Is it finally time to end the “blessed” super PAC?

On July 14th, 2023, it became official. 

In a New York Times article titled “Biden Switches Up His Big-Money Operation Ahead of 2024,” the President’s top advisors told the Democratic party’s biggest donors where they wanted them to spend their money. “President Biden and his advisers are elevating a new outside group as the leading super PAC to help re-elect him in 2024, making it the top destination for large sums of cash from supportive billionaires and multimillionaires,” the story reads. “The blessing of the group, Future Forward, is a changing of the guard in the important world of big-money Democratic politics.”

The “outside” Democratic dark-money ecosystem is notoriously opaque, and can at times be petty and competitive. In every presidential election since 2012, different cohorts of consultants and strategists have jockeyed behind the scenes to crown their organization the primary or “blessed” super PAC, thus becoming the destination for hundreds of millions of major donor dollars. This time around, the group that came out on top was named Future Forward - a research heavy outfit run by low-key operatives with a quasi-religious devotion to ad testing. In that same New York Times article, former Biden gatekeeper Anita Dunn was the one to give the signal, saying Future Forward “really earned its place as the pre-eminent super PAC…”

And earn its place it did.

The group claimed to have raised nearly a billion dollars between its various legal entities, including a rare $50 million donation from Bill Gates and significant sums from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. In terms of independent expenditures (IE’s) just from its super PAC arm, FF PAC, the group spent a historic $455 million on ads boosting Harris in 2024. (Future Forward raised and spent additional funds through other legal entities, including a nonprofit arm.) 

In fact, Future Forward was so “blessed” in 2024 that the group’s expenditures made up more than 69% of all presidential super PAC spending on the Left, according to my analysis of FEC data. That is a stunning contrast to 2020, in which no single Democratic super PAC made more than 21% of independent expenditures that cycle.

The 2024 figure was even a higher percentage than in 2016, when the primary super PAC at the time, Priorities USA, accounted for 55% of the total Democratic presidential independent expenditures. 

In other words: in 2024, Democrats put all of their eggs into one, very large basket. 

Future Forward isn’t exactly to blame for this historic consolidation of resources - after all, a super PAC’s mission is to raise as much money as humanly possible and spend it as strategically and efficiently as they can. 

However, now that 2024 is in the rear view mirror, it’s worth stepping back and questioning why this “blessed” model was deployed in the first place, when in 2020 Biden for President benefited from the spending of many well-funded outside organizations. 

Super PACs play an enormous role in contemporary American politics. While candidates and campaigns are subject to strict per donor fundraising limits, super PACs and their affiliated “dark money” nonprofit arms are allowed to raise and spend unlimited amounts of cash. Super PACs were first established after the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in the Citizens United case, and in every election cycle since then, both sides have used them as vehicles for spending hundreds of millions of dollars.

The supposed benefit of a party adopting a single super PAC model is to avoid duplication. After all, why should donors pay for multiple groups with more staff and more overhead to run similar ads targeting the same voters? PACs can spend an unbelievable amount of money on expensive lawyers too, and those bills add up.

But in 2020, Democrats saw the benefits of the opposite: a robust outside spending ecosystem in which more than a dozen well-funded groups made different strategic choices to contribute to Biden’s victory.

For example, some PACs chose to target voters in Florida, while others chose to expand the map into Georgia and Arizona. One outside group, American Bridge, was the first to run ads attacking Trump on his disastrous COVID response, while the head of another PAC criticized that strategy as “inappropriate” in the midst of a public health crisis. ACRONYM, an organization I worked for at the time, chose to go all in on digital advertising, while Unite the Country and Future Forward spent heavily on television. Some groups spent early, while others saved their spending for the final 90 days of the election. 

This time around, the picture looked very different. In 2024, “[Trump] had an army of super PACs,” Harris campaign strategist David Plouffe told Dan Pfeiffer in a post-election interview. “We didn’t have the benefit of that…I think having multiple players on the field as long as they are coordinated is great…to have an ecosystem is really, really important.”

Steve Schale, a Democratic strategist who ran a pro-Biden super PAC in 2020, echoed Plouffe’s sentiments in a recent piece for The Bulwark. “Having more groups doing more work helps the nominee. In both 2016 and 2024, virtually all the super PAC money ran through a single entity, and both times we lost. The 2020 approach, which happened as much by circumstance as by intention, meant more groups were at the table, bringing a diverse set of opinions and skills.”

On the Right, Republicans were far less consolidated than Democrats this cycle, with donors funneling pro-Trump spending through three major super PACs that each spent over $100 million: MAGA Inc, America PAC, and Preserve America PAC. The largest of those three, MAGA Inc, accounted for 45% of super PAC spending in support of Trump. In addition to those, there were at least 5 other groups that spent in the $10-$75 million range.

Since Election Day, I’ve spoken to nearly a dozen operatives from the Harris campaign or outside groups who have been frustrated by how Democrats’ outside spending game played out this cycle. They generally all have said the same thing: major donor money moved too slowly, was distributed to too few groups, and came way too late. While those types of complaints are pretty common every election cycle, the command-and-control nature of outside spending that took place on the Left in 2024 should concern any Democrat who works in politics.

Too often, the party and its donors seem to sleepwalk into making major infrastructure or leadership decisions because it's the way they’ve always done things. These massive decisions are made by only a handful of operatives or politicians, often in the twilight of their political careers. If Democrats are to find their way out of the wilderness in this increasingly chaotic era, reconsidering some of these legacy models could be a good place to start. 

To counter Trump, the DNC tries “FactPosting”

As confirmation hearings for incoming Trump administration officials began this week, the Democratic National Committee re-branded its @DNCWarRoom rapid response accounts on major social media platforms to @FactPostNews. The accounts are currently active on X, Threads, and Bluesky, and according to Axios, “will be run by many of the same people who led the @KamalaHQ social media accounts during the 2024 campaign.”

Coming soon: TikTok’s reckoning?

Last Friday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in TikTok, Inc. v. Garland, which is the company’s final effort to prevent a shut down of its U.S. operations later this week.

While some legal observers initially said the justices were friendlier-than-expected to TikTok in their questioning, most journalists and court watchers have concluded that the social media company will likely lose their appeal. SCOTUS is set to rule any day now, and if the ban / forced-sale legislation is not blocked by the court, the company has said it will shut down the app in the U.S. on Sunday.

We may be in for many more twists and turns though: on Monday, reports emerged that Chinese officials are considering selling the app to none other than Elon Musk in some kind of weird way to deal with President Trump. This story is fast moving. By the time this newsletter hits your inbox, I’m pretty sure some other bit of breaking TikTok news will have already happened. Apologies in advance.

More things you should read

• How does a “Blue MAGA” online influencer and vocal Democratic fundraiser turn on her party so fast? I kind of went down a rabbit hole writing a piece for the Bulwark on “The Curious Case of Lindy Li.” 

• The Democratic National Committee will gather to elect a new chair in just a few short weeks, but until recently, the list of people who will actually vote in that election had not been made public. Kudos to Micah Sifry for publishing it in full at The American Prospect last week.

• The hypocrisy of our Big Tech overlords has been on full display this week, with most of them coming out publicly and donating millions of dollars to Trump’s inauguration. Drew Harwell at the Washington Post broke it down nicely here.

• “Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America.” That’s the key takeaway from February’s cover story of The Atlantic, “The Anti-Social Century.” It’s written by Derek Thompson, you can read it here, or view his thread about it on X here.

One last thing: Meta’s MAGA moves

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading the first issue.

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