vote.

I'm 50, and I'm one of the older ones.

And yet that is a marker in our history.

My nieces and nephews, the oldest of whom is 18, they live in the first generation since

reconstruction to lose civil rights.

I measure those two things because I grew up in the South.

I love my home. I I grew up in the South. I love my home.

I love my region of the country.

And yet for most of my adult life, I've been working to make my home state, my adopted

state, my country, love me as much as I love them.

And it hasn't always worked. And I look to elections,

those times when we have to come together and ask for more of each other and our government

as a way to anchor me in the work that I do, as a way to push us to be better than we were the day

before. And sometimes it works.

Sometimes we get these giant leaps forward, the leaps that made the V. Rights Act of 1965

possible. The leap that made Roe v. Wade possible because we elected people who appointed people

who could see us as human.

But it doesn't always work. And sometimes elections like the one we had on November 5th,

...