Six months after the Democratic Party’s crushing 2024 defeat, the party’s megadonors are being inundated with overtures to spend tens of millions of dollars to develop an army of left-leaning online influencers.
At donor retreats and in pitch documents seen by The New York Times, liberal strategists are pushing the party’s rich backers to reopen their wallets for a cavalcade of projects to help Democrats, as the cliché now goes, “find the next Joe Rogan.” The proposals, the scope of which has not been previously reported, are meant to energize glum donors and persuade them that they can compete culturally with President Trump — if only they can throw enough money at the problem.
Democrats widely believe they must grow more creative in stoking online enthusiasm for their candidates, particularly in less outwardly political forms of media like sports or lifestyle podcasts. Mr. Trump’s victory last year, many now take as gospel, came in part because he cultivated an ecosystem of supporters on YouTube, TikTok and podcasts, in addition to the many Trump-friendly hosts on Fox News.
The quiet effort amounts to an audacious — skeptics might say desperate — bet that Democrats can buy more cultural relevance online, despite the fact that casually right-leaning touchstones like Mr. Rogan’s podcast were not built by political donors and did not rise overnight.
Wealthy donors tend to move in packs, and some jaded liberals worry that the excitement could cause money to flow into projects that are not fully fleshed out. They argue that the latest pitches on the left are coming from operatives who are hungry to meet donors’ demand for a shiny new object. In a break from the past, some of the Democrats’ new ventures are for-profit companies.
And so far, there are still more ideas than hard, committed money: One Democratic operative described compiling a spreadsheet of 26 active projects related to creators, over a dozen of which are new since November. But a few of the efforts have ties to major donors that could give them liftoff.
“It needs to start with a legitimate investment,” said Marissa McBride, a Democratic strategist who leads a donor group called Mind the Gap. But she added, “There has to be something that is happening organically as well.”
Shedding a ‘Hall Monitor’ Reputation
The first out of the gate has been Chorus, a well-publicized liberal nonprofit group co-founded by the Democratic influencer Brian Tyler Cohen.
But others have stayed under wraps until now. In November, Ms. McBride and other liberal operatives gathered in Washington for a series of meetings to survey the election wreckage. At the headquarters of American Bridge, one of the largest Democratic donor networks, they eventually hatched a plan for a for-profit media company called AND Media, which stands for “Achieve Narrative Dominance.”
The company, incorporated in March, says it is aiming to raise $45 million over the next four years. The group hopes to have a $70 million budget over that time frame based on predictions of $25 million in revenue. It says it has raised $7 million so far. Ms. McBride and Christian Tom, who led digital strategy for the Biden White House, have pitched the company to American Bridge donors as a broad cultural project.
Hoping to move away from “the current didactic, hall monitor style of Democratic politics that turns off younger audiences,” AND Media will focus on directly funding influencers and co-producing their content, opening a creator talent agency and starting by “inking deals with four ‘flagship’ creators,” according to a business plan shared with The Times.
Another effort with ties to major donors is called Project Bullhorn, which is meant to pool contributions to back creator projects. The money is running through Jason Berkenfeld, who has advised the political giving of Eric Schmidt, the billionaire former Google chief executive, and others. Mr. Berkenfeld pitched the project to major Democratic contributors at a briefing this month featuring Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey.
Mr. Berkenfeld is seeking to raise $35 million in the first year for Project Bullhorn and aligned work, according to two people who have spoken to him. He is largely trying to amplify existing influencer networks: An early recipient of the money he raises will be a fund backing left-leaning creators on YouTube. Another will be a “matchmaking service” to book these creators on YouTube shows and podcasts.
Project Bullhorn plans to include a for-profit arm that will “have the potential to reap significant returns,” according to a concept document obtained by The Times. “We will need to create self-sustaining businesses if we want to build an echo chamber with sufficient scale and reach.”
‘We Can’t Afford to Wait’
All of these programs are somewhat similar, and they will compete for scarce capital. Democratic strategists and fund-raisers say that many major liberal donors are still being stingy with their money — and that the few laying out cash are more focused on legal efforts to fight the Trump administration.
One of the top aides on former Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign, Rob Flaherty, and a digital media executive, Mike Vainisi, have been in conversations with donors in recent weeks ahead of what is expected to be a multimillion-dollar fund-raising round for a new for-profit company called Channel Zero. The group is meant to provide back-office services to content creators who already have large followings.
Mr. Flaherty is also advising Project Echo, a new four-year $52 million influencer program from People for the American Way, a progressive nonprofit group. The group is spending about $10 million of its own money and pitching donors for the rest, according to its president, Svante Myrick.
A program called Double Tap Democracy, meanwhile, is working with 2,000 mostly apolitical creators who generally have smaller followings.
The project was started by Rachel Irwin, who led a $30 million influencer program last cycle for Future Forward, the biggest Democratic super PAC. But there was tension during the campaign over the size of the influencer program, which some donors wanted to be even bigger, according to a person briefed on the conversations.
Ms. Irwin incorporated Double Tap late last year. She received an initial grant of about $250,000 from Future Forward and has raised money from some Silicon Valley donors. She has argued to others that the party did not invest early or enough in cultural talent in the last election, and that she is trying to learn from her experience at Future Forward.
“We can’t keep running these programs late in the cycle, only to break down after or treat these relationships as transactional and expect success,” Ms. Irwin wrote to allies in a March email seen by The Times. “Every day we don’t engage online is a missed opportunity — and we can’t afford to wait.”
To some Democratic operatives, the repeated gatherings of donors to mull such ideas has felt like a ceaseless calendar of cattle calls.
Aides to the liberal donors George Soros and Laurene Powell Jobs held an idea-a-thon in February in Washington. This month, about 50 digital operatives presented their proposals at a hotel in Austin, Texas, at an event organized by Civic Resolve, a think tank backed by a Walmart heir. A gathering hosted by Future Forward this month in Half Moon Bay, Calif., featured a session on “Return on Culture” that paired Nimay Ndolo, a progressive content creator, with Jeff Lawson, a Democratic megadonor who recently bought the satirical website The Onion.
And Mark Gallogly, a private-equity veteran and Democratic donor, has invited contributors and operatives to the latest of a series of gatherings on this issue on Tuesday in New York.
Mr. Flaherty, the former Harris strategist, who has been at some donor events, said emulating the right’s success would take time.
“The key is building off what’s already resonating and investing in it,” he said. “If it all goes into more tools for delivering poll-tested messaging, it’ll fall flat with its audience. At that point, you might as well just buy ads.”
Theodore Schleifer is a Times reporter covering billionaires and their impact on the world.
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