Meet the Democratic Party’s Pit Bull: Marc Elias Sinks His Teeth into Any Candidate Not Named Biden

By David Talbot, columnist, The Kennedy Beacon

By David Talbot, columnist, The Kennedy Beacon

“In their hearts, [Marc] Elias and other color-coded partisans know that no party has a lock on wisdom, that both Democratic and Republican leaders are corruptly beholden to their corporate sponsors and to fading imperial ideologies.”

The Democratic Party has declared war on democracy.

That’s right. The party that I proudly belonged to all of my long adult life, the party that has traditionally fought for freedom, is seeking to control the voting process. They want to keep Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — and, in fact, all of the candidates not named Joe Biden — off the ballot in 2024. It is hard and expensive enough for a challenger in a presidential election to get on all 50 state ballots. The Democratic establishment is now making this process more arduous and costly by taking candidates to court. They don’t call it “lawfare” for nothing.

Leading the legal campaign to block President Biden’s opponents is Washington D.C. power attorney Marc Elias. He’s been hired by American Bridge, the Democratic Party’s primary opposition research group, to challenge ballot-qualification efforts by competing candidates. Over the years, Elias — who’s become the Democratic Party’s go-to guy for election battles and campaign finance law — has received generous donations from George Soros and other deep-pocketed Democratic benefactors.

The bald, bespectacled, 54-year-old lawyer looks cuddly enough. In fact, in X (formerly Twitter) posts and elsewhere, Elias is often seen romping with Bode, his shaggy Portuguese Water Dog. But Elias is a pit bull when it comes to advancing the interests of the Democratic Party. He pugnaciously makes his case on MSNBC and other friendly platforms, and his law firm seems to have unlimited financial resources. 

“My firm is currently litigating 47 voting and election cases in 19 states,” recently boasted Elias, who also launched a digital platform named Democracy Docket to promote his lawfare campaigns. 

Elias frames his legal battles as crusades for American democracy. And many of his court challenges of Republican redistricting plans and other disenfranchisement schemes are, indeed, on the side of the angels.

“Over the last few years,” he wrote last week on Democracy Docket, “we have experienced a never-ending series of attacks on our democracy by a man (Donald Trump) who stands for nothing other than his own power. We have seen one of our two major parties turn its back on the American experiment in favor of raw power.”

Elias credited the courts – “as imperfect as our judiciary is” – with providing a “powerful check” on this anti-democratic tilt. And Elias himself deserves praise for those cases in which he has battled for voting rights.

But now Elias is turning his legal acumen against electoral movements that are trying to extend the democratic franchise.

American Values, the super PAC that is supporting the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign (as well as The Kennedy Beacon), is being compelled to spend millions of dollars to ensure that its candidate will be on all 50 state ballots in 2024. Even though RFK Jr. has been polling at over 20 percent and has clearly emerged as a viable candidate. Selecting the candidate of your choice is a “cornerstone” of American democracy, Kennedy has said: “In a democracy, the people are supposed to decide with their votes who gets into office.” But elections have become so expensive and so managed that democracy is now largely a sham, he has charged.

Elias’s aggressive partisanship on behalf of his Democratic clients has sometimes gotten him into trouble with judges and even with President Biden’s advisors, who have questioned his scorched-earth approach. 

In April 2016, he hired the investigative firm Fusion GPS on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Fusion GPS then paid for the notorious Steele dossier, oppositional research linking Trump with Russia that has since been debunked.

And now Elias is subverting his own progressive rhetoric by trying to block third-party and independent candidates. He — and his Democratic Party patrons — are sabotaging democracy by orchestrating the coronation of an unpopular president.

According to a poll released earlier this month by Associated Press and NORC Research Center, few voters are excited by a possible Biden-Trump rematch, with one independent from Maine quoted as saying, “This is probably the most uniquely horrible choice I’ve had in my life.” 

And yet Elias frames the 2024 presidential election in stark, binary terms. “Hear me loud and clear,” he posted this month in a video. “If you vote for Jill Stein, you are voting for Donald Trump. If you vote for RFK (Jr.), you are voting for Donald Trump. If you vote for No Labels, you are voting for Donald Trump.”

Actually, political pundits have been frantically trying to figure out whether Kennedy’s candidacy hurts Biden or Trump more. Though they haven’t come to a conclusion, the Trump camp has targeted Kennedy as a liberal masquerading as a conservative. And the Biden campaign, in lockstep with big media, either ignores Kennedy or casts him as a conservative-leaning lunatic. In truth, RFK Jr. is neither a traditional liberal or conservative, combining ideas from across the political spectrum in a way that makes sense to many voters.

This rare hybrid thinking is what makes Kennedy so threatening to blue-versus-red warriors like Elias. In their hearts, Elias and other color-coded partisans know that no party has a lock on wisdom, that both Democratic and Republican leaders are corruptly beholden to their corporate sponsors and to fading imperial ideologies.

But snapping pit bulls like Elias must keep snarling whenever they’re taken out of their cages. He must growl menacingly at his political enemies. No defeat, no surrender — no compromise, even if it’s good for the country. “They hate me because I fight, they fear me because I win,” he blasted on an X post this week like, well, Donald Trump.

If that’s the bitterly divided America we want to live in, we’ll keep letting Marc Elias and his breed off the leash.