Twenty years ago, the Republican Party under George W. Bush scored an unlikely trifecta in the 2002 midterms, gaining the Senate and holding the House. Two years later, Bush defeated John Kerry and the GOP maintained its hold on Congress. Witnessing this ongoing shellacking of their preferred party, liberal donors were left wondering: What went wrong? And how could they put a stop to the right’s ascent?
Around the same time, political strategist and Clinton administration alum Rob Stein was making the rounds with an answer. Armed with a PowerPoint presentation picturesquely titled, “The Conservative Message Machine’s Money Matrix,” Stein made a case to top Democrats and donors that the right had done a much better job at lining up and deploying philanthropic and political money toward its long-term policy goals. And if liberals wanted to catch up, they’d better take note.
Stein’s pitch got the attention of some powerful progressive donors, including one George Soros, who had just spent millions unsuccessfully trying to oust Bush — and earning the investor the unending ire of the right. Eventually, in early 2005, 50 such donors got together at an Arizona resort, and from that meeting arose the Democracy Alliance.
The DA, as it’s often called, has also been called many other things (some of them unflattering), but at its core, it’s pretty much the original donor organizing hub for progressive funders this side of the millennium, officially unaffiliated with the Democratic Party but deeply invested in the party’s fortunes. The DA has been around for nearly 20 years now, and in that time, it has played a role in moving roughly $2 billion to its preferred groups and causes, marshaling both 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) dollars.
Over the same timespan, though, politics and the progressive movement in the U.S. have dramatically changed. In a far more diverse landscape, momentum on the left no longer lies — if it ever did — with the elite, white male liberals who proved such an avid audience for Stein. Progressive philanthropy, although still playing host to the continued ascent of the liberal mega-donor, has also evolved. Several new left-leaning, grassroots-focused donor networks have sprung up, and even mainstream foundations are taking on far more pointed stances on social and racial justice.
Where does that leave the DA? Is this donor network, a longtime bogeyman of the right that has been labeled “the country’s most powerful liberal donor club,” still the force it once was? Especially at such a fraught time for the system of government it’s named after, it’s worth asking how this granddaddy of progressive donor groups has evolved, and continues to evolve, as the 21st century approaches its second quarter.
Setting up a big tent
As a gathering point for many of the nation’s top liberal funders, the Democracy Alliance has long occupied a crucial space at the nexus of politics and philanthropy. From that 2005 meeting onward, it has counted among its members (called “partners”) many top progressive givers, including George Soros and Peter Lewis. An increasing number of left-leaning institutional philanthropies have also become involved with the DA. From the start, its ranks included major labor organizations, as well.
Stein once described the DA this way: “It’s a gathering place. It’s a learning environment. It’s a debating society. It’s an investment club. And it’s a big tent, a convener for the full spectrum of center-left thought and perspective.”
Throughout its history, people affiliated with the DA have often reached for the phrase “big tent” to describe a network of donors whose backgrounds, issue interests, and views on how to achieve progressive change vary widely. To an extent, that ethos carries through to the present.
“There is an enormous amount of wealth in this country. A lot of that wealth is progressive wealth. And a lot of that wealth is unorganized wealth,” Pamela Shifman, the DA’s current president, told me. “So the more we can get people with resources, whether foundations or individuals, to be in relationship and in connection with each other, the better it will be for our sector.”
One of the DA’s aims has always been to “help move [donors] along a path to a more common understanding,” said Gara LaMarche, who was the DA’s president from 2013 through 2021. “It should strive to include — as it has from the beginning and does today — a broad range of those who identify as progressive, and try to lead them to greater clarity and focus around progressive goals and strategies.”
A light touch
Of course, the extent to which the DA has lived up to those inclusive ideals has, from the start, been a matter of debate. Part of the problem is the unabashedly elite nature of the whole affair. Like philanthropy at large, the DA has long reflected the attitudes and strategic preferences of the well-heeled liberal donors who originally stood it up.
One part of that is a laissez-faire attitude toward the question of how the DA interacts with donors’ money — or rather, how it doesn’t. Upon Soros’ urging, the early Democracy Alliance eschewed the “command and control” approach (as LaMarche put it) of its counterparts on the right, namely the Koch network. The DA would operate with a lighter touch, recommending causes and recipient organizations to its partners while forgoing any large, centrally placed pooled fund — and thus the financial power to pursue a more unified agenda.
The decision was also made to keep the DA’s staff lean. As LaMarche wrote in a chapter in the 2022 book “George Soros: A Life in Full,” that decision “limited [the DA’s] capacity for research, assessment and evaluation.” Taken together, LaMarche went on, these early choices to keep the network lean and nonprescriptive “could be said to have limited its impact” relative to the Kochs’ operation. Note that LaMarche previously worked for Soros as vice president and director of U.S. programs at the Open Society Foundations.
Early on — and even now — a centerpiece of the DA’s strategy has been to build up progressive infrastructure, in line with Stein’s original thesis that the left was bereft in that regard. But what does “progressive infrastructure” actually mean? It’s not that straightforward.
In the beginning, the DA trained its sights on four priority areas: ideas, media, leadership and civic engagement. Working groups in each area would come up with ways to fund them, and an investment committee made up of DA board members would send a vetted list of potential grantee organizations to the group at large. The partners could then pick and choose who to fund, as if from a menu.
At that time, the DA’s partners were mostly well-heeled individual donors of varying means (Soros is an outlier in terms of sheer wealth). But they all had money to spare. Annual dues stood at $30,000 and each partner had to commit to donating $200,000 a year to organizations on the DA’s list, which included both 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) groups.
The highlights of the DA calendar are its in-person conferences — swanky proceedings where partners gather and trade notes on progressive power-building. While they’re a hallmark of the organization, the conferences have also drawn attention to the network’s secrecy and media-shyness. Stories of, say, Politico reporters getting rebuffed on-scene by the bigwigs attending the gatherings, not to mention the DA’s longtime refusal to publicize its partners or activities, have contributed to a “dark money” narrative around the organization. It’s a narrative that the DA’s right-wing opponents have eagerly promoted.
Missteps
The early DA notched some notable wins in its quest to build up progressive infrastructure. From its founding through 2015, it helped move roughly $500 million (exact figures are hard to come by due to the organization’s secrecy and the fact that the DA is neither donor nor recipient in most cases).
Washington D.C.-based policy and advocacy groups were the DA’s focus at the start, and it proved instrumental in growing key left-leaning Beltway shops like the Center for American Progress, Media Matters for America, the American Constitution Society and Catalist, an early player in efforts to marshal big data to boost progressives’ electoral fortunes.
Nevertheless, the DA appears to have been beset almost from the start by challenges traceable to its structure as a lean, loose network of donors with heterogeneous funding interests. In a detailed account in The Nation from September 2006, Ari Berman called attention to the early DA’s apparent ideological incoherence and organizational missteps. “Since its inception, the alliance has been unabashedly elitist, while also poorly run,” Berman wrote. “The criteria for choosing winners have been maddeningly opaque and the grants themselves contradictory. Far from speeding up the funding of progressive organizations, the alliance has slowed certain things down.”
An individual I spoke with who was involved with the DA at that early stage had a similarly downbeat perspective, saying the organization failed to answer the question of “to what end?” As a result, the person went on, the DA largely lost touch with Stein’s initial long-termist vision and defaulted to a preoccupation with the Democrats’ electoral prospects.
In a piece for IP following the passing of Rob Stein earlier this year, Micah Sifry advanced a similar critique: “Reflecting the mindset of its moneymen, the DA’s donors, for all their supposed commitment to social justice values, [were] far more capitalist and short-termist than [their] opponents, who poured money into their institutions like Big Government Socialists.”
Thus, while money from DA donors did make it to progressive policy groups, that support never matched the kind of cash conservative funders bestowed upon their own ideologically driven organizations. Key causes on that initial agenda, like leadership development and media, were left unattended. Most liberal foundations, meanwhile, continued their general policy of shunning such support, while backing for ground-up movement-building remained sparse or nonexistent.
Evolution (and a bigger tent)
By the time LaMarche arrived to head up the DA in 2013, the national climate had changed quite a bit from when the network got up and running in 2005. The halcyon early Obama years were fading into memory as Republicans notched gains, especially in the Democratic setback that was the 2014 midterms.
Meanwhile, as big donors wielded ever-increasing power in both politics and philanthropy, new progressive donor organizing groups began to spring up. It’s hard not to notice how much many of them differ from the DA when it was founded. Take the Solidaire Network, founded in 2013 around a far more pointed critique of the status quo around big money — and with women, people of color, and younger donors in the lead.
As most of us recall too well, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a shock to the collective progressive system, prompting panic, a surge of organization-building, and a veritable flood of giving. A “resistance map” the DA sent its membership in 2017 reveals how much the organization’s recommendations had changed since its earliest days. According to LaMarche, a major strategic shift occurred at the DA during his tenure and into the present, based on a belief that “grassroots organizations on the ground are where the action is.” State-level organizing, which was a component of the DA’s work from the start, became an even sharper priority.
In tandem with that, the DA has taken steps away from the Beltway-centric, white-male-led status quo of its past, embracing a wider array of donors and potential grantees. A bigger tent, if you will.
Ai-jen Poo, best known for her role at the head of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, got involved with the DA through Care in Action, a 501(c)(4) advocacy group founded in 2017 to advance a care agenda in the political sphere centering women of color. Referring to electoral work and power-building, now a mainstay for the DA, she told me, “A lot of people emerged and stepped into that space in the Trump era. To have a place where… donors who became more engaged in understanding that our democracy is under extreme threat right now can go and network and learn and coordinate with others, I think is important.”
A new era?
The DA’s evolution to more closely reflect contemporary progressivism has continued into Shifman’s time as president, a role she stepped into at the end of 2021. As is true of her predecessor LaMarche, Shifman’s background favors philanthropy, not politics. A lawyer who once worked at UNICEF to take on gender-based violence, Shifman went on to become executive director of Peter and Jennifer Buffett’s NoVo Foundation through 2019. NoVo was a landmark funder of women and girls’ causes until 2020, when it unexpectedly changed course.
Since she took the reins, Shifman has sought to articulate a clear answer to the question that has long bedeviled the DA: to what end? “I think the Democracy Alliance has never been more important in our 17-year history,” she said. “Because of the threats to democracy, because of the weakening of democracy in the United States, it’s really imperative that we have donors who are committed to protecting the democracy we have and building the democracy we need.”
Saving democracy — which in this case can be said to translate, unofficially, to saving the Democrats — has been a key concern for both the DA and the progressive donor ecosystem at large since the Trump presidency’s ignominious ending. In keeping with this alarming political moment, it’s a much more dramatic goal than “building progressive infrastructure,” but it basically amounts to the same thing. It’s just that in the DA’s current interpretation, progressive infrastructure looks less like a D.C. policy shop and more like voter engagement in the Sun Belt.
To that end, the DA has also spent the past several years actually handling donor money — albeit in relatively small amounts — via several pooled funds. The New American Majority Fund, which is still housed at the DA, seeks to build progressive electoral power by supporting state-based groups led by people of color and LGBTQ people. Other such funds, like the Strategic Victory Fund and the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, were incubated at the DA but have since branched off.
With Shifman at the helm, the DA has also brought in new voices, both as partner donors and to engage with the existing donor base. One of those newcomers is Teresa C. Younger, president and CEO of the Ms. Foundation for Women, which has been an institutional partner in the DA for less than a year. “We had never been invited to the table,” she said. Traditionally, she went on, the DA has brought together mostly a collection of progressive white men. “Now, it’s about educating in that space, and bringing more people into the space, whether it’s women or women of color.”
Younger was clear about the fact that social-justice-oriented newcomers like the Ms. Foundation aren’t there to pal around in an elite donor club. “And really, if we stop being heard by those in the room, then we will leave,” Younger said. “But if we can change the funding, if we can center the funding on grassroots organizations, that will be a benefit to us and to our grantee partners.”
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It’s no real surprise that the DA has evolved toward a conception of “progressive infrastructure” that centers racial and gender justice and prioritizes grassroots voter engagement, perhaps especially at the state level. That’s the direction the progressive funding ecosystem has taken, and in a far more crowded environment of left-leaning donor collaboratives and funding intermediaries, one must adapt to stay relevant.
As the field fills up, more concentrated strategic focus areas and funding niches have become important. For example, the donor collaborative Way to Win, founded in 2018 to build progressive electoral power in key battleground states, has a tighter ideological focus and walks with donors along a narrower path. In recent years, “anything more broadly based, like bigger-tent groups, have suffered in terms of their value proposition,” LaMarche told me.
The DA is certainly no longer the only game in town when it comes to progressive donor groups and intermediaries. In that sense, its relative importance on the national stage has diminished compared to where it stood in the later Bush and Obama years.
At the same time, none of the people I spoke to, from DA veterans like LaMarche to newcomers like Younger, saw the Democracy Alliance as an organization in competition with other progressive donor groups. “There are a lot of shared donors amongst these groups, who understand that all of us have a part to play,” Younger said. “And there are some who will be far more comfortable with funding in the Democracy Alliance space than they are in the Way to Win space, or the Ms. [Foundation] space or in the Solidaire space, or in any of these locations. And that’s totally fine.”