Who’s Funding the DNC?

By Liam Sturgess, The Kennedy Beacon

By now, most engaged Americans are familiar with some of the tactics of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). They used them against Bernie Sanders in 2016, and they’re using them again against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Those tactics are empowered by a diverse roster of democratic elites, whose money seems to be strategically channeled to influence voting outcomes. 

It’s time to ask directly: who is funding the DNC and thus deciding the party’s nominee?

Since its formation in 1848, the DNC has been the official governing body for the Democratic Party. It is responsible for developing and maintaining the party “brand,” as well as shaping the platform for its candidates. Perhaps most importantly, it controls the pursestrings–the DNC leads fundraising efforts, hires and fires staff, and generally decides what will (or will not) be funded. The DNC’s authority over its parties' candidates spans from local and municipal elections, to state governorships, all the way up to Congress and the White House. 

That purse doesn’t fill itself. As the main fundraising arm of the Democratic Party, the DNC solicits and accepts donations from individuals and corporations, up to a certain amount as set by the Federal Election Commission. But tracking down clear records showing exactly who is donating what has become difficult over the last several years. As a New York Times analysis found last year, the Democratic Party has increasingly embraced the use of “dark money” to influence politics, including through a network of political action committees and obscure non-profit organizations with opaque financial disclosures. While tools such as OpenSecrets are usually helpful in aggregating and publishing this information, it can still be hard to track down records for ongoing campaigns.

But we do have some insight as to who is footing the bills thanks to the FEC’s campaign finance data portal, which reports that the DNC has raised just over $33 million in contributions from January 1-July 31, 2023. 

At the very top of the donor list is the Biden Victory Fund, a ‘joint fundraising committee,’ run as a partnership between the DNC, the Biden campaign, and the state Democratic party offices. The DNC’s $9.5 million share of the pot came courtesy of a number of mega-millionaires and industry titans—including several signatories to Bill Gates and Warren Buffet’s Giving Pledge.

Stewart Bainum Jr., a former Maryland senator and current head of Choice International Hotels (which has recently been buying out its competitors), tops the list along with his wife. Following closely behind is Jeffrey Katzenberg, a co-founder of DreamWorks Animation, who is also serving as co-chair of Biden’s re-election campaign. He previously supported Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama. The Hollywood Reporter called him “one of Hollywood’s premier political kingmakers” and a top fundraiser in the Democratic Party. 

Next is Andrew Hauptman, co-founder of investment firm Andell Holdings. Hauptman sits on the board of the Center for American Progress, a think tank whose influence and reach continues to reveal itself. Whether directly or indirectly, the CAP and its operatives have surfaced in and around organizations we’ve previously highlighted, including Media Matters for America, the Progressive Turnout Project, and Indivisible. Donating almost as much is Andrew’s wife, Ellen Bronfman Hauptman, part of the powerful and controversial Canadian Bronfman family. 

Who’s Behind Media Matters?

Other heavy hitters with deep pockets include Gwendolyn Sontheim Meyer, heiress to the Cargill food empire; LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman; Nathaniel Simons, founder of the Meritage Group; and Mark Heising of the Heising-Simons Foundation. 2020 donors included Alexander Soros, who now leads his father’s Open Society Foundations; Starbucks founder Howard Schultz; Kathryn and James Murdoch (the “liberal-leaning” wing of the Murdoch family); Carl Page, brother of Google co-founder Larry Page; and Dustin Moskovitz, whom we previously identified as the top financier to the PAC leading the campaign to “BAN RFK JR” from the ballot.

Who’s Behind “BAN RFK Jr”?

With much of Silicon Valley behind Biden’s 2020/2024 election fund, which itself is the largest single donor to the DNC, it’s hard to imagine a system more rigged in favor of the current President—or a DNC in need of any more money. But some of the donors mentioned have given even more through other groups like the Democratic Grassroots Victory Fund and the Biden Action Fund, both of which are also joint fundraising efforts with the DNC. These two funds have collectively raised over $8.5 million for the DNC so far this year.

A notable donor to the Biden Action Fund is Sun Microsystems founder Vinod Khosla, who also invests heavily into biotechnology and digital identification startups. He sits on the board of advisors for Deep Genomics, an AI drug discovery company co-directed by former representatives from pharma giants Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, as well as a former official from the Food and Drug Administration. Other companies in his Khosla Ventures portfolio include biometric identification company OneID; DoorDash (which made a killing due to COVID-era stay-at-home policies); OpenAI, which unleashed the highly problematic ChatGPT; Tile, a track-and-trace device which has been used for stalking and the rollout of the so-called “Internet of Things”; and Vox Media, whose news outlet is gleefully accusing Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. of running for president “for attention, not to beat Joe Biden.”

Another Biden Action Fund donor is Chris Hughes, a lesser known co-founder of Facebook alongside Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz. He gave $50,000 in May to support Biden’s primary defense in the State of New York.

But there are additional donors contributing directly to the DNC. The largest individual donor is Michael Sacks, Chairman and CEO of Grosvenor Capital Management (GCM), an “alternative investments” firm in Chicago. Sacks is a part-owner of the Chicago-Sun Times newspaper, which ran a story in July titled Don’t let RFK Jr. kill you. The piece is filled with vitriol towards Kennedy and re-interpretations of his criticisms of the pharmaceutical industry, the FDA, and the CIA’s established complicity in the murder of his uncle and father. Sacks is also on the board of directors for the Obama Foundation, whose namesake declared in June that he didn’t anticipate “any kind of serious primary challenge to Joe Biden,” and that the Democratic Party was unified in support of the incumbent. With his trifecta of influence in finance, politics and the media, Sacks’ donations are not difficult to view as conflicts of interest.

While Kennedy has shown himself to be the candidate most eager to champion the rights of the American working class, there are a number of labor unions choosing to channel dues to the DNC. Top union donors include the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers (IUBAC), the United Steelworkers, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Association of Realtors, and United Food and Commercial Workers. Nearly all of these organizations participated in the federal COVID-19 Community Corps, an operation launched by the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services in April 2021. As described by Dr.

Peter McCullough, MD

, the COVID-19 Community Corps allowed the federal government to make “undisclosed individual payments to hundreds of organizations to promote mass vaccination,” oftentimes as a condition of continued employment for union members. 

As this brief analysis shows, the DNC is anything but a fair, balanced political institution. Rather than representing the collective values and ideals of the liberal wing of the country, the DNC has sold itself out to corporate and ideological interests with enough money and influence to shape progressive values for generations to come. 

If American voters value their ability to choose their elected representatives and intend to do so in the 2024 election, they must first understand how and why the Democratic party is manipulating the primary process. 

Nobody expects that every voter will agree on the same candidate, but if the vote isn’t fair or constitutionally sound, it’s not a vote at all. Rich politicians born out of the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations and their corporate cronies should not hold a monopoly over the future of the Democratic Party. Nor should they have the ability to unilaterally select the candidate to face off against Donald Trump. 

“When democracy crumbles,” Kennedy said recently, “citizens become more like serfs. They labor under laws that are made by oligarchs and elites…”

Kennedy challenged Americans to demand a fair primary process, one in which every vote counts equally, and the candidate with the most votes gets the nomination. 

“Your vote is your power,” he said. “And right now, the Democratic Party elites are trying to take it away from you… When we deny citizens their right to vote, and when we rig the process in favor of insiders, then the flame of democracy flickers. And one day soon, it will go out.”