Stacey Abrams’s ‘Fair Fight’ going belly up?

As they sang in Evita, ‘and the money kept rolling in and out.’

Which brings us to Stacey Abrams, whose legal group, known as “Fair Fight,” has reported a $600,000 deficit and announced that it will lay off 75% of its staff, meaning, 20 people.

According to the Washington Post:

Fair Fight, the political and advocacy organization focused on voting rights that was started by Stacey Abrams, is restructuring and making significant layoffs to its staff, citing the financial toll of complex legal battles.

Fair Fight Action board chair Salena Jegede, in a statement to The Washington Post on Wednesday, blamed prolonged processes for two “vital” voting rights lawsuits and “a contraction in investment [that] has affected most civic actors in our space.”

 

“We had the moral obligation to field these suits on behalf of voters. However, due to the complex nature of litigation, the organization unfortunately faces a serious funding deficit that makes our current trajectory unsustainable,” Jegede added.

Best I can tell, the legal suit, or most recent one they’ve been involved with was picking a legal fight with True The Vote, which found evidence of fraudulent voter registrations possibly linked with Abrams’s group, and then won its case handily last month. It’s as if they didn’t think the scrappy election integrity group would fight back.

They haven’t just been picking legal fights with other groups, they’ve also been mired in legal issues of their own making.

As I wrote last month:

As for Abrams’s group, we learned a lot about their game, too — they’ve been accused of legal irregularities on all kinds of matters — here’s one on questionable big-dollar payments to cronies, another on general ethics issues, and another on fraudulent registration accusations brought by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffenberger. What makes them think they can get away with it is the racism card — anyone who challenges what they are doing is hit by racism charges. If they can get away with that, they can do anything they like politically.

Sound like the kind of group you’d want to donate money to? Apparently a lot of big-dollar donors on the left didn’t based on the cash deficit seen in the group now.

It calls to mind that some pretty impressive money mismanagement has been going on with this group, which has now sacked its CEO and brought in an old hand to clean the finances up.

And with Abrams, that has been a pattern. 

Back in 2022, Thomas Lifson thought it remarkable that Abrams’s personal record of debt, unpaid taxes, and bounced checks was drawing so little media attention.

While it is true that Abrams spearheaded a successful voter registration drive in Georgia, and that she has authored a series of romance novels under a pen name, she also has a checkered personal history when it comes to fiscal responsibility, having run up $170,000 in credit card debt and become a tax deadbeat to the tune of $54,000 owed to the IRS (which she paid off as preparation for running for governor again in 2022).

The personal pattern continues with her organization, and now it may be going the way of all such organizations where nobody can stay within budget or do double-entry bookkeeping.

Bounced checks? Now it’s budget shortfalls and laid off staff.

There is likely more backstory to Abrams falling out of favor and failing to draw in more billionaire donations, but for now, the old spendathon pattern continues with Abrams at the helm. Once upon a time, Stacey Abrams was feted in the press as a towering giant over the cities, a Godzilla, of sorts. Now she’s shriveling to nothing. Easy come, easy go.

Can you imagine what Georgia’s finances would look like right about now had Abrams won her gubernatorial bid back in 2018? They’d look like Argentina after Evita.

Image: Twitter video screen shot