Nonprofit that Once Turned Georgia Blue Admits to Prohibited Campaign Intervention
Until the 2024 election, Democrats enjoyed a string of unlikely victories or near victories in Georgia. After LBJ pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Georgia and the rest of the southern states seemed irretrievably Republican. The post-1964 switch from Democratic to Republican stronghold was a backlash to civil rights gains. But then Stacy Abrams came along and starting with Barack Obama, through Raphael Warnock and Joe Biden in 2020, Georgia turned blue largely on the strength of African Americans in and around Atlanta:
Abrams won 1.9 million votes in 2018, almost double the 1.1 million votes of Georgia’s 2014 Democratic gubernatorial nominee. Biden won almost 2.5 million votes, compared to Clinton’s 1.9 million. There are probably lots of reasons for the increased number of Democratic voters — particularly anti-Trump sentiment and Georgia’s changing demographics. Plus, Republican voter turnout in Georgia also surged this cycle, so maybe the Trump era has just boosted turnout among all groups. All that said, it’s worth isolating the role of Abrams, because she has executed a specific, turnout-based strategy in Georgia for nearly a decade and has pushed for the Democratic Party to join her in implementing it.
In 2014, Abrams, then a member of the Georgia House of Representatives, co-created a group called the New Georgia Project that focused on getting people of color in the state who haven’t previously participated in the electoral process to vote. In 2017 and 2018, Abrams ran for governor and diverted from the normal Southern Democrat strategy of centering a campaign on winning as many white swing voters as possible. Abrams did try to win white swing voters, but also invested heavily in boosting turnout among voters of all races in the Atlanta area and among Black people in particular in the state’s more rural areas.
On Wednesday, the Georgia’s Ethics Commission, which has been pursuing the New Georgia Project, a 501(c)(3), for at least six years, collected a hefty price for NGP’s apparent success. And in the process, it may have assured New Georgia Project’s doom as a 501(c)(3). Here, from the consent order, are the salient facts to which New Georgia Project stipulated:
The Commission’s Complaint alleged that during the 2018 election cycle, Respondents advocated for Representative Stacy Abrams’ election for Governor of the State of Georgia during the primary and general election, along with Sara Riggs-Amico, John Barrow, and Charlie Bailley and other state-wide candidates for public office during the general election. These expenditures included, but were not limited to, canvassing activities, literature expressly advocating for the election of candidates, social media engagement, and operating field offices with paid staff where those electioneering activities were organized.
New Georgia Project and its affiliated (c)(4), New Georgia Project Action Fund, agreed to pay $300,000 for violating state registration and disclosure laws, the largest such fine in Georgia history. Of course, state campaign finance violations are only half the story. From the NY Times:
The group was credited with conducting mass voter registration drives that helped turn Georgia blue in 2020 — propelling President Biden, Senator Jon Ossoff and Mr. Warnock to surprising victories in a long-red state. Under federal tax law, a tax-exempt charity can register voters but not tell them whom to vote for. In 2018, however, the New Georgia Project did just that, the state ethics commission said. The commission said the nonprofit paid for fliers endorsing Ms. Abrams and for canvassers who were told to say, “She’s the leader we trust to fight for us under the gold dome” of Georgia’s State Capitol. Some of the canvassers were nominally paid for by the related nonprofit, the New Georgia Project Action Fund, which has more legal leeway to campaign. But Mr. Emadi said there was actually little distinction between the groups. Bank records showed that the New Georgia Project was in charge of it all.
This is such a high profile case that its hard to imagine that the Service won’t step in and that the case won’t become a must-read in tax exemption casebooks. There really are so few cases useful for general deterrence, particularly regarding campaign intervention disguised as voter registration. New Georgia Project’s only hope is that despite the consent order’s broad language, it can prove that its affiliated (c)(4) actually did the intervening. It doesn’t sound like a promising hope.
So this case should be instructive, at least until the Johnson Amendment and the political speech restrictions are declared unconstitutional. Something that might happen during the next four years, I expect.
darryll k. jones