ATLANTA — Georgia fundraising powerhouse Stacey Abrams raised close to $100 million for Democratic candidates in the two years since she lost to GOP Gov. Brian Kemp in a close statewide race, records filed Friday showed.
In the last two months of 2020 alone, Fair Fight PAC had raised more than $62 million, funneling most of it into groups that helped President-elect Joe Biden edge out President Trump and, more remarkably, flip two Republican incumbent Senate seats into the D-column.
Between Oct. 26 and Dec. 31, Fair Fight PAC said it had 550,000 donors and that the group has raised about $95 million since it was created after Abrams lost to Trump-backed Kemp, according to reports filed Friday. The massive numbers make Abrams’s Fair Fight the strongest Democrat-supporting fundraising PAC in the Peach State.
Fair Fight senior adviser Lauren Groh-Wargo said that the PAC “is proud to have played a key role in sending two champions of democracy to the United States Senate.”
“In particular, we are proud to have funded Georgia-based organizations that played an indispensable role in mobilizing a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-generational electorate,” she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Abrams’s voting organization was founded in 2018 after she lost to Kemp. Trump, at the time, had taken Kemp under his wing and campaigned for him.
It is believed that Trump’s stamp of approval is what gave Kemp the win. Their rosy relationship, however, took a nasty turn when Kemp refused to go along with the outgoing president’s demands to flip the state’s presidential election results in Trump’s favor. Since then, Kemp has been on the receiving end of countless taunts and criticism by not only Trump, but his closest allies in the state, including former Sen. David Perdue and soon-to-be-former Sen. Kelly Loeffler.
Perdue and Loeffler lost to Democratic rivals Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in Tuesday’s runoff races.
The Ossoff and Warnock wins will help Biden advance his legislative agenda. Had the Republicans won, they would have been able to keep the Senate red and, in turn, mount opposition to every nominee and piece of legislation Biden wanted. Loeffler conceded Thursday. Perdue, who had been off the trail and quarantining with his wife after coming into close contact with someone who had tested positive for COVID-19, conceded Friday afternoon.
Fair Fight PAC, via GAsenate.com, raised more than $12 million each in direct contributions to Ossoff and Warnock, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The massive amount of money raised is also making some in the Republican Party nervous about a Round Two matchup between Abrams and Kemp in 2022.
“She has shown she can raise the money it would take to mount another gubernatorial bid,” one Athens, Georgia-based Republican strategist told the Washington Examiner.
Fair Fight Action and Fair Fight’s PAC were formed after Abrams and her supporters raised questions about what they claimed was a GOP effort to suppress the vote.
Kemp, who was secretary of state at the time and oversaw the state’s elections, denied the allegations and pointed to a jump in voter registrations in the three years leading up to his matchup with Abrams.
After her 2018 loss, Fair Fight Action filed a 66-page federal lawsuit alleging widespread voting problems in the Peach State, including inaccurate results, canceled absentee ballots, and voter registrations that either had been canceled or mysteriously went missing. The lawsuit also argued that Georgia’s system violated the constitutional rights of voters of color and took aim at Kemp, who did not resign from his position as the state’s chief election officer until two days after the election.
