The strategist who revved up liberal fundraising
Rob Stein 1943–2022
Rob Stein got liberal donors to fight fire with fire. He’d had more than a decade of experience in Washington as a strategist and Clinton administration adviser by 2002, when congressional Democrats suffered a midterm rout. Convinced that the debacle foretold decades of GOP dominance, Stein worked late nights piecing together the conservative movement’s network of big-money donors and think tanks. He gave Democratic Party operatives and donors a presentation based on his research. “The center-left is comparatively less strategic, coordinated, and well financed than the conservative right,” he told them. These disadvantages “are debilitating.” In 2005, he founded his own network, the Democracy Alliance, which distributed more than $2 billion to left-leaning causes.
Stein was born in Wheeling, W.Va., to a lumberyard owner and a mother who was active in “religious and local arts organizations,” said The New York Times. Attendance at a conservative military academy and then Antioch College, “a hotbed of progressive politics,” helped form his worldview. After getting a law degree from George Washington University, Stein worked as a public-interest lawyer before a 1988 talk he gave on voter mobilization led to a position with the Democratic National Committee. He was chief of staff to Bill Clinton’s commerce secretary, Ron Brown, and then worked in venture capital. But Republicans’ post-9/11 2002 midterm triumph, said The Daily Beast, was “a rare instance where the party in the White House actually strengthened its hold on the Congress.” Stein “reached out to donors” and began building a Democratic organization that required members to give at least $200,000 a year to groups supporting progressive causes such as abortion rights and fighting climate change.
But Stein also “embraced cross-party efforts to overcome political polarization and the threat he believed it posed to democracy,” said The Washington Post. Even after stepping down from active management of the Democracy Alliance, he continued to sound the alarm about rising authoritarianism at home and abroad, including in a filmed presentation he put together in the hospital days before his death. “I know it is difficult to be optimistic,” he wrote in March, “but the burdens of healing the world are ours and ours alone— there is no one but us.”