Stacey Abrams PAC tops $100 million raised

The political action committee founded by former Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams (D) has raised more than $100 million since it was founded just over two years ago, putting it among the top-raising political groups in the nation.

Abrams started the group Fair Fight after narrowly losing a 2018 bid for governor. She blamed her loss in part on Republican efforts to block Democratic voters from getting to the polls.

Now, Fair Fight has raised more than $103 million, according to filings with Georgia’s Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission.

Abrams’s group raised almost $90 million in the run-up to November’s general election, and another $8 million in advance of and just after two runoff elections in Georgia that handed Democrats control of the U.S. Senate. Fair Fight will report raising another $6 million since February.

The money puts Abrams’s group among the wealthiest political action committees in the country. Her organization pulled in more money last election cycle than The Lincoln Project, the prominent group of former GOP strategists dedicated to beating former President Trump; American Bridge, the Democratic super PAC; and the political action committee of the Club for Growth, a conservative group that has long roots in federal politics.

Fair Fight spent $66 million on Democratic campaigns and causes last year, including giving millions to the Georgia Democratic Party and the Senate Majority PAC and hundreds of thousands to state Democratic Party organizations in Iowa, Mississippi and Pennsylvania.

Abrams’s group has gotten cash from some of the biggest Democratic funders, including $5 million from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as he sought the Democratic presidential nomination; more than $2 million from Silicon Valley philanthropist Karla Jurvetson; and $250,000 from LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

The group also reported raising $12 million in direct contributions for both Sens. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) and Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) as they waged the campaigns that ultimately decided control of the Senate.

Fair Fight had about $24.7 million in the bank at the end of June, according to its most recent filings in Georgia. That money can be used, in part, to back Abrams if she mounts a widely expected bid to challenge Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) once again.

Kemp is preparing for that seeming inevitability: In the first advertisement of his reelection campaign, airing this week during what was supposed to be the Major League Baseball All-Star Game’s return to Atlanta, Kemp blames Abrams for the league’s decision to move the game to Denver after Georgia’s legislature passed an election overhaul bill that divided the two parties.

“This week, we should be celebrating baseball. Instead, Stacey Abrams and the liberal mob forced the All-Star Game to move, despite the fact that we made it easier to vote and harder to cheat,” Kemp said. “Here’s my commitment: Secure, accessible and fair elections will always remain the foundation of who we are as a state, and I’m not backing down from this fight.”

Abrams urged the MLB not to move the All-Star Game.

The 2018 contest between Kemp, a surprise winner of the Republican nomination after he secured Trump’s backing, and Abrams turned into one of the most closely watched gubernatorial contests in the nation. Kemp won by just under 55,000 votes, or 1.4 percentage points, as Abrams claimed a higher share of the vote than any Democrat since Roy Barnes (D) won the governor’s mansion in 1998.

Two years later, with Fair Fight’s help, Georgia voted for President Biden, the first time a Democrat had carried the state’s electoral votes since former President Clinton in 1992. Biden’s 49.5 percent of the vote was the highest share any Democrat had captured in the Peach State since former President Carter carried the state during his unsuccessful reelection bid in 1980.