The ultrawealthy donors who are backing the Democratic Party are increasingly impossible to identify. That’s kind of the point.
In the decade and a half since the Supreme Court opened the door to super PACs, which can take in unlimited contributions to support federal candidates, the amount of money coming in from undisclosed donors has grown at a stunning rate.
For the first decade after the court’s decision, Republicans dominated the so-called dark money game. But nowadays, it’s the Democrats who are running the table. That’s partly because some of their ultrarich donors fear retribution from President Trump and want to hide the fact that they are together spending hundreds of millions of dollars on liberal candidates and causes.
The current disclosure system makes that rather easy. Billionaires and corporations are increasingly giving tens of millions of dollars a time to a daisy chain of nonprofits that obscure donors’ identities when the nonprofits make their own large contributions to super PACs.
These kinds of donations are sometimes called gray money — the checks from the nonprofits are disclosed by the super PACs, as is legally required, but the true origin of the money is never reported.
A relatively new collection of liberal nonprofits — some with dizzyingly similar names, and some operated by the very same people — is playing a big role in this trend muscling out consultants like Arabella Advisors that have historically dominated liberal philanthropy.
The New York Times, using campaign finance records, tax filings, internal fund-raising documents and interviews with dozens of Democratic operatives, has pieced together how hundreds of millions of dollars donated mainly by wealthy individuals and corporations are coursing through the progressive ecosystem. Here are a few of the groups that are playing the game.
Future Forward
Much of the Democratic dark-money story revolves around what has been the largest Democratic super PAC, known as Future Forward. But good luck figuring out how all of it is funded.
The role played in the 2024 election by that super PAC’s own dark-money nonprofit, Future Forward USA Action, was without precedent. The nonprofit took in huge contributions from what are believed to be many of the biggest Democratic donors in the country. The nonprofit then sent $266 million to the Future Forward super PAC, helping it become the biggest advertiser in the presidential election.
Future Forward also quietly maintained another nonprofit, this one an explicitly nonpolitical entity called the Future Forward Education Fund, according to a document distributed to potential donors that was obtained by The Times. That group was prohibited by law from spending money on partisan politics, but it did send big money to help finance a $100 million nonpolitical program at Future Forward USA Action.
Much of how the money flowed from donors to the nonprofits, between the two nonprofits, and from the nonprofits to the super PAC, is not public. Future Forward said that all its money was used for its intended legal purpose.
Our American Future
The education fund was a component of a new, low-profile collection of groups called Our American Future, which has rapidly become a center of gravity in progressive politics.
There is both a political nonprofit called Our American Future Action, which is permitted by law to spend some money on campaigns, and a nonpolitical one called Our American Future Foundation, which is largely not. Yet almost all of the money spent by the latter, according to the most recent tax records, went to the former.
Our American Future houses many nonprofits within it, primarily for legal compliance reasons. That structure, though, also makes it almost impossible to track its hundreds of millions of dollars in spending.
The groups said all the expenditures had been carefully monitored and carried out as required by law.
American Opportunity Action
But there are more interconnections that help confuse the landscape. The leader of the Our American Future groups is a Democratic lawyer named Katie Nee. She also heads a new nonprofit called American Opportunity Action — notice the ever-so-slightly different name — that started a month after Mr. Trump’s victory in 2024.
The group is perhaps the newest big player in dark-money politics. In its application to the Internal Revenue Service for tax-exempt status, the group estimated that it would raise $20 million in 2025 and another $20 million in 2026. It said it would “especially prioritize engagement in states with pending ballot measures” and pledged to spend only a “limited amount of resources” on elections.
Nevertheless, the group has become the largest, and sometimes sole, donor to multiple super PACs and ballot initiatives this cycle.
American Opportunity Action’s spokeswoman, Christina Reynolds, declined to answer detailed questions, but said that the group’s donation decisions were just “the most effective ways to achieve our policy goals, such as reproductive rights.”
Evidence for Impact
Nonprofits typically don’t raise tens of millions of dollars almost immediately after they are founded.
But two Democratic-aligned groups did just that, ahead of the 2024 election.
In February 2024, an operative close to Silicon Valley donors named Marissa McBride started a political nonprofit called Evidence for Impact. Ms. McBride, has sought to bring a more evidence-based approach to the world of political giving and help donors achieve greater — as the name says — impact.
That May, Evidence for Impact accepted two donations in public-company stock, each greater than $40 million. In the final six weeks before Election Day, the nonprofit would funnel $16.8 million into federal super PACs, financing over $10 million of the anti-Trump barrage from Future Forward’s super PAC. Ms. McBride declined to comment.
Bright Future Fund
As fast as a nonprofit can appear, it can disappear.
Take the Bright Future Fund. It was started in December 2023 by Preston Elliott, a Democratic operative who would later help start American Opportunity Action.
In a matter of 28 days that December, Mr. Elliott took in over $140 million through just four checks. The group went on to spend over $180 million on boosting Democrats and progressive causes in 2024, including through several of the other nonprofits on this list. This group also declined to discuss its operations and donors.
You won’t find much out there about the Bright Future Fund. It dissolved this past November as soon as it filed its last tax return — a year after the election concluded.
Theodore Schleifer is a Times reporter covering billionaires and their impact on the world.
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