DEMS: PROGRESSIVE ELECTORAL MAP GROWING
nor base, creating a potentially potent early financial foundation for prospective presidential candidates who appeal to the party’s left flank.
The nominating process remains in its earliest stages, and there is nothing approaching unanimity among Democrats and their financial supporters about the best path to 2020, much less the best candidate. Many of those likely to run will try to straddle the party’s ideological, geographical and generational divides, even as Trump continues to face challenges that could reshape the political landscape before Election Day.
But at the recent donor conferences, centrist groups and think tanks affiliated with the moderate wing of the Democratic Party mostly took a back seat to organizations promoting more liberal ground-organizing efforts focused on expanding the electoral map.
At the annual winter meeting of the Democracy Alliance at a downtown Washington hotel this past week, the agenda featured groups focused on registering and mobilizing voters in Arizona, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas.
The description for a session moderated by Gavito on “building progressive power in red states” declared that “one clear message of 2018 is that the progressive electoral map is widening,” and could include Sun Belt states, and even deep-red states like Alaska, thanks to long-term investments in ground organizing.
Conference leaders credited such efforts with helping progressive Democrats such as O’rourke, Abrams and Andrew Gillum, who narrowly lost the governor’s race in Florida, run more competitive races than they otherwise might have.
The leaders of several groups that worked to mobilize minority voters — including Black Voters Matter, Blackpac, New Florida Majority and Color of Change — were granted coveted spots at the conference, allowing them to develop potentially lucrative relationships with the major donors in attendance.
Since its creation in 2005, the Democracy Alliance has played a significant role in shaping the institutional ecosystem of the political left by steering more than $1.6 billion to recommended liberal and Democratic groups, according to an alliance official.
It has helped to fund an array of new nonprofit groups dedicated to taking on Trump. Its ranks include some of the left’s most prolific donors, such as billionaire investors George Soros and Tom Steyer. This past week’s meeting drew appearances from several Democratic politicians, including Reps. Adam Schiff of California and Pramila Jayapal of Washington, as well as Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Gov.elect Jared Polis of Colorado, a former Democracy Alliance donor.
Gara Lamarche, president of the Democracy Alliance, did not dispute the club’s heightened focus on progressive organizing, but he said it was not mutually exclusive with policy work and efforts to appeal to Rust Belt voters.
“It’s not about abandoning white working-class voters,” he said in an interview. “It’s about expanding the electorate and giving people reason to vote.”
In a speech to the assembled donors Thursday, he praised “unapologetically progressive candidates who excite and inspire core progressive voters,” according to his prepared remarks. And he singled out the efforts of other groups and donor coalitions that steered funds to help such candidates, including Way to Win.
Way to Win is funded in large part by more than 120 female donors, including Susan Pritzker, a member of the family whose fortune stems from Hyatt Hotels. She traced her involvement in the coalition to the 2016 election, which she called “a brutal wakeup call, throwing into sharp relief how broken our democratic processes had become.”way to Win consists of a political action committee called Way to Lead that donated money this year directly to candidates and a pair of nonprofit groups that donated millions more to groups organizing in those candidates’ states, with a particular focus on Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Virginia and Texas.
The goal is “to shift the way political giving happens” away from advertising and other outreach done by national groups, and toward ground organizing controlled by local groups, according to one of the group’s founders, Leah Hunt-hendrix.
A granddaughter of Texas oil billionaire H.L. Hunt, Hunt-hendrix, who is also a Democracy Alliance member, is among the most influential young donors on the left.
“One of the problems with political giving on the right and the left is when it’s used to move a donor’s agenda, whether it’s Wall Street, tech or oil,” Hunt-hendrix said in an interview. Way to Win was created to counter factions of the Democratic donor class that she said were “socially liberal but unwilling to challenge corporate power and the accumulation and concentration of wealth.”
In an Op-ed article last year, she suggested that donors boycott nonprofit groups aligned with the Democratic establishment, such as the centrist think tank Third Way and the nonprofits spearheaded by conservative-turned-liberal operative David Brock. She deemed those groups part of the “neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party,” which she blamed for thwarting progressive movements like the 2016 primary campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.