Black voters were key to securing President Joe Biden’s unexpected 2020 win in Georgia. In 2024, those same voters could return the state to Republicans.
Civil rights leaders and activists are sounding the alarm that the Biden campaign has a major problem on its hands with Georgia’s black community, which makes up 33 percent of the state’s population and overwhelmingly supported the president in 2020. Black Georgians are increasingly signaling that they won’t turn out or may even vote Republican in 2024 as they struggle with the persistent inflation and the feeling that Democrats haven’t followed through on their ambitious racial justice promises, Reuters reported Monday.
“A lot of them are not quite sure that Biden is the answer,” Georgia Black Republican Council chairwoman Camilla Moore told Reuters. “What we’re seeing in the Black community is a little bit more of a willingness in terms of Republicans being an option.”
Compounding Biden’s troubles: the financial collapse of twice-defeated Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s (D.) network of voter turnout groups, which helped swing the state for Biden in 2020.
One of Abrams’s groups, Fair Fight, laid off 75 percent of its staff in January after blowing the $100 million it raised from 2018 through 2021 on spurious voter suppression cases that were ultimately rejected by Georgia courts. The group doled out $9.4 million in legal fees to a firm run by Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, a close friend of Abrams and the chairwoman of the Democrat’s failed 2018 and 2022 gubernatorial bids. Fair Fight was also ordered to pay over $200,000 to reimburse the state of Georgia over its failed lawsuit that claimed Gov. Brian Kemp (R.) stole the 2018 gubernatorial election from Abrams. As of January, Fair Fight had just $1.9 million cash on hand and $2.5 million in debt.
Abrams’s other voter turnout group, the New Georgia Project, which she founded in 2013, also laid off half its leadership team one month before the 2022 elections amid allegations of financial mismanagement. A former senior executive of the group told the Washington Free Beacon that the New Georgia Project’s chief financial officer was fired in June 2022 after saying he couldn’t do his job without violating the law. And Politico reported in November that Abrams’s hand-selected leader for the group, Nsé Ufot, owed thousands of dollars to the group for “non-work-related” reimbursements.
Ufot, who was fired from New Georgia Project in late 2022, called the allegations a “fucking lie,” Politico reported. The group faces investigations from the Georgia secretary of state and the Georgia State Ethics Commission. The New Georgia Project also recently settled a dispute with the IRS over unpaid payroll taxes, according to Politico.
Black voter apathy for Democrats has already been felt at the ballot box. Democratic strategists in Georgia helped craft a memo that found black voter turnout had dropped by close to 25 percent between the 2018 and 2022 midterms, NPR reported.
“If the numbers look like they did nationally, Democrats don’t win,” the memo’s coauthor, Jack DeLapp, told NPR. “We can’t have a quarter of black voters in 2020 drop off in 2024.”
National polls also paint a dire picture for Democrats heading into the 2024 elections. An analysis of recent polls by the Financial Times on Monday found that the Democratic advantage in the black community has plummeted by around 25 points. Among all minority groups, Biden leads former president Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, by just 10 points after winning the demographic by nearly 50 points in 2020.
In Georgia, that’s led to a sizable polling lead for Trump. The former president leads Biden in Georgia by 6.5 points in the latest RealClearPolitics polling average.
