Across America, there has been a remarkable shift in the type of people who fund politics.
The biggest thing is that they often aren’t people at all.
The 10 largest individual donations so far in the midterm elections? They total almost $300 million — and none of them came from a human being. Some of the origins can be deduced, but other checks came from a series of little-known nonprofits whose original donors will most likely never be known.
This is the new normal in American elections. Increasingly, individuals do not cut the big checks to political campaigns, donations in which their names would have to be disclosed to the Federal Election Commission or state regulators. They come more and more from an alphabet soup of patriotic-sounding philanthropic organizations that send hundreds of millions of dollars to political action committees but do not have to disclose where the money came from.
So-called dark money is not new. But a review of new election filings and internal fund-raising documents obtained by The New York Times shows a stunning increase in the use of these shadowy philanthropic groups to raise money on behalf of candidates in federal elections. This is particularly true among Democrats, who have sharply escalated their reliance on them since 2020, far surpassing Republicans.
About 17 percent of the money donated to super PACs in the 2024 election cycle — about $1.5 billion — came from organizations that did not disclose their donors, the review showed. That was more than double the proportion that came from these dark-money groups in 2020, which in turn was a major spike from 2016.
The two main nonprofits behind the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns alone raised nearly $900 million.
“We are moving toward a system where transparency is just optional,” said Dan Weiner, a money-in-politics reform advocate at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which studies campaign finance. At the state level, even ballot initiatives, which are envisioned as America’s closest thing to direct democracy, are awash in money from these middlemen.
In November, voters in Michigan will decide on whether to hold a constitutional convention — a gathering that Democrats fear could allow conservatives to make sweeping changes to state laws on the death penalty, abortion rights, school funding and redistricting.
Leading the opposition is a group called Protect MI Constitution from Special Interests, which says the convention is a scheme by “politicians, their billionaire donors and extremist groups” to advance possibly dangerous agendas “without transparency.” Started last August, the group raised $150,000 within a month of its formation and received another $150,000 two months later.
It said in its promotional materials that it was made up of a “bipartisan coalition” of “real people like teachers, nurses, police and firefighters across Michigan.” In reality, records show, it has been funded exclusively to date by a brand-new, $40 million nonprofit founded by a trio of experienced Democratic operatives and traceable only to a mailbox at a UPS store in Washington, D.C.
The donors to the new nonprofit, known as American Opportunity Action, are a secret. They could be special interests and billionaires in their own right — liberal donors looking to influence Michigan’s future with the same lack of transparency they accuse their opponents of.
These intermediaries are not new in the world of big-money donors, particularly in traditional philanthropy. But their ascendance in the political arena is undermining one of the central protections the U.S. Supreme Court offered when it opened the door in 2010 to unlimited campaign contributions. Donors, the court said in its Citizens United decision that year, were free to spend as much as they wanted to on behalf of their favorite candidates or causes. But in return, the court said, their donations would be disclosed for all to see.
The flood of money channeled anonymously through philanthropic organizations in recent elections has all but erased the very protections the court promised.
Wealthy Republicans were first to form a daisy chain of nonprofit giving to funnel anonymous money into the political system. But recently, this path has been exploited to a far greater degree by wealthy Democrats, many of whom are seeking anonymity to avoid reprisals from President Trump, even as they donate tens of millions of dollars at a time to defeat Republican candidates.
In the 2024 election cycle, over 40 percent of the nearly $2 billion raised by the largest Democratic super PACs came from entities that did not disclose their donors, according to the Times analysis. That was twice the rate of the largest Republican super PACs that cycle.
Alexandra Acker-Lyons, an adviser to several prominent progressive donors, said that liberals had to use everything in the campaign finance arsenal to fight Mr. Trump.
“When we get power, we can change all of the rules so that everyone plays nice,” Ms. Acker-Lyons said. “But until we have power, we can’t do that.”
‘The Shell Game Was Inevitable’
Since Citizens United, the typical way for ultrawealthy donors or corporations to offer large amounts of money to support candidates is through super PACs, which can take checks that are unlimited in size and must publicly report their donors’ identities and the amounts they contributed.
But when money is donated first to a third party that later makes a contribution to a PAC, only the intermediary organization is listed on the disclosure required by federal regulators; the original donor in most cases remains anonymous.
That’s where the nonprofits come in. Often referred to as 501(c)(4) organizations, these nonprofits are required merely to file a yearly tax return, often long after the election, showing where their money went and how much money they raised — not their underlying contributors.
Legally, they cannot spend more than half of their money to explicitly back political groups. Otherwise, their tax-exempt status is at risk.
But if the amount raised grows large enough, a group donating less than half its money can still become one of the biggest donors in an election. And that is exactly what has happened.
In both parties, a cottage industry of lawyers and accountants monitors how close various nonprofits are to their legal limits, routing money to allied nonprofits, according to interviews with almost two dozen strategists who do exactly that.
Dmitri Mehlhorn, who advised mostly Republican donors during the Obama years and mostly Democratic donors, like the billionaire LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, during the Trump years, said operatives started obscuring donations almost immediately after the Supreme Court’s decision in early 2010.
“The moment Citizens United was decided, the shell game was inevitable,” Mr. Mehlhorn said.
By the end of 2010, Mr. Mehlhorn said, “both sides already had full systems set up to game and track the new laws.”
It is illegal for operatives, seeking anonymity for a specific donor, to route a contribution to a nonprofit and directly earmark the money to go to a super PAC. But conversations can get close to the line, the strategists said.
In fact, some major super PACs have created their own sibling nonprofit groups precisely to make their offices a one-stop shop for major donors — and to make these transfers easy. In the 2024 cycle, the largest single donors to the main super PACs behind Senate Democrats, House Democrats, Senate Republicans and House Republicans were not people, but those super PACs’ own nonprofit groups.
The super PACs’ activity is not considered dark money, because it is sort of disclosed. The trend has spawned a new term: “gray money.”
The New Gray-Money Machine
No super PAC has capitalized on this interlacing with nonprofits more than Future Forward, the dominant Democratic super PAC in the 2024 election, backing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It was financed overwhelmingly by billionaires and corporations.
But often indirectly.
In 2023 and 2024, Future Forward’s super PAC took in nearly half of the money it raised, more than $266 million, from its main sister nonprofit organization, Future Forward USA Action, according to federal filings. That $266 million accounted for about 42 percent of what the nonprofit collected.
Almost all of Future Forward USA Action’s donors are not public, although a few, such as Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg and a George Soros nonprofit, have become known through media reporting or tax filings. One undisclosed donor gave the nonprofit a staggering $97.5 million.
It did not used to be this way.
In the 2012 and 2016 election cycles, what was then the main Democratic super PAC, Priorities USA, almost exclusively collected donations from wealthy individuals like Mr. Soros, according to F.E.C. filings.
Of the 997 separate contributions raised by Priorities USA in the 2016 cycle, 91 percent came from identified individuals.
The same was true of most super PACs back then. In the 2012 race, only 1 percent of all money donated to super PACs came from entities that did not disclose their donors, according to the Times analysis. That figure was 4.5 percent in the 2016 race, climbed to 7.7 percent in 2020 and rose to 16.8 percent in the 2024 cycle.
President Trump’s main super PACs in 2024, together called MAGA Inc., were backed by billionaires like Timothy Mellon and Timothy Dunn — and heavily relied on undisclosed donors, too. The groups took in $68 million from Securing American Greatness, a nonprofit run by the same people who run MAGA Inc., tax filings show.
But only about 25 percent of the MAGA Inc. super PAC’s cash came from its nonprofit, and several unrelated major pro-Trump super PACs disclosed almost all of their megadonors, including the billionaires Elon Musk and Miriam Adelson.
In the final weeks of the 2024 election, Future Forward was the largest advertiser in the presidential race by far, pounding the airwaves with what ended up being over $500 million in anti-Trump ads. At the exact same time, Future Forward’s nonprofit was cutting massive checks — $90 million, two of $40 million, $35 million — to finance the super PAC’s operation, records show.
Future Forward said its operations had all been well within the law.
“We had donors supporting the educational, policy advocacy and electoral work we did a few years back, as other organizations do,” said Chauncey McLean, who heads both the super PAC and its nonprofit. “Every dollar we had for educational programs, nonpartisan voter registration and the like was used for those purposes.”
The ‘Future’ of Giving
Future Forward was backed by a range of other new liberal nonprofits that collectively spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the 2024 election cycle. Some of them were fly-by-night operations, founded only a few months before the election and remaining largely out of the public eye.
In 2022, the operative who managed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, Robby Mook, began telling other Democrats who manage big money for progressives about his plans to start a duo of new nonprofit organizations, called Our American Future, that would seek to displace the existing big players in the progressive funding pipeline, according to four people who spoke with him.
One of his organizations was a nonprofit set up under the 501(c)(4) section of the tax code, the kind of group that is allowed to use some of its money for political contributions; the other was set up as a 501(c)(3), the type usually used by traditional nonprofits like universities and hospitals.
The groups drew support from liberal billionaires like Hansjörg Wyss and Mr. Soros, whose own nonprofits each donated tens of millions of dollars.
Both of Mr. Mook’s groups ended up heavily funding the Future Forward nonprofits. By law, 501(c)(3)s are not allowed to give money to back political candidates, and can give only to 501(c)(4) organizations with tight restrictions on how much and what the money can be spent on.
In this case, almost all of the money disbursed by the (c)(3) group has gone to the (c)(4), according to the most recent tax filings, which end in mid-2024. The groups together raised about $251 million from outside donors between late 2022 and mid-2024, with one outside donation, to the foundation, as big as $70.8 million.
Some political committees maintain segregated accounts to make sure there is no commingling of assets in ways that break the law, according to campaign finance lawyers and an Our American Future grant agreement obtained by The Times. But because of the way these nonprofits are structured — as “fiscal sponsors” — it is almost impossible to trace the precise flow of money, both for the public and tax regulators who police misconduct.
Eddie Vale, a spokesman for the Our American Future groups, said they had “rigorous procedures” to ensure compliance with the law. He said that it was “legal and common” for a traditional nonprofit to give money to a political nonprofit, and that this money was not part of whatever was transferred to super PACs because of the legal restrictions on using it for partisan activity.
But he declined to provide details on how the money was allocated because the information “could subject people or organizations to additional bad faith attacks by right-wing organizations.”
Caitlin Sutherland, of the conservative watchdog group Americans for Public Trust, said the sheer amount of money transferred between and across interlinked progressive groups in recent years raised questions.
“It just defies logic,” she said, to assume that the 501(c)(3) money “isn’t ultimately being used to support or oppose a candidate” in some cases.
A variety of other brand-new progressive big-money groups are also making use of nonprofit laws to boost Democrats, the Times analysis shows. One of them is American Opportunity Action, the nonprofit that is funding the opposition to the constitutional convention ballot initiative in Michigan.
The group appears to be linked to the Our American Future network. It has quietly donated about $6 million to various Democratic super PACs and liberal ballot measures across the country, according to F.E.C. and state records, part of its expected $40 million midterm campaign. That includes $1 million to back a Democratic redistricting push in Virginia, and over a quarter of the $6 million raised by a ballot group, People Not Politicians, to combat a Republican redistricting effort in Missouri.
Multiple Democratic operatives who have worked directly with or are funded by Our American Future and its partners said they knew almost nothing about them. Richard von Glahn, who runs People Not Politicians, said that even he did not know where his biggest donor’s money came from.
“Since Citizens United, there’s been a set of rules that people follow, and that’s what we do here,” he said. “I don’t do an interrogation of any single donor.”
Theodore Schleifer is a Times reporter covering billionaires and their impact on the world.
The post Wealthy Donors Are Hiding Political Money in Secretive Nonprofits appeared first on New York Times.
