The voting rights group that Stacey Abrams started after her first gubernatorial defeat was credited with playing a major role in Democrat Joe Biden’s surprising 2020 win in Georgia, spending $65 million to aid the party’s success that year.
Four years later, Fair Fight officials are just hoping the group is on the financial mend, with its political action committee having raised $1.57 million in 2024 as of June 30, according to filings with the Georgia Ethics Commission.
It reported having $143,000 in the bank as of June 30. At the same time in 2020, Fair Fight’s PAC had a bankroll of $14.5 million, with a lot more money on the way as the election neared.
Still, Fair Fight’s filing shows its fundraising is picking up and thousands of small-money donors from across the country continue to send the organization money, with 51,000 contributions since Jan. 1. The celebrity and big-money donors of 2019-2022 haven’t been so plentiful since Abrams lost her second gubernatorial election to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in 2022.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported early this year that Lauren Groh-Wargo, who left the organization in 2021 to manage Abrams’ second unsuccessful campaign for governor, had returned as chief executive and Fair Fight’s nonprofit wing faced $2.5 million in debt with only $1.9 million in the bank.
Groh-Wargo said then that the organization’s voting rights, media, fundraising and grassroots organizing efforts would be slashed and most of its staff would be cut.
Fair Fight’s board chair, Salena Jegede, told the AJC at the time that rising litigation costs and slowing fundraising left the organization with a “serious funding deficit that makes our current trajectory unsustainable.”
Its expenditures mounted as it waged yearslong — and losing — voting rights battles in federal court. A Politico investigation found that Fair Fight spent more than $25 million on legal fees over 2021 and 2022.
Of that, $9.4 million went to a small law firm headed by Abrams’ onetime gubernatorial campaign chairwoman, according to an AJC analysis of Fair Fight’s tax filings.
The financial situation was worlds better from 2019 to 2022, when Fair Fight was such a fundraising behemoth that Republican lawmakers passed a law allowing Kemp and a few others to create “leadership committees” to skirt campaign contribution limits to help the incumbent compete financially with Abrams and the group.
Democratic megadonors and celebrities gave millions to Fair Fight, but the group always touted the tens of thousands of small donors from across the country who gave $100 or less. For instance, Fair Fight reported it had 550,000 donors between Oct. 26 and Dec. 31, 2020, right before and after the presidential election.
Groh-Wargo said the group negotiated and paid off the debt of Fair Fight’s nonprofit wing and cut costs, and the reports show its PAC’s cash on hand — puny by 2020 standards — had increased by the end of June.
“With strong fundraising fueled by over 50,000 individual contributions since January, Fair Fight is moving forward on rebuilding to continue taking on the big voting rights and ballot access fights this year and for the long haul,” she said in a statement to the AJC.
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