Things aren’t looking up for Stacey Abrams, the twice-failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate who also founded an advocacy organization called Fair Fight. That organization is now buckling under the weight of massive debts racked up in lengthy court battles requiring equally extensive legal bills. It is now having to lay off a significant number of staffers and shrink its mission.
Abrams, for her part, has moved away from Fair Fight since she lost her second gubernatorial battle with Brian Kemp in 2022. It has since struggled with fundraising, lacking its high-profile head and the donations she could garner from the Democrat donor class.
The plight of Abrams’ organization was first reported on by the Atlanta Constitution-Journal. According to that outlet, Fair Fight faces a massive $2.5 million in debt at a time when it has just $1.9 million in cash on hand. It will thus have to engage in a “restructuring” of the debt and organization, with a new chief executive inbound to help it manage that.
That new, interim chief executive is Lauren Groh-Wargo. She was employed by the organization after it was founded in the wake of Abrams’ 2018 gubernatorial defeat, and left it in 2021 to help Abrams run her second unsuccessful campaign.
According to Groh, the organization’s restructuring will have to take the form of, among other changes, massive cuts to its staff. In fact, the cuts will amount to somewhere between a quarter and three-quarters of the current staff members.
The cuts and the group’s downfall will be something of a problem for Democrats, as Fair Fight, which has raised over $100 million since its founding in the wake of Abrams’ first defeat to Brian Kemp, was one of the groups that helped Democrats win Georgia’s electoral votes and Senate seats in 2020.
Much of Fair Fight’s current debacle is the result of its fighting protracted courtroom battles that have led to a significant financial bleed. In one such case, for example, it has battled conservative advocacy organization True the Vote for three years over an attempt to throw out a quarter of a million voter registrations in 2020. Fair Fight lost that battle in late January of 2024.
Similarly, Fair Fight also lost a lengthy case about absentee ballots and restrictions on them that it was fighting with Georgia. In that case, it not only had to pay its own massive legal fees, but was ordered to pay back the state nearly a quarter of a million dollars in legal fees.
According to a poll conducted by the University of Georgia and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, former President Donald Trump currently leads President Joe Biden by a wide margin in Georgia despite having lost there in 2020. As of late January 2024, Trump led 45 percent to Biden’s 37 percent among registered voters in the Peach State.
The poll also found that a whopping 62 percent of poll respondents view Biden’s job performance negatively, with more than half saying that they “strongly disapprove” of how Biden is doing. That trend is generally true nationally as well, with Biden’s approval being significantly underwater.
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