When President Joe Biden won a surprise victory in Georgia in 2020, media reports didn’t credit Biden with his victory here as much as Fair Fight and the woman who founded it — Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic House leader and voting rights activist. Reuters declared Abrams, “The Woman Behind Joe Biden’s Surprise Win.” The BBC called her “The woman behind Biden’s biggest surprise,” while USA Today detailed, “How Stacey Abrams blew up Georgia electoral map.”
But three years later, with Biden running for reelection and struggling in Georgia polls, Abrams has largely left the day-to-day activism in Georgia that brought her to prominence. And her Fair Fight organization, which raised more than $100 million early in its existence, is now struggling with debt and laying off 75% of its staff. Costly litigation, a Super Bowl ad, and donations to other Democratic groups, including Abrams’ 2022 campaign for governor, all drained the coffers faster than they could be refilled.
So the question national Democrats are asking now is natural — can Biden win Georgia without Abrams and Fair Fight on the scene the way they were in 2020?
The answer from local Democrats in Georgia is yes. Although Abrams and Fair Fight got the lion’s share of the acclaim in 2020, in reality, a network of hundreds of other voting rights leaders and groups had been registering, canvassing and turning out Democratic voters in Georgia for decades. Those groups haven’t gone anywhere.
“There have been many organizations on the ground doing excellent work in Georgia for years,” said state Rep. Saira Draper, an Atlanta Democrat who was the head of voter protection for the Georgia Democratic Party in 2020 and 2022. “They existed before Fair Fight and they will continue to exist.”
One of those groups is the New Georgia Project, another group Abrams founded in 2014 but is no longer connected to. Although the group and its affiliates have faced well-publicized questions about their The Neoperations, new CEO Kendra Davenport Cotton said the group has addressed its internal problems and will play a significant role in 2024.
“With regard to voter mobilization, there is not another apparatus in the state of Georgia that has the capacity to scale in the way that New Georgia Project Action Fund does. Period,” she said. The group already has 10 field offices across the state and will increase that number as Election Day gets closer.
She compared Fair Fight’s previous role to the Air Force, broadcasting messages that other grassroots groups could follow. “But New Georgia Project is the infantry. When you see the crates dropped on the beachhead…we get our walk lists and we fan out into the community.”
Along with New Georgia Project, local activists pointed to the Georgia Alliance for Progress, the ProGeorgia coalition for grassroots organizations, and a partnership between the state’s two largest Black churches as others who will be key to a potential victory for Biden in Georgia. The Democratic Party of Georgia will have a large role, too.
National groups say they plan to plow money into Georgia to get Biden reelected, as will the Biden campaign itself.
“Georgia, to us, is top-tier,” said Sondra Goldschein, executive director of the Campaign for a Family Friendly Economy PAC. “It is a state that is pivotal on the path to 270. We need to be able to win Georgia in order to reelect President Biden.”
The PAC intends to spend $11 million of its $40 million election-year budget to boost Biden in Georgia this year. Its plans include a door-knocking operation focused on Cobb and north Fulton counties.
But even with those efforts, Democratic leaders say a Biden win in Georgia won’t be easy in 2024, not because Fair Fight won’t be as prominent, but because U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock won’t be on the ballot, too. . Warnock became Georgia’s first Black senator, and U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff became Georgia’s first Jewish senator when they were elected in 2020, along with Joe Biden.
“I think the negative to this cycle, and I don’t think people put enough into this, is that Joe Biden won in 2020 because of the energy of having two Senate races going on at one time,” said former Democratic state Rep. Erick Allen, who is running for a seat on the Cobb County Commission in 2024. Allen called Warnock “the standard bearer” for Democrats in Georgia, followed closely by Ossoff.
NGP’s Cotton agreed that, for Black voters in particular, not having Warnock on the ballot this year “does give us pause.”
“Reverend Warnock, much like Brian Kemp, is extremely popular in the state,” she said. “Warnock was the draw in 2020. Biden, in Georgia, was not the headliner.”
A spokeswoman for Fair Fight said the group will be active in Georgia in some capacity this year, but it’s not clear what that will be.
“Fair Fight launched in 2018 with a mission to defend and repair democracy by fighting voter suppression,” said Fair Fight executive director Lauren Groh-Wargo. “While the structure of our organization has changed, we remain committed to that mission.”
Looking ahead, some local activists said that Fair Fight’s reduced role could make life easier for them, not harder. There won’t be the same rivalries between leaders, nor the focus on a single organization when a coalition is working behind the scenes. And no matter what happens next, Abrams’ original goal of convincing national Democrats that they can win in Georgia has already been accomplished.
Making it happen again is the work that remains.
An earlier version of this column attributed Groh-Wargo’s comment to a spokesperson. We regret the error.
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