(theme music playing) MUSCATINE: Good evening, everyone, I'm Lissa Muscatine, co-owner of Politics and Prose.

And along with my husband and co-owner, Brad Graham, we welcome you to tonight's edition of P&P Live!

Our two guests are among the most influential leaders in progressive politics today.

And in just a moment, you will hear Senator Elizabeth Warren and Stacey Abrams together, side by side, discussing Senator Warren's new book, Persist.

No doubt it will be a bestseller, along with her previous two.

So, many things come to mind when you hear the name Elizabeth Warren.

Harvard law professor turned Senator turned presidential candidate.

Pinky promises and hours'-long selfie lines.

81 policy plans and proud of them, the chastening of Mike Bloomberg on a debate stage, bankruptcy reform, getting big money out of politics, fighting for childcare, Bailey and Bruce, Bruce and Bailey, beer, and a battle cry that became part of our political lexicon, thanks to Mitch McConnell who, in 2017, famously explained that, despite his repeated warnings to Senator Warren to stop her speech opposing Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions, quote, "Nevertheless, she persisted."

Persist she did.

Persist she always has.

Persist she always will.

And that is the crux of her wonderful new book, Persist, which explains, with refreshing candor, how her experience as a mother, teacher, planner, fighter, learner, and woman have shaped her political vision and made her a champion of society's underdogs, especially women.

When you turn the pages, you'll also learn about how Senator Warren has handled sexism, Me Too moments, and the emotional pain of pulling out of the 2020 campaign.

How lucky and honored we are tonight that Senator Warren will be in conversation with the incomparable, formidable Stacey Abrams.

Lawyer, former Minority Leader of the Georgia House of Representatives, Georgia gubernatorial candidate, and persistent voting-rights advocate who deserves more credit than any other human being on the planet for Joe Biden's victory in Georgia in the 2020 election and the flipping of the state's two US Senate seats from red to blue.

And that's not all Stacey Abrams has done.

She's also the author several bestsellers about politics, a slew of romance novels, and her first fictional political thriller called While Justice Sleeps.

Stacey Abrams has accomplished already, in not quite five decades, more than most of us could accomplish in five lifetimes combined.

And we know she's not done yet.

We can't wait to see what the future holds for both of these incredible, inspiring women.

We're so honored to have them with us tonight.

And with that, I turn the floor over to the two of you, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Stacey Abrams.

ABRAMS: Thank you so much, Lissa.

And it is always an honor, Senator, to be in your presence and to get to talk about this extraordinary work, Persist by Elizabeth Warren.

I'm going to start by reading one of my favorite passages from this book.

“The judge glanced at each of us and looked down at his papers.

Then he looked back up at me, seeming to appraise my spiffy suit and the perky little bow at my neck.

Mrs. Holtz?

He said.

Couldn't you get a lawyer?

Everything stopped.

The other lawyer rolled his head my way.

Mr. and Mrs. Holtz stared up at me.

The people in the courtroom looked over at me.

I was dumbstruck.

I glanced again at Mr. and Mrs. Holtz, just in time to see them look at each other with the, I told you she couldn't handle this, written all over their faces.

I felt sick.

I looked back at the judge.

After a long pause, I lifted my chin a bit and said, as calmly as I could muster, I am the lawyer, Your Honor.” Can you tell us about that moment and how that ties to every extraordinary moment we have seen of Elizabeth Warren over the last, for most people, over the last 15 years?

But tell us about the lawyer, Mrs. Holtz.

WARREN: So here I was.

I'll set a little more of the stage.

I had, I'm the first in my family to graduate from college.

I became a special ed teacher, got fired when I got pregnant.

That story is also in the book.

I'm at home with a baby.

I decide, I get this crazy idea.

I'm going to go to law school.

I end up going to law school.

Lots of challenges in doing that.

I've graduated from law school, nine months pregnant and, once again, completely unemployable.

So now, I'm at home with two little babies.

And I'm basically practicing law out of my living room.

So you know, somebody comes up, literally I have a shingle hanging out in front of my house.

And somebody wants to do something, like write a will or something like that.

I kick the toys under the couch, invite them in, and do the work.

And a neighbor ends up in a car accident.

And one thing to another.

The insurance company won't pay.

So they ask me if I'll help, all of us thinking this is going to be a couple of letters.

Well, it ends up in court.

So there I am, in court.

I've never been in court before.

This is actually was the shocking thing to me.

You could be a lawyer, certified, the bar, the whole business, and never actually having been in court.

So I show up.

And when the clerk calls out for the two parties, the judge mistakes me for the plaintiff, the person who's suing, rather than a lawyer.

And when I say, “Your Honor, I am the lawyer,” he does this, um, Oh the lawyer.

We never had a... And he keeps stumbling around about what this means.

And it really is, it's one of those moments that we all face, I think, at different levels, or at least I sure have in my life, about when it's so clear.

Without, no one has to speak it out loud.

You just don't belong here.

You're not what it looks like.

You're not the person we expect to see in this spot, doing this thing.

And that is the moment where you've got a choice to make.

You either fold in on yourself and never put yourself in that position again.

Or you push on through it.

And even when the people you're there to represent look like they want to, you know, flee from the room.

And that's, for me, was a big part of what that moment was like.

But also, the reminder, I came just a little later than a lot of the, what I think of as the real pioneers in the women's movement.

What it was like for so many of them to be first, but what it's still like for women, for people of color, for immigrants, for anyone who faces a you don't belong here.

I can't know other people's experience.

But I can do just a little corner of what it's like not to belong and to decide, then I'm just going to have to change this place so I do belong.

ABRAMS: Well you, for someone who may have been made to feel like you don't belong, according to my count, you've had 27 lives?

And in each of them, you've distinguished yourself by never settling for what, never settling for the story you're told that you're supposed to live.

Can you talk a little bit about the most unexpected, other than Senator, the most unexpected role that you had and how you shaped it to make it your own?

WARREN: Running for President of the United States.

I mean holy guacamole here, Stacey!

Look, I knew what I was going to be.

I've known what I was going to be since second grade.

I was going to be a teacher.

And I thought it was going to be a special-needs teacher.

I taught special ed.

That didn't work out.

And I ended up going to law school.

And then notwithstanding what a superb job I did in court, I ended up going right back into teaching, and teaching much taller students.

I had taught four to six-year-olds.

Now, I taught law students.

But that, that's my life.

That's what I did.

I taught and did the work on policy and fed this to other people.

And as you say, shocking I end up running for Senate.

But it's also shocking that I ended up running for president.

But to do this, it was a chance to get out there and fight for the plans that I believed in.

To talk about what I believe is broken in America and to lay out real, honest-to-goodness, here's how we get from Point A to Point B to Point C. We can fix this.

And in the course of running for president, I got to lay out 81 juicy, gorgeous, rich, detailed plans for changes we could make.

I got to stand up at a bazillion town halls and talk about childcare and talk about, in a very personal way, why we need to make an investment in childcare and early education in America.

And talk about why we need it as a country.

Talk about the economics of it.

Talk about what it means for American productivity.

I got to do that.

I got to talk about wealth tax over and over and over.

I got to talk about cancelling student-loan debt.

I got to talk about big changes we could make.

And I didn't win.

I mean, spoiler alert.

That's in the book.

I didn't, I don't win the primary.

I didn't become president.

But this book is about the day after I dropped out, when I opened my door and there, in these giant, chalked-in letters on my sidewalk from one of my neighbors, huge, two-foot-high letters.

It just says, "Persist".

And it's that moment when I just thought, yeah.

The same reason I got in this fight is the same, still out there.

I still need to be in the fight.

And so I write this book.

I tell these stories about why policy is so personal to me, but to all of us.

And then get a chance to talk about a lot of those 81 juicy, glorious plans.

And we're still talking about them.

Last week, the President of the United States talked about childcare and early childhood education as a significant part of how we build an America going forward.

Yes.

ABRAMS: So talk a little bit about why, and anyone who watched your campaign should be able to recite your stories.

Because what, well, I say, I mean it in this way.

That there are a lot of people who put plans out, but you always contextualize those plans.

You always shape them using your stories and narrative, not to explain others' lives but to invite them in to tell their own stories.

So can you talk a little bit more about why childcare, why this conversation has been so core to who you've been, you know, your adult life?

WARREN: You know, I appreciate your asking this question, Stacey, because I've also listened to you talk.

I stood beside you when you campaigned for Governor in Georgia.

You do that.

You tell the story and bring people in.

So for me, childcare to me is like one of these, it's at the heart of how I think of every part about policy.

And here's why.

Like I said, I thought I would be a special-education teacher for all my life.

And I talk in the book, I tell the stories about how much I loved it and why.

And what it was like.

And I talk about getting fired when I got pregnant.

So here I am.

I'm at home.

And like I said, I have a little toddler.

And I get this crazy idea that I'm going to go to law school.

And you know me.

Plans, plans, plans.

So I have it totally laid out.

Take the LSAT, check.

And a good state school, Rutgers, State University of New Jersey, I can afford, and how I'm going to pay for it.

I've got all the pieces laid out.

On that list is childcare.

Amelia, my daughter, by the time I start law school, will not yet be two years old.

So I kind of think, alright.

I'll get this done.

I have everything checked off on my list.

And you know, like a month, month and a half before school's ready to start, I start looking for childcare.

It was a horror, Stacey.

It was, I couldn't find any place.

If I could find a place, it was 80 bazillion miles away.

If I could find a place that was closer, they had a waiting list that was a mile long.

If I could find one that didn't have a waiting list that was a mile long, it cost a fortune.

And it would keep me from, I couldn't pay for it.

Every part about this just, it was just almost impossible.

And then literally, we're down to five days before classes start.

And I find a woman who is just starting to do some daycare and childcare and take kids in.

And it's a nice place.

It's gentle.

It looks kind.

It's going to be great for Amelia.

And I'm filling out the form.

And the form has all the pieces to it.

And then it says, she only takes dependably potty-trained children.

Amelia's not yet two years old.

And I still remember, I look over.

And Amelia, who's sitting there in a diaper, thank you very much.

And I looked down, dependably potty-trained.

And I went, check.

And went home.

And I had five days, less than five days at that point, to get a not-yet-two-year-old dependably potty-trained.

I will not give you my techniques here but will tell you this, Stacey.

I'm here tonight, at least in part, courtesy of three bags of M&Ms and a very cooperative toddler.

And I laugh about the story now, but here's the thing.

I came that close, hair's breadth, to not being able to go back to school.

And my whole life would look different right now.

And then I talk later in the book about something very similar happening when I had my first teaching job in law.

That close.

I mean, as in I'm on the phone saying, I can't do this anymore.

That close to losing that first teaching job, at a time when those jobs were really hard to get and really hard for women to get.

And now here's the part that really kills me.

That was me two generations ago.

It was my daughter, a generation ago, who faced exactly the same set of problems.

And it will be my granddaughter, if she has children, if we don't make some changes.

We want to build an America that's full of opportunity.

We want to build an America where productivity goes up.

Then by damn, we need to invest in childcare.

Universal childcare, childcare that is affordable, childcare that is available, high-quality childcare for everyone.

We need to create that for our babies, because I call it childcare.

It's early childhood education.

We need to do that for our mamas who want a chance to build, to go back to school or to get a job, to build a career, to build some economic security.

And for our daddies.

And we need to do it for our childcare workers, who are just paid a pittance relative to the kind of responsibilities they take on.

And that is what policy is about.

President of the United States is talking about infrastructure so people can work, you bet.

Roads, bridges, communications, broadband, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And childcare.

You want people to be able to go to work?

Invest in childcare.

So that's what it's about for me.

And I've got to say, to this day, I am caught somewhere between furious that we have not done this and over the moon hopeful that we are just an inch away from getting this done, making a real commitment as a nation.

ABRAMS: Well, you've got 1500 people watching.

And I guarantee, at least 1498 of them are already in the Elizabeth Warren army.

So what's your charge?

How do we persist to make it possible?

WARREN: So part one is you've got to lift up this story.

I do everything I can from the inside.

I've got a childcare bill now.

I've got great co-sponsors on it.

We've got a House version, Senate version.

And ours is the one that says universal childcare.

In other words, we're going to make a commitment as a nation that we're going to create enough childcare and early childhood education slots for every one of our children, if their parents want to send them.

And enough money in that that we're going to pay all of our childcare workers and preschool teachers commensurate with the responsibilities that they're taking on.

Please talk about it.

And when I say talk about it, I mean talk about it like, get in touch with your Senator.

Get in touch with your Representative.

But also put it up on social media.

Retweet around it.

Make a Facebook post about why childcare is important to you and why you want to see our president and our Congress make childcare one of the priorities that goes into a package that's about infrastructure and caregiving.

That's how we build a future together.

I'll work on the inside part.

Everybody else on this Zoom call, you work on putting wind in our sails, because it takes both of those to make real change.

And we are so close.

The President of the United States last week addressed the nation.

And one of the things he talked about was childcare and early childhood education.

A $425 billion commitment.

He needs $700 billion to make this universal.

So you know, got to inch him up on this.

But we're close, we're close.

Let's do this.

ABRAMS: So you and I share, in addition to telling stories to give people you know, an anchor point, we love planning.

You are a much more famous planner than I am.

WARREN: Oh, no!

You're a good planner.

ABRAMS: Talk about why planning, I mean, you've talked about the plans.

And what I love about your book is that you spend time explaining why planning matters, how it conquertizes dreams.

Can you talk about why, and where you started planning?

Like do you remember your first plans?

WARREN: So let's start with why plans are so important.

I talk about in the book that my brother, Don Reed, my oldest brother, died from Covid-19.

And he died at a time when the President of the United States not only didn't have a plan.

He was anti-plan.

He said that Covid would magically disappear.

He complained because he couldn't be on the golf course.

If America had had a plan early, it's at least possible that my brother would be alive.

So planning matters a lot.

Planning is how we get from here to there, but it's more than that.

Planning is telling the rest of the world what you're doing.

And that has real consequences.

It means partly the rest of the world can give you better ideas.

They can help you make it better.

I have 81 juicy, wonderful plans, but you want to know a funny thing about that?

Some of them got a lot better over time, after I put them out there.

And I say that partly with some embarrassment, saying there were some parts in some of those plans that we hadn't fully thought about or hadn't seen some other aspect until you put it out there publicly.

And people jump in and say, whoa.

Add this part to it.

Planning lets you do that, instead of going off in silence and, and, and not getting that kind of feedback.

But a second thing that, or a multiple thing that planning does, planning, in the electoral context, gives us the chance to weigh and measure what candidates are telling us.

I want to see your plan.

And I want to see that other person's plan.

And I want to see if those plans make any sense to me.

I want to hear, when you plan, what you prioritized.

Why is it that you, Warren, put childcare so high on your list?

And you didn't put some other thing so high on your list?

Big tax breaks for investing in more automation, for example.

Why do you not talk about all those things?

So I think it's partly how we can understand what it is that elected officials want to do.

But then what plans did is dang, they give you a way to hold people accountable.

Because you laid it out.

You said this is what you were going to do.

This is a chance to say, you promised one, two, and three in pretty concrete terms.

How close did you get?

But you know, I always thought of this as, if I won, it would allow me to say to Congress, to the other party, people voted for us to do this stuff.

They didn't just vote for somebody because they thought that person was amiable or cute or whatever.

Voted because these are things people want to get done.

And so for me, I think of planning as, it's a part of democracy.

It's a part of our being transparent about what we're fighting for and, okay, one more part to planning.

It's how we build momentum behind things.

It's not enough just to say to me, just to say, well yeah, the rich out to pay more.

Let me show you how a wealth tax works.

Let me give you enough pieces that you actually get it, and particularly that you get why we need it.

That the 99% in America paid 7.2% of their total wealth in taxes last year, and the top one-tenth of 1% paying 3.2%.

Come on, let's make them pitch in two cents.

They pitch in two cents.

We've got the money for universal childcare.

We've got the money for our infrastructure plans.

We've got the money to cancel student-loan debt.

And still have money left over.

That's how you can see how the pieces work.

So yeah, I've got taste about plans.

But at the end of the day, better planning, and like so many families in this country, we might not have been hit so hard by the coronavirus.

We'd have been stronger.

We might have loved ones who would have made it through.

So I'm a believer, and I'm not going to change on that.

ABRAMS: Great.

Well, I'm going to take some questions from the audience.

And I think an appropriate question to follow on is from Jillian Singer.

She asked, "Can you walk us through the process of researching and drafting one of your plans?"

WARREN: Oh, I absolutely can.

So, so here's how it starts.

It starts first with a problem.

Plans don't start as plans.

They start as understanding something that's broken.

And here is why diversity matters and money matters.

I'm going to connect these up.

And when I say diversity, I'm hitting every sense of the word.

So I talk about in the book the role of money in the whole electoral process.

You know about this, Stacey.

You've had to raise money.

And in fact, we've done it together, right?

But think about it this way.

If you spent a huge amount of your time as a candidate, and even better, a huge amount of your time, let's just say as a sitting Senator, raising money, who are you spending your time with?

People who have money to give, right?

And well-to-do people.

What kind of problems do you hear about?

You hear about how taxes are high, right?

You hear about how some business regulation is causing friction, and they don't like it.

If you don't spend your time that way, but instead spend your time, oh, let's say doing a bazillion town halls and selfies.

And that's where you spend...

I don't mean a little bit.

Everybody does some, right?

I mean that's your time.

You hear from public school teachers.

You hear from people who wait tables.

You hear from people who are living it every day.

So for example, it was a public school teacher in a selfie line who explicitly said to me, about Secretary of Education.

Everybody was talking about, you know, how much we dislike Betsy DeVos.

Big surprise.

And this public school teacher said to me, why don't you just commit that you will have a public school teacher as Secretary of Education?

Somebody who actually sees the world from the perspective of a public school teacher, someone who's at least taught public school.

And I said, that's a really good idea.

I did it.

Lots of other people eventually committed to something like this.

And by the way, we right now have a Secretary of Education, I talked to him earlier today, a Secretary of Education who has taught public school and been a public school superintendent.

And it's that the ideas come, both the problems, identification of the problems, what it's like to deal with student-loan debt, for example.

I thought it was a problem before I started doing town halls.

Try doing town halls and selfie lines, and listen to what people tell you about how student-loan debt is crushing them.

The cost of prescriptions is just killing people.

What they're paying for insulin and Epi-pens and HIV/AIDS drugs.

So you hear the problems.

And then it's, you start to spark on it.

What can we do?

What can we do?

So for me, it's about talk to the folks around me.

I have a really terrific team.

They are smart.

They are thoughtful.

They are what I like to call intellectually entrepreneurial, always looking for new ideas.

Call experts in the field.

Call real people and test out ideas with them.

And that was the process by which we came up with plans.

Some plans were quick, because they're something I know well or they had a really kind of dart-like quality.

Some took a long time.

And you keep going back.

Criminal-justice reform.

It's big, because there's so much that needs to be done.

And it's like you get a piece of it out there, and then people make more suggestions.

And I meet with more people.

And they talk about more aspects to the problem, so you add more layers to it.

Plans become living things.

I feel like I fight for them and that I adopt them.

Jay Inslee was in the race, had some great plans around the environment.

When he decided to drop out, the first call I made was to Jay and said, "Would you be okay if I picked up some of these plans?"

And Jay said he'd be delighted.

Julian Castro had some fabulous plans, actually around early childhood education, for example.

I asked Julian, when he was no longer in the race, would he be okay if I lifted his plans?

And why not?

That's a good thing that came out of our running, that we came up with these ideas and that these are ideas worth borrowing, worth sharing, worth moving forward.

It's true.

I do love the plans, because I believe they are our best chance to make good change.

No, our best chance to make great change.

ABRAMS: Well, that actually leads perfectly into this question from Tara Kumar.

"How do you balance fighting for systemic change while taking incremental wins along the way and not losing momentum?"

WARREN: Oh, boy.

It is a great question.

And the answer is, it's a constant weigh and measure, weigh and measure, weigh and measure.

So for example, I was willing to go along with the trade deal that improved over where we had been with the NAFTA deal, but was not as good as we need.

Because how much longer are you going to hold back some improvement?

On the other hand, you settle for less and take the wind out of the sails.

You've got the right point here about what the risk is.

So I think at any given moment, you really just kind of have to make this judgment.

I'll say one more thing, because I talk about this a fair amount in the book.

By doing a plan where you lay out what you believe is right, the good news is it wasn't just a kind of general, you know, 10,000-foot-level vague description.

You actually know what you can accomplish.

I often talked about, on the plans, ways that, where you can raise revenue, for example, for... And the point is not to say that's what we have to do.

But it was a way to try to make the pieces concrete.

It gives you something to measure against when you're trying to decide, have you gotten half a loaf?

Three-quarters of a loaf?

Or only a couple of crumbs?

And the specificity of plans and the fact that you've had to think through them in detail really helps a lot on that.

ABRAMS: So this is from Natalie Richman.

"How do we get the older generation more concerned about climate change?"

WARREN: Well, you know, I don't get it anymore.

I don't get how anybody's not concerned.

In fact, I don't get how anybody in America sleeps at night because it is, this is an existential threat.

I have been so impressed with how young people in our country have taken this on and become the activists for climate change.

The Sunrise Movement has changed the conversation.

They have put such energy into this, into the fight.

Fighting for the Green New Deal, young people who are out fighting for this.

So I think part of it is we just have to do that.

We have to be willing to drive home the urgency of this moment and to make clear, to those who are comfortable where they are and don't want to consider this problem, that this is a generational issue.

And that the younger generation is going to bear much more of the brunt of climate change than my generation will.

And that means, I believe, that young people have not only the responsibility but truly the right to make real demands on the climate front and to be heard on this.

I think they have real credibility on it.

And so part of my answer is just get louder.

ABRAMS: So from Leah Sousa, "Do you have some guidance for parents in raising children who understand the importance of using their voice and staying engaged in creating democracy?

How do we make sure the political lessons we're learning get carried to future generations?"

WARREN: Oh, that's a wonderful question.

I believe in engaging children early.

You know, when I ran for Senate, I was told I had no chance at all.

People said to me quite openly, Democrats said to me quite openly in 2011 and 2012, I think it's great that you're running.

But you know Massachusetts is not going to elect a woman.

And you know this guy you're running against, you can't beat him.

And so I thought, well, that may be right.

But I'm going to make something come out of this, no matter what.

And one of the things I decided I would make come out of this is every time I saw a little person, especially a little girl, I would get down on one knee and say, "Hello.

My name is Elizabeth.

And I'm running for Senate because that's what girls do."

And then we would do pinky promises to remember it.

I'm talking about little, tiny ones, all the way up to some that were in their 80s and 90s.

So we had a big range there.

It's the personal engagement.

And of course, we did a bazillion pinky promises when I ran again in 2018.

And when I ran for president, I think treating children with respect and talking about it openly, what it means to respect other human beings, is a big part of laying a foundation for raising good global citizens.

I think talking about public choices that we make about our schools, appropriate to each age of the child.

But talking with children about things like why we want every child to have a chance to go to school.

Children are ready to talk about those things.

And I think early on, it instills in a child this sense of, we are in this world together.

And we owe to each other a duty of care and concern and investment in each other.

It's thinking about our children, as I wrote this book, that I do feel deeply optimistic.

The question about the environment, about how young people have so aggressively gotten into the fight over the environment.

I feel optimistic.

We are poised in this moment.

Think about what's happened in the last year, a pandemic, a racial reckoning, an armed insurrection.

We now have a new president.

We just passed an historic rescue package.

And so now our toes are right, right on the line for change.

I believe we can do this.

And that's what Persist is about.

That's why I'm in this fight.

I believe children are going to make this happen.

Young people are going to make this happen.

Parents are going to make this happen.

And I think a lot of grandparents are going to make this happen, as well.

We're in this fight.

It is the moment when change is possible.

And we can't let this moment pass us by.

The next 100 days matter enormously to our future.

And I'm all in in this fight.

And I'm feeling good about it.

ABRAMS: I'm going to combine a question from Chase Raymond with one of my own.

And I ask this because I've had a little bit of experience, not quite the same as yours, but a similar experience.

Chase asks, "What has best helped you keep from experiencing burnout over the last few years?

And I will add to that, how did you rebound from 2020 and the very public nature of you losing for the first time?"

WARREN: You know, like I write about in the book, I think a loss forces you to ask yourself, well, why were you doing this to begin with?

And for me, the answer is pretty straight-forward.

81 plans.

That's why I was doing this.

I mean, dang.

That's what it was always about.

Well, okay.

So now, you're not going to get to be president.

Does that mean those 81 plans don't matter anymore?

And the answer is no.

They still matter.

So the question I asked myself is, so could you do something to advance those, any one of those 81 plans?

And the answer is, you bet.

You know, this last year has been so hard for so many people.

A pandemic, a K-shaped recovery that, if you started out rich in this pandemic, man, it was a great year.

But for so many others, how troubled it was.

How many women have been pushed out of the workplace that we've all seen.

The killing of George Floyd, of so many Black men and women.

And had to face this.

This has been a hard year for so many Americans.

And I think of this as a moment of, we are rebuilding our resilience.

And part of that was at least some accountability in the George Floyd trial.

Some of it, can I just say this bluntly?

Getting rid of Donald Trump as President of the United States.

Some accountability for what he did over the past four years, and in particular, what he did during this pandemic.

Some of it is taking back the Senate, Stacey Abrams Georgia.

Can we do the Georgia dance?

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

And actually, the Georgia race is this perfect example for me because it was the culmination of, as I see it, and you can correct me here, but all the work that you put in leading up to your governor's race, which was taken from you.

And that your response, you showed the rest of us was not just to lay down and say, I can't do this anymore.

This is so painful.

Was to get back in the fight and say, "Okay.

I'm gonna hit this harder.

I'm gonna get more people to the polls.

I'm going to find more avenues to make democracy work."

And it worked.

And Stacey, I'm now in a Senate.

I know it is the skinniest possible majority.

I mean, mathematically, it don't get any smaller than 50/50 and you've got to haul in the Vice President if you end up with a 50/50 vote.

But it has been enough to pass a meaningful rescue package that has really helped families that are suffering, that has extended unemployment insurance.

That has put a check in the hands of lots of people who can use it.

That has given us a child-tax credit that we're hoping we're going to be able to make permanent.

That has given us money to the states to be able to plug holes in state and local budgets so that we can go forward with public health and education, that we don't have to shut down schools.

So lots of good things.

And it has given us the light that says, we can get there.

You can see the path now.

We're not just on the no, no, no.

We are on the path.

We can make change.

Again, last week, when President Biden spoke, he laid out an agenda.

We can do these things together.

There's going to be some negotiation.

There's going to be some pushing and shoving around the edges.

We're Democrats.

But we're all trying to go in the same direction.

We're trying to move in the direction of a government that is not just on the side of billionaires.

Of a government that, when it sees need and want and hurt, doesn't look the other way.

A government that doesn't say, oh, opportunity is up to you all.

If you were born into a family that had plenty of it, you'll do fine.

And the rest of you will pull yourselves up by your bootstraps.

No, a government that says, our job is to help build those opportunities, to invest in education for our babies, to invest in K-12, to invest in post-high school education, to get rid of some of the student-loan debt.

So people will have an opportunity to get married, to start families, to buy homes, to start their own small businesses.

Invest as a nation in opportunity.

Roads and bridges, we've been doing it for a long time because we said that's what it takes to run a business, to get to work.

Now, it's time to say, there are other pieces.

The pieces that are about our people.

Our number-one asset in this nation is our people.

We need to make more investment in our people and their opportunities.

And when that happens, we can build a country of our best dreams.

A country of our best values.

We're so close.

ABRAMS: Well, one of the things that I love about you so much is that, from the moment I met you, when you came down to Georgia to help me rally the troops, you insisted that I call you Elizabeth.

I explained to you that, while I was born in Wisconsin, I grew up in the South.

And no, I can't do that.

But you persist.

Every time we speak.

WARREN: Every time.

ABRAMS: Every single time.

And what makes me smile every single time is how sincere you are, how you aren't saying it because it's something nice to say.

You ask me to call you Elizabeth because you see no difference between who you are and where you are and where anyone else is.

And so I just want to tell you, on behalf of the hundreds of people with questions that I didn't have a chance to ask, and those of you who adore Elizabeth Warren, the teacher, the woman, the persistor, the Senator, the lawyer, the leader, we are so grateful every day that you persist.

Thank you so much for spending the evening with us.

WARREN: Thank you.

You're the best, Stacey.

MUSCATINE: And I just want to say, on behalf of all of us at P&P, thank you both so much for an incredible conversation.

It was wonderful.

We're so honored to have you both.

We will follow you both to the ends of the earth to get all this work done that needs to get done.

I also want to say thank you to our audience.

Thank you to GW for partnering with us.

We look forward to many more events.

We look forward to many more books from our two authors, and it's not even their day jobs.

We hope everyone will stay safe, stay well, and stay well-read.

Thank you all.

NARRATOR: Books by tonight's authors are available at Politics and Prose book store locations or online at politics-prose.com.

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