ATLANTA — Stacey Abrams once believed she could have been in a close presidential race against Kamala Harris. In 2020, both Abrams and Harris were considered for Joe Biden’s vice presidential pick, with Abrams expressing her willingness to serve. However, Harris ultimately got the opportunity.
Now, Harris is looking to replicate Biden’s victory in Georgia, a success largely attributed to Abrams’ efforts. However, Abrams’ influence has waned since 2020, raising doubts about her ability to mobilize voters to support Harris.
Despite their intertwined paths, Abrams and Harris have had limited interaction over the years. While Abrams has increased her public appearances in support of Harris, many doubt she can have the same impact she had in previous elections.
There are concerns about the effectiveness of Abrams’ nonprofit organizations, which have faced fundraising challenges and scandals. Abrams’ own political brand has also suffered, following her significant loss in the 2022 gubernatorial race in Georgia.
Although Abrams has raised funds for other groups and for Harris directly, her own fundraising efforts have been less successful in 2024. Democratic officials in Georgia believe that Abrams’ support and recent campaign activities could still make a difference in the final weeks leading up to the election.
While some Democrats remain hopeful that Abrams’ groundwork will benefit the party, others fear Georgia may be slipping away from Harris. Despite the polls showing a close race, Republicans have won more statewide races in Georgia since Biden’s victory in 2020, posing a challenge for Harris in a state where Black voters, Abrams’ specialty, play a crucial role.
The state electorate in Georgia is approximately 25 percent Black, one of the highest percentages in the country. However, Vice President Harris’s polling margins within that group are not as strong as those of Biden in 2020 or even Hillary Clinton in 2016 in public surveys. Former First Lady Michelle Obama recently visited the state in an implicit acknowledgment of the need to rally Black voters for Harris.
Georgia Democrats believe that a surge in activity by Stacey Abrams in the final days could make a significant difference in the election. However, the campaign has not shared information about where Abrams will be deployed.
Abrams is crucial to Harris for another reason, as each represents a different face of a Black woman’s experience in America. Harris, the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica, grew up in liberal Northern California, while Abrams, raised in conservative Gulfport, Mississippi as the second of six children of United Methodist ministers, worked her way through the back roads of Georgia politics to become a Democratic leader.
Since the 2020 election, Harris and Abrams have often been grouped together as Black trailblazing women in the Democratic Party. They have both been credited with increasing enrollment at Historically Black Colleges and have been speculated as potential Supreme Court nominees. However, despite their similar backgrounds, they have rarely crossed paths in person during Harris’s tenure as Vice President.
Abrams has been vocal about the importance of race and gender in politics, defending Harris from racist and sexist criticism. In contrast, Harris has avoided making her racial background a focal point of her campaign.
After Abrams’s loss in the 2022 gubernatorial race, her campaign manager blamed the defeat on her work for other Democrats, including Biden and Sens. Warnock and Ossoff. The defeat affected Abrams’s personal standing and the nonprofits she founded, including Fair Fight Action, which faced financial troubles after losing a voting-rights lawsuit in federal court.
Groh-Wargo returned to lead Fair Fight Action, revealing that the nonprofit was in significant debt and had to lay off most of its staff. This financial strain coincided with a decrease in Abrams’s personal popularity. Fair Fight Action did not respond to an interview request for this story made through her communications team.
Fair Fight Action is still operating and recently claimed that it aired a TV ad to call attention to potential changes to state election laws implemented by a Republican-controlled State Elections Board — though there is no record of the TV spot on the ad-tracking website, AdImpact.
Fair Fight Action did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Also on the sidelines is the formerly litigious — and often victorious in its cases — New Georgia Project, another Abrams-founded nonprofit that has had significant turnover since the 2022 election.
Days before the 2022 midterm, Abrams’s hand-picked leader of the New Georgia Project was fired and accused in federal financial disclosures of owing $27,127 for unauthorized expenditures in 2021 and 2022.
The New Georgia Project still focuses on voting rights but has broadened its mission to include access to affordable housing, environmental justice and childcare, according to its website.
The New Georgia Project did not respond to an interview request.
In their prime, those groups vacuumed up money, but left little room for more locally focused grassroots organizations. As millions flooded into Georgia campaigns, smaller nonprofit organizations often found themselves left out of the financial windfall. Now, those groups are promising to fill the gap and deliver for Harris.
Christine White, head of Georgia Alliance for Progress, which helps to fund hyper-local and smaller nonprofit groups for year-round organizing, said she had never heard from small grass-roots groups about having received money from Abrams’ network, even though some donors were under that impression.
The need for greater funding of what White described as an entire ecosystem of organizing — including the campaigns, parties, PACs and nonprofit groups — has been a constant since Georgia first became a swing state.
With only days before the election, the Harris campaign is outspending the Trump campaign on airwaves in the state. The vice president’s ground team was faster to open field offices across the state than Trump. Democrats involved in the campaign insist that smaller nonprofit organizations are succeeding in their goal of filling the void left by Abrams’s network.
But whether Georgia stays blue is far from a settled question.
Abrams told MSNBC during the Democratic National Convention in August that she believes Harris can win Georgia. And she feels her own campaigns helped laid the groundwork.
“Part of the challenge was building, first and foremost, the imagination: people believing that this was a possibility,” Abrams said. “The second was the conscience: showing the people the consequence of not acting. So I would look at my ’18 race as the imagination race, showing people you should pay attention to Georgia. 2020 and 2021 and again in 2022 was the conscience race, here’s what happens in America and in Georgia if we don’t act. And this third race, which will be our third cycle, will be the opportunity to show change.”
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