Steve Sampson, an Arabella spokesperson, tried to downplay the company’s role or comparisons to the Koch network, portraying it as providing administrative services rather than figuring out how to operate the extra-party infrastructure from the left. be built. “We work for the non-profit, not the other way around,” he said in a statement.
Left and right, dark money hubs mixed politically oriented spending with less political initiatives. The main financial center of the Koch network donated $575,000 to the LeBron James Family Foundation. Hopewell gave nearly $3.8 million to a clinic that provides abortion services and more than $2 million to a Tulane University fund.
In considering which nonprofits to include in its analysis, The Times considered both their spending on politically oriented efforts and their relationships with allied groups. Some large institutions, such as the National Rifle Association and the Sierra Club, are involved in politics, but have been excluded because they spend a lot of money on membership-oriented activities.
The analysis includes three of Arabella’s five managed nonprofits, including one charity, the Hopewell Fund. It donated to groups working to reduce the role of big money in politics, but it also donated $8.1 million to a dark-money group called Acronym, which spent millions of dollars on Facebook advertising and support. to a company called Courier Newsroom that published articles in which Democrats and received millions of dollars from dark money groups. It was paid $2.6 million by a nonprofit affiliated with the Democratic House leadership to promote articles.
Hopewell also sponsored a project called Democracy Docket Legal Fund that filed lawsuits to block Republican-backed voting restrictions across the country. It was led by a prominent Democratic Party election attorney, Marc E. Elias. His then firm, Perkins Coie, received $9.6 million from Hopewell, according to tax returns, and an additional $11.6 million from the Biden-backed nonprofit Priorities USA.
Two other groups, the Voter Participation Center and the Center for Voter Information, together spent $147.5 million in 2020 to register and mobilize voters. They described their targets as “young people, people of color and single women” — demographics that tend to lean democratic — and said they had registered 1.5 million voters by 2020.
Tom Lopach, a former Democratic strategist who now heads both groups, said their work was apolitical and “an extension of civil rights efforts.”