Founded by Stacey Abrams, the group claims credit for registering tens of thousands of voters, but a recent report suggests its heyday is over.
The New Georgia Project, the Stacey Abrams–founded non-profit once seen as a model for progressive advocacy, was beset by financial mismanagement, and long suffered from a toxic work environment and infighting among its leaders, according to a new report.
The investigation, released this month by Politico, paints a picture of an organization that conveyed an outward image of strength and confidence, but was internally roiled by a “climate of chaos” — high turnover, poor record-keeping, and disillusioned staffers.
Georgia political analysts who spoke to National Review said the revelations could further erode confidence in the group among prominent Democratic donors, who are struggling with an increasingly apathetic base, and who are already turning their attention to other states heading into the critical 2024 election. Conservative analysts said they believe that the New Georgia Project’s influence in the state is waning, if not essentially over.
“As an operated entity that has any influence in the state, it’s done,” said Erick Erickson, a conservative political commentator and talk show host. “Now you’re headed into another presidential season, and you’ve got a Democratic Party in Georgia in disarray, Stacey Abrams gone, the collapse of the New Georgia Project. God bless ’em.”
But Kendra Davenport Cotton, the New Georgia Project’s CEO, downplayed the allegations against her organization as “dated” and exaggerated, and said the problems raised in the Politico report have been fixed. “None of those things are the current state of the organization,” she told National Review. “We’re stronger than we’ve ever been.”
Founded about a decade ago by Abrams, then a rising political star, the New Georgia Project sought to shift Georgia’s conservative politics by registering and mobilizing likely Democratic voters who typically don’t engage politically. The group claims to have registered hundreds of thousands of Georgia voters over the years.
On the heels of Joe Biden’s win in the state in 2020, and Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff winning Senate runoffs in early 2021, Abrams and the New Georgia Project were credited with blowing up Georgia’s electoral map and turning the state blue. Tens of millions of dollars flowed in from across the country.
But Erickson, who lives in Georgia and previously served on the Macon City Council, argues that Democrats in his home state are the beneficiaries of a changing political landscape rather than the drivers of it.
“Georgia’s shift came not because of some massive voter registration drive by the New Georgia Project, but just by a demographic shift in the metro Atlanta area of a bunch of people moving into the state in the last decade who were left-of-center,” Erickson said.
The New Georgia Project “never did the voter turnout they claimed to have done,” he added. “It’s always been more smoke and mirrors.”
And while other progressive organizations sought to emulate the New Georgia Project’s perceived success, “behind the scenes there was often disarray,” several former staffers told Politico.
According to the report, the New Georgia Project leaders didn’t properly track the group’s finances — salary advances weren’t accounted for, and employees were given Visa gift cards to cover work-related expenses, with no system in place to review receipts. The non-profit’s former director, Nsé Ufot, who was handpicked by Abrams but fired last year, owes the organization thousands of dollars in “non-work-related” reimbursements, according to the report — an allegation Ufot has called a lie.
There was frequent turnover in the non-profit’s top finance role, infighting among management, resignations of top leaders, a toxic work environment, and then a round of layoffs. In October 2022, just weeks before the midterm elections, “the head of HR told staffers on a Zoom call that the company could no longer make payroll,” the Politico report states.
The new revelations come as a state ethics commission is still investigating whether the New Georgia Project illegally spent millions of dollars to back Abrams in her 2018 campaign for governor — Abrams left the group’s leadership in 2017 as she prepared her run. The New Georgia Project has also been investigated over allegations that it attempted to register ineligible voters and that it violated state election rules by not submitting completed voter applications in the proper timeframe.
The New Georgia Project Action Fund has most recently engaged in signature-gathering effort to challenge the building of a police-training facility, known as “Cop City,” in Atlanta. The group has received some pushback for overstepping its mission of registering minority voters.
Charles Bullock, a University of Georgia political-science professor, said the New Georgia Project’s influence could be hurt if the allegations facing the group turn off donors.
“If contributors look at it and say, ‘I’m wasting my money by giving it to them, because they do have problems with their bookkeeping and questionable expenses,’ then that would kill the organization,” he said. “If they can continue to raise money, they can continue to be players.”
Daniel Franklin, professor emeritus of political science at Georgia State University in Atlanta, said he is a supporter of voter-registration and mobilization efforts, particularly for underrepresented groups. But he said the New Georgia Project’s impact on the state’s political direction may have been overrated. He believes the biggest reason Democrats have performed well in Georgia’s federal races recently has less to do with voter-registration efforts than it does with the quality of the Republican candidates in a state that still leans Republican.
“Herschel Walker and Trump, they’re poison,” Franklin said.
He called the allegations against the New Georgia Project raised in the Politico report “small potatoes” and “the sort of thing that you clean up internally.”
Chip Lake, a Republican consultant in Georgia, said that “the New Georgia Project has probably run its course.” At the very least, he said, “it’s certainly suffered some brand damage,” which could suppress the organization’s fundraising ability.
Davenport Cotton, the New Georgia Project’s CEO since October 2022, defended her organization, saying they have the infrastructure in place to “once again shock the nation.” The group “is sitting on a $10 million reserve,” she said, calling criticism of the New Georgia Project’s finances “comical.”
“We let our work speak for ourselves, but I want to be clear: There is not another organization, another civic engagement organization here in Georgia . . . that has the resources that the New Georgia Project has in its coffers going into 2024. And that’s a fact,” she said.
The problems reported by Politico are at least a year old, she said, and some date back several years, closer to the organization’s founding. Those problems have been corrected, she said.
“We’ve expanded our board. We have all of our finances and protocols in place. We don’t have any compliance issues,” Davenport Cotton said. “I think it’s a healthy work environment.”
She called the layoffs reported by Politico a “strategic reduction in force” designed to set up the organization for “long-term sustainability.”
Davenport Cotton also downplayed concerns about the group’s financial management.
For an organization that has raised tens of millions of dollars, “you’re talking about alleged misfeasance of roughly $50,000,” she said. “I’m not trying to discount, because we think every donor dollar is important. But in the grand scheme of things, percentagewise, that is not a lot of money that you’re talking about.”
“We have had multiple conversations with our donors,” she said. “Our donors are well aware of all of the positives that are going on in the organization.”
While the New Georgia Project has set a fundraising goal of about $18 million for 2024, Davenport Cotton acknowledged some concerns heading into the new year. “We’re going to have a fundraising issue on the progressive side, period, because it’s been a down fundraising year for the progressive ecosystem across the nation, and in Georgia in 2023. And we fully expect that to carry over,” she said.
And because Georgia doesn’t have a major statewide race on the ballot in 2024, convincing Democratic donors to commit money to the state for the presidential race will be harder.
Georgia is on everybody’s map in progressive circles, she said. “But let me just tell you straight up, we are at the bottom of the map,” she said. “If money gets tight or resources need to be redirected, we’re going to be the first thing off. Everybody knows it.”
She believes investing in Georgia for the presidential race is a smart move for Democrats, because they can force Republicans to invest there, too. “Is it a need for progressives? No, it’s not a need,” she said. “But it certainly is where you want to make sure, if you’re being strategic, that conservatives are playing defense.”
Analysts who spoke to National Review said they didn’t see much reason to believe that Warnock — who chaired the New Georgia Project from 2017 to 2020 — would be impacted by the allegations of mismanagement at the nonprofit. Warnock, who won reelection last year and isn’t up for election again until 2028, told Politico that he wasn’t aware of any problems.
“He can just go back and say, ‘Look at how I’ve managed my church,’” Franklin said of Warnock, who is the senior pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
“Nothing sticks to Raphael Warnock,” Lake said. “He is the most protected elected official in Washington, D.C. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
After losing to Republican Brian Kemp in her bid for governor last year, Abrams has said on several occasions that she “will likely run again” for political office. In April, she took a new role at Howard University in the Washington, D.C., school’s leadership and public-policy center.
She could be shielded from the most recent scandals at the New Georgia Project because most of it seems to have occurred after she left the group’s leadership. But her political opponents could argue that she maintained influence with the group, “and so it might have been that she made bad hiring decisions, and that might reflect upon her,” Franklin said.
Bullock said that “in terms of the average voter, this is an organization — to the extent that they think about it at all — would be associated with her.”
Abrams is deeply ambitious, Erickson said, but he doesn’t see a political path forward for her in Georgia, at least at the moment. Abrams was the Democratic chess master in 2022, he said. There is a growing sense of bitterness and ill-will among the party faithful for her, he said, “because she promised them the moon, aligned the chess pieces on the board. Everyone marched to her orders, and she lost the war.”