Liberal mega-donors plan $100 million swing-state blitz to beat Trump

2020 elections

The Democracy Alliance is paring back its support for Washington-based groups to focus instead on pouring money into key states in 2020.

The country’s most powerful liberal donor club is reshaping its spending for the 2020 election, playing down longtime relationships with groups in Washington and instead preparing to pour $100 million into key states to help defeat President Donald Trump.

The group, the Democracy Alliance, wants to fund everything from programs combating social media disinformation to candidate training sessions leading up to the election and the next round of redistricting, according to a new three-year spending plan described to donors during a recent members-only meeting at the Four Seasons Hotel in Austin, Texas.

Story Continued Below

It’s a significant shift for the group, whose members plowed $600 million into various causes on the left in 2017 and 2018. The Democracy Alliance has long been a major funder of left-leaning, Washington-based institutions like the Center for American Progress think tank and the national media watchdog Media Matters. But while individual Democracy Alliance members may choose to continue financing those groups, they are no longer a central focus for the donor club, whose members pledge to give at least $200,000 a year to groups on a list of approved organizations.

“It’s not that we don’t need any more national organizations, or that the national organizations are sufficiently resourced. Of course they need investments,” said Gara LaMarche, president of Democracy Alliance. But for the group to be effective, LaMarche continued, “we have to be working at the state level and we have to be funding organizations in the grassroots.”

The Democracy Alliance’s next wave of spending will include “funding programs that listen to voters’ concerns and amplify the policy records — and harm — that the Trump administration and conservatives have caused in Americans’ lives,” according to a spending plan reviewed by POLITICO.

New Media Ventures, which invests in politically-minded tech startups, is helming the group’s digital organizing, spurred by concerns among Democrats that the GOP and the Trump campaign deployed better digital advertising and organizing tactics in 2016. The Democracy Alliance is aiming to funnel more than $5 million into digital spending in 2019, on top of the $100 million in state spending.

“We view our job, generally, as helping to build the infrastructure that is in place for an eventual nominee,” said LaMarche. “But we’re not doing our job well if we don’t have our eye on the long term.”

In addition to grassroots organizing and digital politicking, the group’s top priorities include candidate and staff training and initiatives on voting rights. It will also include raising $12 million for organizations led by Native Americans to mobilize voters in Native American communities.

“Our donors are keenly aware of both the digital tactics and level of disruption that are being utilized both in this country by the far right and by foreign entities, said Kim Anderson, executive vice president of the Democracy Alliance, adding that donors are motivated by a lack of faith “in the Trump Administration to engage with actors that put our democracy at risk.”

The changes to the group’s plans were introduced to donors in April at a muted spring gathering. Unlike many Democracy Alliance meetings, attended by operatives who are recipients of the group’s largesse and featuring hotel bars packed with shoulder-rubbing Democrats, outsiders were not allowed to the April meeting so that members could pore over details of the 2020 plan.

Roughly 75 people attended a session to hear the rollout of the new operation, many of them representatives from labor groups, according to a person present.

Some Democrats argue the Democracy Alliance, which was founded in 2005 to build up progressive infrastructure and counter the power of conservatives like the Koch brothers on the right, does not hold the same sway as it used to, as Democrats now have numerous other outlets for big-money political giving.

One of the Democracy Alliance’s most active and high-profile original members, Tim Gill, is no longer a member of the Democracy Alliance, according to multiple people familiar with his status. And though Soros is still a member of the group, he does not usually attend the meetings in person.

“I don’t pay a lot of attention to [their] strategy,” said one Democrat who has attended Democracy Alliance meetings. “Politics has decentralized.” Today, many organizations thrive off individual donors rather than focus on getting the approval of a group like the Democracy Alliance, the Democrat said.

There are other donor gatherings organized by the likes of David Brock, the founder of American Bridge and Media Matters; the states-focused collaborative Way to Win; and the new political operation helmed by tech billionaire Reid Hoffman, who collects money from other donors in addition to spending his own.

In recent years, a handful of mega-donors also began putting tens of millions of their own dollars into self-founded, and funded, political groups — among them Steyer and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

“Equally as important as what the DA is going to do is, what is Mike Bloomberg going to do?” Steve Phillips, a Democracy Alliance member, said in an interview. “When you get single individuals spending $100 million, they kind of become the center of gravity.”

Anderson, the group’s executive vice president, dismissed the notion that other organizations are competing with the Democracy Alliance for progressive power or money.

“Our competition is not progressive donors, our competition is donors who don’t share our values,” said Anderson. “The Democracy Alliance has had the broadest view of the ecosystem on the far right and the progressive side, and the longest commitment.”