Progress! At least this time Stacey Abrams and her campaign have finally acknowledged a defeat at the hands of Brian Kemp. Abrams managed to turn herself into a national figure by claiming that Kemp stole the 2018 election — until election denialism got a lot less popular after 2020.

Nonetheless, Abrams managed to raise over $100 million in the 2022 race for the rematch. How much does she have left? Well, guess why the campaign so readily admits that this time, “we did not just lose, we got blown out”:

After raising more than $100 million in her second bid to be Georgia governor, the Stacey Abrams campaign owes more than $1 million in debt to vendors, two-time campaign manager Lauren Groh-Wargo confirmed to Axios.

Why it matters: Abrams has been heralded for her fundraising prowess and had brought in donations at a presidential level earlier in the year. But money became so tight that most of the 180 full-time staffers were given an abrupt paycheck cutoff date — just a week after the November election.

“People have told me they have no idea how they’re going to pay their rent in January,” one former staffer told Axios. “It was more than unfortunate. It was messed up.”

The campaign canned the staff the week after the election. By contrast, Axios notes, Herschel Walker plans to keep his campaign staff on salary until the end of the year, as does Raphael Warnock. Kemp not only paid his campaign through the end of November, he paid out bonuses. That came despite the oft-reported fact that Abrams — fueled in part by her claims of injustice in the 2018 election — far outraised Kemp in this cycle.

Maybe her campaign staff should have thought twice about working for her — at least if they wanted managerial competence. The campaign told Axios that the staffers actually had it pretty good otherwise, except …

Another staff member emphasized that the compensation was high for campaigns — and that the human resources department worked “above and beyond” to try to help staff find new jobs. …

“We tried to do the best we could to make sure that help would be there for folks,” [Groh-Wargo] said, pointing to health insurance benefits that lasted through November.

That sounds generous … at least until one recalls that health insurance is bought on a monthly basis. If they paid for health insurance the week before the election in November, then they paid for the whole month because there was no other option. The campaign didn’t have any choice but to cover them for the whole month.

It’s not unusual for campaigns to end with debt. It is unusual for a $100 million campaign to tell their vendors to sit patiently for further fundraising, however, and to go broke well before Election Day.  The money was already running out before the final push, as it turns out. “Cash flow problems” began in the last weeks of October, when Groh-Wargo all but ran out of money for broadcast air buys.

How in the world does that happen in a gubernatorial campaign that raised over $100 million directly? Groh-Wargo blames a “cavalcade of negative press and negative polling” for sub-par fundraising in the final weeks, but in July 2022 Abrams had $18.5 million in cash and only four months to go after raising $12.2 million in Q2, nearly double Kemp’s fundraising in the same period. In early October, FEC filings showed Abrams “continuing her powerhouse fundraising,” combining with her PAC to raise $36.3 million. At that point, a month out from the election, Abrams reported having $11 million in the bank for the campaign, compared to Kemp’s $15 million, but still plenty to bankroll four weeks of a gubernatorial campaign in Georgia with cash to spare.

Where did the money go? Either staffers really got paid a lot of money, or the grift was on. Perhaps a few of the staffers and vendors that Abrams stiffed can follow the money and let the rest of us know how the United Earth President spent their cash.