Scott Bland and Maggie Severns
The “green wave” of campaign cash that
boosted Democrats and liberal causes in 2018 included an unprecedented
gusher of secret money, new documents obtained by POLITICO show. The Sixteen Thirty Fund, a
little-known nonprofit headquartered in Washington, spent $141 million
on more than 100 left-leaning causes during the midterm election year,
according to a new tax filing
from the group. The money contributed to efforts ranging from fighting
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and other Trump judicial nominees
to boosting ballot measures raising the minimum wage and changing laws
on voting and redistricting in numerous states. The spending was fueled by massive anonymous donations, including one
gift totaling $51.7 million. That single donation was more than the
group had ever raised before in an entire year before President Donald
Trump was elected. Most of the group's funders are likely to remain a
mystery because federal law does not require "social welfare"-focused
nonprofits to reveal their donors. The Sixteen Thirty Fund’s rise last year is a sign that Democrats and
allies have embraced the methods of groups they decried as “dark money”
earlier this decade, when they were under attack from the money machines
built by conservatives including the Kochs. The
nonprofit operated under four dozen different trade names in 2018, many
of which have benign-sounding local titles like Arizonans United for
Health Care and Floridians for a Fair Shake. POLITICO revealed in 2018
that a number of these linked groups were collectively spending millions of dollars
to pressure Republican members of Congress on their stances on health
care, taxes and the economy through TV ads and grass-roots organizing. A
related organization called the Hub Project controlled the flow of
money for this effort from Sixteen Thirty Fund into states and
districts, according to reporting
by The New York Times. This year, the group is “continuing to work on
campaigns that Americans care about,” Hub Project spokesman Dan Crawford
said, including campaigns focused on health care, taxes and the
economy. Demand
Justice, the courts-focused group helmed by former Hillary Clinton press
secretary Brian Fallon, also ran out of Sixteen Thirty Fund. Demand
Justice spent millions of dollars on TV ads as Democrats tried to
prevent Brett Kavanaugh from being confirmed to the Supreme Court in
2018. More recently, the group projected a video of Christine Blasey
Ford accusing Kavanaugh of assault on the side of a truck outside a
Washington gala where Kavanaugh was speaking. In
addition to the direct spending conducted under prominent trade names,
Sixteen Thirty Fund also distributed more than $91 million in grants to
95 other groups in 2018, according to the tax filing. These funds made
Sixteen Thirty Fund a major source of money for political nonprofits
pushing an array of changes to state and federal law...MORE
No comments:
Post a Comment