The Corner
Stacey Abrams’s Organization Is in Danger of Going Belly-Up Despite $100 Million in Seed Money
One almost has to respect some grifts in politics because their scale and expenditures are so astronomical. Like others with delusions of lost elections and many legal fees, Stacey Abrams’s “voting rights” advocacy group, Fair Fight, has found it necessary to lay off 75 percent of its staff after finding itself hundreds of thousands of dollars in the hole despite having received over $100 million in its first three years of operation.
Greg Bluestein reports for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
The Fair Fight political and advocacy organization that Stacey Abrams founded is laying off staffers and narrowing its mission as it struggles with mounting debt from lengthy court battles over voting rights that racked up massive legal bills.
Lauren Groh-Wargo, who left the organization in 2021 to manage Abrams’ unsuccessful campaign for governor, said in an interview that she’s returning as interim chief executive to lead a “restructuring” as it faces $2.5 million in debt with only $1.9 million in cash in the bank.
The organization’s voting rights, media, fundraising and grassroots organizing efforts will be slashed, and it will pare back its use of outside consultants and vendors. Some 20 employees — or 75% of the staff — will be cut.
. . .
The cuts are a blow to the organization Abrams launched after her first defeat to Brian Kemp in the 2018 governor’s race. Aside from waging a legal battle to expand voting rights, it also operated as a de facto shadow political organization for the Democrat’s comeback bid in 2022.
It quickly became a fundraising behemoth with national ambitions, collecting more than $100 million over its first three years. It promoted Abrams-backed policies and financed hard-hitting ads pummeling Kemp and his allies. One 30-second spot ran in Georgia during the 2019 Super Bowl.
Super Bowl commercials, donations to Democratic politicians’ campaigns, and $25 million to a friend’s law firm — talk about bloated. Yet Ms. Abrams never starved. Surely serendipitously, she has been able to turn her finances around during these past few years. She barely scraped by in 2017, according to campaign filings, and she failed to settle a $54,000 debt with the IRS until 2019. Still, as of 2021, she owned two homes worth $1.4 million, according to a report from Fox News. I simply must know which index fund she used.