Arabella: The Left’s “Dark Money” Monster (Pt. 2)
We dive into the Arabella network, the Left’s greatest “dark money” machine. Arabella’s billions and “pop-up” advocacy campaigns have helped Democrats win for years. It’s time for the Right to beat them at their own game.
The Big Money Behind “Our Network”
When dealing with outsiders, Arabella is careful to maintain the illusion that its nonprofits are wholly independent organizations which “hired” the firm for its premier services (and legally speaking, that’s true). Arabella Advisors, we’re told in fluent legalese, merely provides “administrative and operational support services” to its nonprofits and “neither controls nor directs” spending by these “clients.”
But secret emails dated to 2017 reveal New Venture Fund president Lee Bodner selling its services to then-Gov. Jay Inslee (D-WA) while treating Arabella Advisors as one and the same:
I’m attaching a memo which outlines ways that the New Venture Fund and Arabella Advisors might support you and the other governors’ offices with the US Climate Alliance, and some background on our work. I’m also copying my colleagues Bruce Boyd [Arabella senior managing director and a New Venture Fund advisor] and Ryan Strode [then-Arabella senior director] from Arabella. They lead our collective work on climate policy and advocacy.
“In these ways, we could make sure that you are connected both within and beyond our network to help marshal the resources you need to make this successful,” Bodner concludes.
Despite this secrecy, we’ve dug up mountains of data on the network’s donors.
This data is difficult to find, even with IRS disclosures. There is no central database of grants; everything must be pieced together by hand from numerous sources. In all, we’ve accounted for 45 percent of the network’s $6.4 billion in total revenues between 2013 and 2021, or $2.8 billion, across nearly 2,500 grants. (The difference between each nonprofit’s total revenues and revenues from contributions is negligible; each nonprofit routinely collects 99 percent of its revenues from contributions.)
That’s an average. We know far more about the 501(c)(3)s than the 501(c)(4)s; we’ve traced 74 percent of New Venture Fund’s 2021 contributors, for example, compared with just 7.5 percent of Sixteen Thirty Fund’s contributors for that year.
In the case of the 501(c)(3)s, these contributions overwhelmingly came from private foundations or other pass-through funders (i.e. donor-advised fund providers), while much of the rest almost certainly came from individuals or even private companies cutting checks to each nonprofit. That money is untraceable. For the 501(c)(4)s, the money is split between labor unions and other (c)(4) groups. Much of North Fund’s money, recall, comes from its Arabella-run “sisters,” making the source even darker.
We’ve listed the biggest and most notable donor to each Arabella nonprofit below, excluding intra-network grants (with the exception of North Fund, since its money from 2019–2021 overwhelmingly came from its “sister” nonprofits):
Clearly, New Venture Fund might be considered the Gates Foundation’s preferred pot for funding politics. But a huge portion of the 501(c)(3) groups’ funding comes from other pass-through nonprofits, most notably major donor-advised fund providers like Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund and National Philanthropic Trust.
These act as a double- or triple-blind: A donor dumps money into his Fidelity Charitable account for an immediate tax write-off, and later directs a portion of it to New Venture Fund, which then goes either to an Arabella-run pop-up or to yet another political group. There’s absolutely no way to trace those funds back to the original source—and that’s exactly the point.
Spending Big in 2020
2020 was without a doubt the Arabella network’s biggest year. The 501(c)(4) Sixteen Thirty Fund poured $44 million into dozens of anti-Republican groups in 29 states, notably the battlegrounds of Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
The biggest of these by far was North Carolina, where leftists received a stunning $9.5 million from Sixteen Thirty Fund in 2020. One of them, Fair Future NC, used $1 million of it—three times its total budget for the prior year—to savage Republican state senators. Piedmont Rising, despite its name a Philadelphia-based group, took in $1.2 million from the fund to attack Sen. Thom Tillis (R).
In Arizona, Sixteen Thirty Fund poured $3.6 million into Advancing AZ, formed just six months prior to the November election, which spent heavily on attack ads criticizing Sen. Martha McSally (R) for voting to overturn Obamacare. She lost reelection by 79,000 votes.
In Georgia, Stacey Abrams’ voter turnout group Fair Fight Action raked in $3.1 million from Sixteen Thirty Fund, swamping the 2021 Senate runoffs with 800,000 newly registered voters, “half of them people of color and 45 percent under 30,” according to Newsweek.
And in Pennsylvania, Sixteen Thirty Fund’s $3.3 million paid for a Philly-based get-out-the-vote drive run by the Voter Project—itself a front for the SEIU- and AFSCME-funded Keystone Research Center. The Voter Project reportedly registered 3.2 million new voters nationwide for mail-in ballots. Its lead strategist later bragged that the project led “the soft-side effort to win the swing state [for Biden] in 2020.”
What’s amazing is that Arabella’s millions didn’t make more of an impact. Democrats picked up four seats in just three of the 19 states with Senate races targeted by Sixteen Thirty Fund in 2020 (Arizona, Colorado, and Georgia).
One or two seats is certainly enough to change control of the chamber. But the lesson is clear: “Progressives” must vastly outspend conservatives to have a chance at winning majorities.
Carpet-Bombing the 2022 Midterms
Sixteen Thirty Fund channeled another $9.3 million into pro-Democrat PACs in the 2022 midterm cycle. Over 40 percent of that sum ($4 million) went to a single group: Open Democracy PAC, which aimed to “stop election subversionists” and “extremists” by endorsing Democrats running for everything from county clerk to governor. Its ultimate aim is to enact automatic voter registration laws and “eliminate rules disenfranchising voters because of race,” as if it’s 1865.
76 percent of its budget came from Sixteen Thirty Fund. In turn, Open Democracy paid Elias Law Group $148,000 (whose principal, super-lawyer Marc Elias, sits on the PAC’s board); the Democrat consultancy BerlinRosen $687,000; and moved $1.5 million and $777,000 to PACs in Texas and Colorado, respectively.
In Alaska, Sixteen Thirty Fund pumped $1.1 million into Alaskans for Bristol Bay Action, 73 percent of that group’s budget for the 2020 cycle. Almost all of that money went to attacking Lisa Murkowski (R) in the Senate race and supporting Democrat Mary Peltola in the congressional race, who defeated Republican Sarah Palin largely thanks to the state’s ranked-choice voting policy.
In total, pro-Peltola groups spent $3.1 million to the meagre $15,000 spent by pro-Palin groups—and Alaskans for Bristol Bay Action was the second-biggest spender.
The North Fund, Arabella’s newest 501(c)(4), dropped another $5.3 million in the midterms, $4.1 million of which went to a single PAC: Somos, which spent its millions attacking Republican Senate candidates in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and other key states.
2022 Pop-Up Ads
Across the 2022 cycle, we’ve discovered nearly $6.6 million in political ads backing at least 20 Democrats paid for by Arabella nonprofits, and another $4.9 million from its spin-off, Demand Justice.
Sixteen Thirty Fund and its pro-Obamacare pop-up, Protect Our Care, ran generic ads for House Democrats in close races, all of which hit prescription drug prices, Big Pharma, health insurance premiums, and preexisting conditions: Abigail Spanberger (VA-07); Elaine Luria (VA-02); Angie Craig (MN-2); Antonio Delgado (NY-19), now New York’s lieutenant governor; Chris Pappas (NH-01); Cindy Axne (IA-03); Colin Allred (TX-32), who’s running for Texas’ Senate seat in 2024; Elissa Slotkin (MI-07); Jared Golden (ME-02), who won with Maine’s new ranked-choice voting policy; Susan Wild (PA-07); and Susie Lee (NV-03).
Many of the network’s 2022 ads ran under the name of a pop-up campaign, not the nonprofit sponsoring the ad.
Defend American Democracy (DAD), a Sixteen Thirty Fund front, wants voters to “put country over politics” by handing permanent control of Washington to the Democrats. DAD was originally formed to push Robert Mueller’s investigation into pro-Trump Russian “interference” in the 2016 election.
In January 2022, DAD ran ads targeting veterans in Arizona, demanding that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D) vote to “end the filibuster” so lawmakers could “protect the right to vote” and “hold [Jan. 6] insurrectionists accountable.” (Sinema ultimately joined Republicans in preserving the filibuster rule.)
It also urged Sinema to support Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s (D-MN) Freedom to Vote Act, which would’ve enacted same-day and automatic voter registration and permanent vote-by-mail nationwide, barred states from removing inactive voters from the rolls (something they’re required by law to do), restricted campaign finance laws, and handed control of state redistricting to the Justice Department.
Another DAD ad complained that there are “30,000 veterans in Washington, D.C., [who] don’t have a vote in Congress because D.C. isn’t a state.” “Patriotism means doing what’s right for our country,” we’re told, which apparently means giving a city of 713,000 residents—only 12,000 of whom voted Republican in 2022—two U.S. senators.
In Wisconsin, an Arabella-run North Fund ad accused Sen. Ron Johnson (R) of supporting a “tax loophole” that earned him $5 million for selling his family’s manufacturing business, doubling his net worth since he took office in 2011. Where’d they get those amazing facts? From the Congressional Integrity Project, an activist group run by multiple Arabella staffers—and funded with millions of dollars from Sixteen Thirty Fund.
If that’s not incestuous enough, the ad was also run through North Fund’s D.C.-based front Opportunity Wisconsin, a fact missed by the lefties at PolitiFact when they glowingly described the pop-up as “a coalition of Wisconsin residents focused on an economy that works for working people.”
In Part Three, we expose Arabella’s most infamous “pop-up” campaign, Demand Justice, and its war to delegitimize the Supreme Court—then pack it with “progressives.”
