Midterms aside, big donors look left to defeat Trump
WASHINGTON — As the debate rages among Democrats about how best to position the party to defeat President Donald Trump in 2020, many big donors are signaling early support for expanding and firing up the party’s liberal base rather than backing centrist appeals targeting the Rust Belt.
Even though middle-of-the road Democrats helped propel the party to broad gains in the House in the midterm elections this month, especially in coastal suburbs, influential donors signaled in postelection meetings that their priority would be to back progressive appeals in Sun Belt states.
Efforts in particular to register and mobilize minority and low-income voters in the South and Southwest, they said, present greater potential return on investment for Democrats than trying to win back the white Midwestern voters who helped elect Trump.
While left-leaning Democrats fell short in some high-profile races across the South — most notably Rep. Beto O’rourke’s effort to defeat Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas and Stacey Abrams’ narrow loss in her campaign to become governor of Georgia — the gains they made underscored the changing demographics of traditionally Republican states and the long-term opportunity for Democrats, the donors said.
“Once we expand the electorate in these places, there will be no turning back,” said Tory Gavito, president and co-founder of a new coalition of mostly female donors called Way to Win.
She made her case in presentations to major donors at a conference sponsored by WDN Action, the political arm of the Women Donors Network, this month in Seattle and this past week at another put on by the Democracy Alliance, an organization that includes some of the party’s wealthiest and most influential donors. She promoted the impact of her group’s “New Southern Strategy,” which included steering $22 million to political efforts in the South and Southwest before the midterms.
“The concentration of young people, poor people and people of color who used to sit on the sidelines because Democrats have not inspired them will upend the map,” she said in an interview.
That assessment aligns with the passions of the party’s increasingly powerful small-do-