Civic engagement tools: increasing capacity and availability of data services, including online organizing services for civic engagement groups.

  Election reform: structural reforms of our democratic process that will increase voter participation among progressive constituencies.

  Youth leadership development: the youth part of the leadership pipeline, especially organizations targeting young people that work at scale.

  Mid-career nonprofit leadership development: again, they want to strengthen the “leadership pipeline,” especially “organizations working at scale.”

  The consequences of the Democracy Alliance’s emphasis on building a nonprofit network of progressive activism was clear by 2014. Donors on the left, inside the Alliance and out, have poured stunning amounts into “charities” active in public policy. My colleagues’ research identified that in the $9.6 billion universe of “traditional public policy nonprofits,” left-of-center organizations—environmentalist groups like the World Wildlife Fund, social liberal groups like Planned Parenthood, and think tanks like Center for American Progress—outraised conservative organizations by 77 percent to 23 percent. An analysis of foundation grant-making on the Right and the Left came to a similar conclusion; the nonprofit cash on the Left far outstrips that on the Right.

  The methods the Left employs to make this vision a reality have undergone some streamlining. Project incubation and fiscally sponsored projects of preexisting organizations—such as Arabella’s network specializes in—add an element of spontaneity and flexibility to the Left’s operations.

  While organizations like the Tides Center have been around for a long time, offering incubation services and back-office support to new campaigns and movements, an explosion of new, Potemkin-esque groups arose in resistance to the Trump administration. And some of the organizers are making a pretty profit while pushing the Left’s agenda.

  The Importance of the Alliance Conferences

  The Democracy Alliance doesn’t make grants itself. Instead, it’s an invite-only strategy group for leftist luminaries to coordinate the best ways for environmentalists, foundations, labor unions, and their allies to spend resources and reshape America. The Alliance hosts semi-annual conferences that connect left-leaning donors with like-minded activist groups.2 In secret strategy sessions, the groups pitch themselves and everyone discusses “investment recommendations” for where donations will have the strongest political effect.

  Though Democracy Alliance closes the meetings to the media, works to keep the conference agendas confidential, and discourages attendees from speaking to reporters, news outlets have often obtained and published conference materials, and Capital Research Center’s InfluenceWatch has a page devoted to what is known about the speakers and participants.3 The conference themes are telling:

  A New Progressive Era? (spring 2014)

  Honoring the Past, Shaping the Future (spring 2015)

  Vision Strategy Victory (spring 2016)

  Seizing Opportunity & Building Power (fall 2016) (It’s worth noting that this conference was planned prior to the results of the 2016 election that shocked the Left and ushered in the Trump administration.)

  Beyond #Resistance: Reclaiming our Progressive Future (fall 2017)

  Charting the Course for Progressive Power (spring 2018)

  Taking Our Democracy Back (fall 2018)

  Focus|Strategy|Victory (fall 2019)

  The materials outline the group’s sophisticated, multipronged approach to securing enduring political power, and their conference participants read like a who’s who of the Democratic Party.

  Following the fall 2016 conference, held a week after the election that former Alliance president Julie Kohler deemed the “most shocking and disturbing in recent history,” the Alliance scrambled to reexamine its strategy in its “Democracy Alliance 2020 Investment Portfolio Progress & Updates.”4 Note that this report, appearing in November 2016, was explicitly looking toward the 2020 election. According to the report, in 2016 alone, the Democracy Alliance’s 113 “partners” (read: coordinated donors) pledged to invest $146 million in “Progressive infrastructure map organizations” and promised close to $72 million to other 2020 efforts (recommended organizations, state funds, and leveraged investments).

  In her introduction to the report, Kohler promised it would explain the ways the left-wing groups it recommended be funded “are collectively moving the needle towards ambitious, movement-wide goals.” She added that

  Accomplishing these and many other aligned goals requires us not only to win elections but to advance policy and build power in a way that realigns complex economic and democratic systems that currently serve the interests of the privileged few. [Emphasis added.]

  The report illustrated fifteen funding streams moving money to battleground states ahead of the 2016, 2018, and 2020 elections to avoid attention. Fourteen of those streams were made up of seven matching pairs of groups, an Arabella specialty: each pair has a 501(c)(3) “charity” tied to a (c) (4) political nonprofit. The (c)(3) maximizes fundraising, because it’s easier for foundations to give to (c)(3)s and individual donors are incentivized by a tax deduction, while the (c)(4) maximizes political power, because these nonprofits have much greater latitude to lobby, to purchase political ads, to endorse candidates, and the like. These groups let the Democracy Alliance pool donor funds for distribution to the places where cash would have the strongest effect on elections. The seven pairs were

  Climate Fund / Climate Action Fund

  Democracy Fund / Democracy Action Fund

  Inclusive Economy / Inclusive Economy Action Fund

  New American Majority / New American Majority Action Fund

  Black Civic Engagement / Black Civic Engagement Action Fund

  Latino Engagement Fund / Latino Engagement Action Fund

  Youth Engagement Fund / Youth Engagement Action Fund

  Every single one of these streams ran directly through Arabella Advisors. Page 28 of the report details precisely where contributions to the funds should be directed. While each fund’s director was affiliated with Democracy Alliance (evidenced by the fund directors’ email addresses), donations were directed to Arabella organizations. For example, under Democracy Fund/Democracy Action Fund, the directory states:

  Checks for 501(c)(3) donations must be written payable to: New Venture Fund

  * Check Memo Line: Democracy Fund EIN: 20-5806345

  Checks for 501(c)(4) donations must be written payable to: Sixteen Thirty Fund

  * Check Memo Line: Democracy Action Fund EIN 26-44867535

  The Alliance, in its 2016 report, identified states to target as a part of its strategy to mobilize the various voter cohorts identified by the seven activist pairs. One of those states was Pennsylvania, and the Keystone State showed up as a target for five separate campaigns (Climate Fund/Action, Youth Engagement Fund/Action, and the State Engagement Initiative).

  The group entrusted with the plans developed under the Climate Fund/ Climate Fund Action strategy was One Pennsylvania (styled as One PA).6 One PA is virtually a subsidiary of the SEIU, which is one of the largest institutional donors on the Left. The Climate Action Fund raised roughly $1.3 million and gave One PA at least $188,000 in 2018 through the Arabella-run Sixteen Thirty Fund for “fighting a proposed refinery and dirty energy port facility in a low-income African-American community, educating voters on U.S. Senate candidate positions on climate change, and mobilizing them to vote” (emphasis added).

  Similarly, the Democracy Alliance’s Youth Engagement Fund raised $3.5 million to bolster youth turnout, which the report calls the Left’s “long-term competitive advantage against the political Right.” Almost all of that was intended for youth turnout in elections—ideally “doubling” it in “high impact states.”

  The New American Majority Fund and its 501(c)(4) arm, the New American Majority Action Fund, raised over $1 million in 2016 to target left-wing outreach to likely Democratic-leaning constituencies in North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, Ohio, and Arizona. The funds especially targeted “Asian and Pacific Islanders Americans, women, the LGBTQ community, and white working class”—the so-called New American Majority. The pair’s spending is overseen via an advisory board staffed by Democracy Alliance employees, the teachers’ union operative Daaiyah Bilal-Threats, and an SEIU representative.7

  Similarly, the Black Civic Engagement Fund and Action Fund—with oversight from the Ford Foundation and three unions (AFSCME, NEA, and SEIU)—directed spending toward Blueprint NC and groups in other key states “to build political power and activism within the Black community.” In 2016, the pair raised close to $5 million. They’re joined by the Latino Engagement Fund and Action Fund pair, which also directed money to Blueprint NC. That pair raised over $2 million in 2016.

  The State Engagement Initiative, another Democracy Alliance front group run through Arabella, raised $6.7 million in 2016 to create “donor tables” in battleground states, aiming to increase left-wing spending on elections and activist nonprofits supporting the Left. In North Carolina, the initiative directed funds to a group mysteriously called Put NC First, possibly a front for the liberal news aggregator Real Facts NC. (Hilariously, on one map, the report mistook South Carolina for its northern sibling—a shining example of how less-than-grassroots these megadonor operations run by Arabella actually are. Their puppetmasters are not merely from another state; they can’t even recognize the state for which they presume to speak on a map.)

  America Votes

  Another example of the dramatic overlap between Democracy Alliance and the Arabella network is America Votes. (America Votes was covered briefly in chapter 2.) America Votes emerged from the Democrats’ defeat in the 2004 presidential election as the brainchild of a group of influential operatives.8 These operatives—Clinton official Harold Ickes, SEIU president Andy Stern, Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope, EMILY’s List founder Ellen Malcolm, and Partnership for America’s Families president Steve Rosenthal—quickly gained the support of major labor unions, litigation nonprofits, abortion groups, environmentalist groups, and professional activists to put together a huge $95 million war chest for churning out likely Democratic voters in key battleground states.

  That’s considered a “charitable” act by the IRS, by the way, so long as tax-exempt nonprofits like America Votes don’t engage in partisan efforts—that is, overtly supporting members of a political party.

  While IRS rules don’t require America Votes to report its donors, past grants to the group show substantial funding from the League of Conservation Voters, Atlantic Advocacy Fund, Tides Advocacy Fund, Patriot Majority USA, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, and the National Education Association.9 The grant-making organizations in George Soros’s foundation network alone gave a combined $30 million to America Votes in 2021.10

  Little wonder that America Votes’ coalition includes just about every leftist standby imaginable, including the AFL-CIO, EMILY’s List, Indivisible, Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club. The list also includes ACRONYM—the nonprofit owner of Shadow, Inc., the tech firm run by Clinton and Obama cronies that was responsible for the debacle at the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses that caused delays in counting votes.11 (Chapter 2 documented how Arabella’s Hopewell Fund directed $8.6 million to ACRONYM in 2020 and 2021.)

  Chapter 2 also showed that America Votes received $191 million in (combined) funding from New Venture Fund and Sixteen Thirty Fund from 2019 through 2021. During the same period, America Votes had revenue totals of $339 million, so Arabella nonprofits provided 56 percent of the group’s income.

  A Giant Money Funnel

  America Votes is also a donor to aligned state-level groups. Consider North Carolina. In 2017, it gave $25,000 to NC Citizens for Protecting Our Schools, an education lobbying group that gave $1.1 million in 2017 to NC Families First—a group that spent millions of dollars attacking Republicans in the state legislature.12

  In 2016, America Votes gifted $175,000 to Make North Carolina First, which despite having no website nonetheless raked in $4.1 million in 2016 and another $2.7 million in 2017. It’s a good example of how the Left weaponizes nonprofits to achieve political aims—entirely in secret.

  Among the activities listed in Make North Carolina First’s 2017 IRS Form 990 are “voter registration and voter representation.” Its three-person board is headed by Adam Abram, owner of an insurance group and a board member for the left-wing groups Human Rights First and the Urban Institute. In November 2019, Abram was appointed to the state Housing Finance Agency by the governor.13 Also on the board are Dean Debnam, who runs the highly successful polling firm Public Policy Polling, and Michael L. Weisel, a legal expert in independent expenditure activities—the domain of partisan super PACs.

  In 2017 alone, Make North Carolina First made eight (mostly six-figure) grants to groups such as North Carolina Latino Power, Progress North Carolina Action, Advance Carolina, and NC Citizens for Protecting Our Schools. In 2018, it granted $1.3 million to NC Citizens for Progress, a PAC that spent some $1.6 million in attack ads during the midterm elections.14 Mainstream media reporting about Make North Carolina First and similar groups has been nonexistent—and it will almost certainly stay that way.

  The Democracy Alliance Windfall

  The first thing to remember about the Democracy Alliance is the central role partisan politics and electoral outcomes have always played in it. The second is that nonprofits have always been the primary types of organizations that the Alliance has recommended to its funding partners. Nearly all the groups identified in Matt Bai’s 2007 left-leaning analysis The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics were nonprofits.

  There are critical (though not always clear) legal restrictions on how nonprofits may involve themselves in elections. Private foundations and charities—the 501(c)(3) world—are categorically prohibited, in the IRS’s language, from “directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.”15 Voter registration, get-out-the-vote, and other voter “education” activities are permitted, but must not “have the effect of favoring a candidate or group of candidates.” By contrast, 501(c)(4) nonprofits (groups like Democratic Socialists of America and the National Rifle Association) may engage in substantially more direct political activities—endorsing candidates, making independent campaign expenditures, and so on—as long as these do not become their “primary” activity (legally, that ends up meaning no more than 49 percent of the budget goes to these efforts).

  Nothing proves the Democracy Alliance’s activities have violated any of these restrictions. Documents indicate that the Alliance is attentive to the requirements of applicable nonprofit law.16 Yet even with these requirements in place, the Alliance certainly sees nonprofits as playing an important role in America’s political landscape and in electoral outcomes. It’s also a role that appears to be growing. Funding directed toward ideologically left-of-center nonprofits has swelled since at least the 2004 election cycle. The Democracy Alliance is one notable part of this trend.

  Consider the budgetary growth of the Alliance’s recommended groups during that time. The Center for American Progress, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Economic Policy Institute, and Media Matters for America are all technically charities identified in The Argument as among the earliest recipients of Democracy Alliance funding. All remain core Alliance-recommended groups to this day. Organizations highlighted by the Democracy Alliance are often assured of future resources—which can have lasting effects. In 2004, these four nonprofits had combined revenues of about $37.6 million. Adjusted for inflation, based on the Consumer Price Index, that would have come out to just over $60.5 million 2021 dollars. But the actual combined 2021 revenues of those four groups exceeded $139 million.

  This trend is consistent across many Alliance-recommended groups. Faith in Action (formerly known as PICO National Network) had 2004 revenues of about $5 million.17 By 2021 its annual revenue exceeded $31.6 million (a drop from $37.4 million in revenues in 2020). The National Employment Law Project brought in less than $1.6 million in 2005, but $28.4 million by 2021.18 The Brennan Center for Justice, which among other things fights to overturn voter ID laws, went from about $4.4 million in 2003 to $101.3 million in 2021.19

  Note, too, that many of the nonprofits the Democracy Alliance recommends today didn’t even exist when the Alliance was founded or were brand new. America Votes, the Center for American Progress, ProgressNow, Re:Power (formerly known as Wellstone Action), and Working America were all founded in 2003—the same year that Rob Stein started showing his PowerPoint presentation.20 Media Matters for America and Color of Change popped up between 2004 and 2006—roughly the period chronicled in The Argument.21 Others came about even later: the 501(c)(3) Center for Popular Democracy was established in 2012, merged with another group in 2014, and brought in almost $173 million total from 2017 to 2021.22

  The Alliance, while steering vast sums of money into groups like these, was not solely responsible for their creation, or for their revenue growth. More money has simply been flowing through the ideological nonprofit sector in general. But wherever that money flows, it is never far from the Arabella empire.

  What all these Democracy Alliance and Arabella groups have in common is their support for more and more centralized government in Washington, including ever more burdensome regulation of all facets of American life. We turn now to one especially disturbing Arabella effort to control lives through regulation, and by no coincidence, it has advanced through the near-unlimited checkbook wielded by George Soros.

  10

  CASE STUDY