Stacey Abrams: The Hype, the Money, and the Record

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14 min read

Last updated October 15, 2026

Last updated October 15, 2026: This article has been completely rewritten with the record through 2026, including the 2022 rematch, the Fair Fight collapse, the record New Georgia Project ethics fine, and the $2 billion Power Forward Communities grant fight.

I have zero respect for Stacey Abrams. I never bought the hype. What follows is not a balanced profile. It is the record. Every charge in it is documented in court rulings, tax filings, state ethics orders, and reporting from outlets that include the Associated Press, Politico, and the Washington Post. Abrams and her defenders will call this partisan. Fine. Let them argue with the paperwork.

The $2 Billion Grant: $100 in Revenue, $2 Billion Out the Door

Start with the biggest number, because it is the one Washington would rather you forget. In April 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency under President Biden awarded $2 billion from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund to an organization called Power Forward Communities. The money was supposed to finance energy upgrades in low income housing. Power Forward Communities is a coalition vehicle whose partners include Habitat for Humanity, the United Way, Enterprise Community Partners, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, and a climate group called Rewiring America.

Now, precision, because precision is what keeps this section standing. Stacey Abrams did not run Power Forward Communities. She was not its chief executive, and she did not formally head the coalition. Her role was one level down, and it was plenty. From March 2023 until her contract ended in December 2024, Abrams served as senior counsel at Rewiring America, the coalition partner assigned to orchestrate the financing side of the program. A Rewiring America partnerships director named Ian Magruder said at the time that Abrams played a pivotal role in securing the grant. After the money became a scandal, Abrams said she had no affiliation with Power Forward Communities and only a negligible role. Readers can decide which version sounds like the one you give before the subpoenas.

Here is what the tax filings say about the outfit that received the $2 billion. Power Forward Communities was formed in 2023. Its 2023 tax filing reported total revenue of $100 and net assets of $100. The Internal Revenue Service granted its tax exempt status in 2024, the same year the EPA handed it $2 billion. Those figures were first dug out by the Washington Free Beacon, and they held up: fact checkers at The Dispatch, who rejected the wilder claims about Abrams personally pocketing grant money, confirmed the $100 revenue filing. By the end of 2024, Power Forward Communities had taken in $9.5 million from the EPA, and more than half of it, over $5 million, had been passed along to Rewiring America, according to tax documents reviewed by the Free Beacon.

To be fair to the facts, because the facts are damaging enough without decoration: the coalition has said Abrams has not received a penny from the grant, and no reporting has shown otherwise. Nobody serious claims $2 billion landed in her personal account. That is not the scandal. The scandal is a system in which a brand new organization with $100 in revenue gets handed $2 billion in taxpayer money because it is stuffed with the right allies, the right causes, and one very famous senior counsel.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin made the Abrams connection a centerpiece when the Trump administration moved in early 2025 to terminate the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants, pointing at the $100 revenue figure and calling the broader program a rush job that threw taxpayer gold bars off the Titanic. Zeldin and President Trump have described the awards as corrupt self dealing by Democrat connected groups. The recipients sued. A federal judge initially blocked the terminations, a three judge panel of the D.C. Circuit sided with the EPA in September 2025 on where the dispute belongs, and the full appeals court has been reviewing the case while the money sits frozen. However the courts finish with it, the award itself is a matter of record: $100 in revenue one year, $2 billion the next, and a famous name on the coalition payroll in between.

2018: The Loss She Would Not Concede

Georgia voters have now rejected Stacey Abrams twice, and the first rejection is the one that built her brand. On November 6, 2018, Republican Brian Kemp, then Georgia secretary of state, beat Abrams 50.2 percent to 48.8 percent. The margin was 54,723 votes out of nearly 3.9 million cast. Close, yes. Stolen, no, and no court or recount has ever said otherwise.

Ten days later, Abrams ended her campaign with a speech that told you everything about how she intended to play the loss. She acknowledged Kemp would be certified the winner, then announced: this is not a speech of concession, because concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true or proper. By April 2019 she had dropped the lawyerly hedging entirely, telling a National Action Network audience that despite the final tally, she had won. She spent years in that register, building a national career on the implication that Georgia had been robbed, before eventually insisting she had never denied losing at all. A normal politician concedes, goes home, and thinks. Abrams turned a 54,723 vote defeat into a grievance franchise.

Her central claim was voter suppression: that Kemp, overseeing elections as secretary of state while running in one, had tilted the field. It was a serious charge, and it deserved a serious test. It got one. It failed, which brings us to the lawsuit.

The Lawsuit That Lost on Every Claim

Days after the 2018 election, Abrams allies launched Fair Fight Action, and the organization sued Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in federal court. The suit attacked the state absentee ballot rules, its voter roll maintenance, and its signature and identification practices as discriminatory burdens on minority voters. This was the case that was supposed to prove, with evidence, under oath, that Georgia elections were rigged against Abrams and voters like hers.

On September 30, 2022, after a bench trial, U.S. District Judge Steve Jones ruled against Fair Fight Action on every remaining claim. The challenged practices, the court held, did not violate the Constitution or Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Four years of fundraising emails about a stolen election ran into a federal judge, a full record, and a ruling that the emperor had no case. The court then ordered Fair Fight Action to pay $231,303.71 toward the state costs of defending the suit. Georgia taxpayers spent less than $6 million total defending their election system against the accusation. Fair Fight spent far more than that making it, which is its own story.

Fair Fight: The $100 Million Machine

Fair Fight was born as a voting rights organization and grew into something closer to a money incinerator with a mission statement. The Washington Post reported that the group raised about $100 million between its founding and 2021, an astonishing haul for a state level voting outfit, powered by national outrage over the 2018 loss and by Abrams celebrity.

Follow the Legal Fees

Politico went through the tax filings in October 2022 and found that Fair Fight Action had spent more than $25 million on legal fees in 2019 and 2020 alone. The single largest share, $9.4 million in those two years, went to Lawrence and Bundy, a small Atlanta law firm with fewer than two dozen attorneys. One of its two named partners is Allegra Lawrence-Hardy: Abrams’s friend since their Spelman College days, and the chairwoman of both of Abrams’s gubernatorial campaigns. Another $12 million in legal fees followed in 2021, bringing the three year legal tab to $37.7 million. RealClearInvestigations later totaled the full run of payments to Lawrence-Hardy firm from the tax records: $20,201,857 between 2019 and 2023, for a lawsuit the firm lost on every claim.

Craig Holman, a campaign finance ethics expert at the liberal watchdog group Public Citizen, told Politico it was a very clear conflict of interest. That is a liberal ethics watchdog describing the arrangement, not a Republican press release. Fair Fight’s own founding documents promised the organization would not be operated for the pecuniary gain or profit of any individual. Twenty million dollars to the founder’s best friend’s law firm is a strange way to keep that promise.

Debt, Layoffs, and the End of the Money

By the start of 2024, the machine was out of fuel. Fair Fight announced a restructuring: its executive director resigned, Abrams’s 2022 campaign manager Lauren Groh-Wargo came back as interim chief executive, and 20 employees, about three quarters of the staff, were laid off. Groh-Wargo told reporters the group was $2.5 million in debt with only $1.9 million in cash on hand. The donors had been told their money would save democracy. The lawyers got paid in full. The organizers got laid off. The founder got a bigger national profile. Everybody in the Abrams orbit seems to land on their feet except the people who wrote the checks and the people who cashed the small ones.

New Georgia Project: The Record Fine

If Fair Fight was the machine built on the 2018 loss, the New Georgia Project was the machine that helped produce the 2018 campaign itself, and its ending is a matter of state record. Abrams founded the New Georgia Project in 2013 to register minority and young voters. She ran it until 2017, when she left to run for governor. Raphael Warnock, later a U.S. senator, was among those who led it after her.

On January 15, 2025, the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission, the state ethics commission, approved a consent order. The New Georgia Project and its affiliated Action Fund admitted 16 violations of Georgia campaign finance law. The groups had failed to register as a political committee and failed to disclose their election spending: they raised $4.2 million and spent $3.2 million in 2018 supporting Abrams and other Democratic candidates, all of it hidden from the disclosure system. In 2019 they ran the same play for a Gwinnett County transit referendum, raising $646,000 and spending $174,000 without disclosure. The fine was $300,000, the largest in the history of the Georgia ethics commission, its executive director David Emadi confirmed. The New Georgia Project dissolved in 2025.

Two facts belong side by side here, because honesty about the first makes the second land harder. The consent order binds the organizations, and Abrams had left the group in 2017, before the 2018 spending. The commission has not ruled that she personally directed the violations. What is not in dispute is where the hidden money went: into electing Stacey Abrams. And the story did not end with the fine. The Georgia Senate Special Committee on Investigations, working under Senate Resolution 292, subpoenaed Abrams in May 2026, along with Groh-Wargo and former New Georgia Project chief executive Nse Ufot, to testify under oath about coordination, decision making, and who knew what about the unlawful spending. Abrams dismissed the probe as partisan and performative. Maybe she is right that it is partisan. The 16 admitted violations are not a partisan invention. They are her founding organization’s signature on a consent order.

2022: Georgia Was Not Buying

For all the national celebrity, there remained the small problem of Georgia. The 2022 rematch with Governor Kemp was supposed to be the coronation: unlimited money, a national donor network, four years of organizing, and wall to wall favorable coverage. Instead, Kemp won 2,111,572 votes to Abrams 1,813,673, a margin of 297,899 votes and 7.5 percentage points. That is not a squeaker, a suppression story, or a moral victory. That is a rout. To her credit, and only in comparison with 2018, Abrams conceded on election night this time. Georgia had already sat through the non concession act once and was plainly not in the mood for a sequel.

Famous Everywhere but Here

The strangest thing about Stacey Abrams is the gap between her national billing and her home state verdict. National Democrats handed her the response to the State of the Union address in 2019, a first for a Black woman, before she had won anything bigger than a state House seat. She was openly discussed as a vice presidential pick. Documentaries were made. She is widely credited, including by herself, with delivering Georgia for Joe Biden in 2020, a race decided by fewer than 12,000 votes. Yet the only voters ever asked to hire her as an executive, Georgia voters, in the only two elections where she topped a ticket, said no, first narrowly, then by a landslide margin. She is the most successful almost governor in American politics, a celebrity built entirely out of a loss.

Losing Paid Well

It also paid literally. When Abrams ran in 2018, her financial disclosure showed a net worth of about $109,000. She owed the IRS roughly $54,000 in back taxes, having deferred her 2015 and 2016 taxes and entered a payment plan, which she said was necessary to help cover her family medical bills, alongside roughly $179,000 in student loan and credit card debt. By 2019, with fame banked, she had paid all of it off. By March 2022, her state disclosure reported a net worth of $3.17 million, the Associated Press reported, built on more than $6.5 million in income since 2019: book payments above $3.5 million, speaking and booking fees above $1.5 million, and about $700,000 for running the Southern Economic Advancement Project. Most losing candidates go home broke and forgotten. Abrams converted two defeats into a fortune, a film and television career, and seats in rooms most governors never enter. As a business proposition, losing was the smartest thing she ever did.

The Bottom Line

Strip away the magazine covers and the awards, and the Stacey Abrams record is a business model. Lose an election and refuse, on principle, to say you lost it. Build nonprofits on the grievance and raise a hundred million dollars. Watch the biggest of them admit to hiding millions spent on your behalf and pay the largest ethics fine in state history. Watch the flagship group burn tens of millions on lawyers, millions of it to your best friend’s firm, lose everything in court, and slide into debt and layoffs. Then take a senior counsel job with a coalition partner just before that coalition is handed $2 billion by a friendly administration, through a recipient that reported $100 in revenue the year before.

At every step, the money, the fame, and the opportunities flowed toward Stacey Abrams, and the bills, the fines, and the consequences landed on everybody else: donors, staffers, taxpayers, and the voters of Georgia who kept being told their elections were broken by a woman whose real complaint was that she lost them. Georgia has delivered its verdict twice at the ballot box. The paperwork has now delivered its verdict too.

So here is my question for you, Georgia. If a Republican had assembled this exact record, two losses, a record ethics fine for the group he founded, his best friend law firm enriched by his nonprofit, and a $2 billion grant flowing to a coalition that employed him, would the national press call him a voting rights hero or a hustler? You know the answer. I would like to hear yours in the comments.

Professor Winston Wants to Know

Our resident watchdog is taking the temperature of the room.

What should Stacey Abrams do next?

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What should Stacey Abrams do next?

Run for governor a third timeRun for the U.S. SenateStay in the nonprofit worldRetire from public life

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References

• Associated Press, January 2025: Pro Abrams groups to pay record fine for breaking Georgia campaign finance law. whro.org
• Georgia Senate Resolution 292, enrolled text, authorizing the Senate Special Committee on Investigations. legiscan.com
• 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election results: Kemp 50.2 percent, Abrams 48.8 percent, margin 54,723 votes. wikipedia.org
• 2022 Georgia gubernatorial election results: Kemp 53.4 percent, Abrams 45.9 percent, margin 297,899 votes. wikipedia.org
• Politico, October 2022: Fair Fight Action legal fees, $25 million in two years, $9.4 million to Lawrence and Bundy. politicalwire.com
• Politico, December 2022: Fair Fight Action legal fees reach $37.7 million from 2019 through 2021. politicalwire.com
• Fox News, January 2023: Fair Fight Action ordered to pay $231,303.71 in legal costs after losing its case. wedbush.com
• The Dispatch fact check, 2025: what the $2 billion Power Forward Communities grant was, and what Abrams role actually was. thedispatch.com
• Associated Press, April 2022: Abrams net worth rises from $109,000 in 2018 to $3.17 million in 2022. politicalwire.com