When most Americans think of Washington politics, they imagine it’s run by the two major political parties. What few realize is that the real powerbrokers in D.C. are the legions of professional “progressive” activists working 24/7 to push the country left.
The secretive clique leading—and funding—that army is the Democracy Alliance, which this week huddled in Washington to lay out the Left’s grand strategy for stymying President-elect Trump’s agenda next year.
Call it the “Resistance 2.0,” a desperate retread of the post-2016 coalition which fabricated the Russia hoax, filed a mountain of lawsuits against Trump’s first administration, impeached him twice, and ultimately harried the President out of office in 2020 with a corrupt vote-by-mail campaign made possible by China’s COVID virus. While it’s too early to tell what their 2025 strategy will be, we know a lot about the Democracy Alliance itself.
The Rules of the Game
Conservatives won 2024 by learning the biggest lesson of the 2020 election: If your rival has permanent political infrastructure to drive turnout, you need it, too. But the Left’s vaunted get-out-the-vote machine has its own origins in Democrats’ embarrassing defeat in 2004.
Despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat George W. Bush—much of it from the Left’s newest mega-donor, George Soros—the sitting President won the popular vote and 286 electoral college votes. Congressional Republicans also expanded their House majority and retook the Senate.
Instead of regrouping, the Left decided to change the rules of the game. Liberals, led by consultant Rob Stein, concluded that conservatives’ network of policy, watchdog, and activist training organizations—think the venerable Heritage Foundation or Leadership Institute—gave them a powerful edge over Democrats, who would need to fabricate their own institutions to catch up.
Stein approached over 700 Democratic donors, among them George Soros and Progressive auto insurance magnate Peter B. Lewis, with a revolutionary idea that became the Democracy Alliance: A hub for top leftists to identify the most effective “progressive” political groups and build up new ones.
The alliance itself doesn’t spend money. Instead, it holds annual conferences for members to coordinate political strategy and spending ahead of the next election. It would effectively serve as the brain for what we recognize today as the professional Left, far surpassing anything on the Right for the next two decades.
The Democracy Alliance is largely why politics now hinges more on tax-exempt 501(c) nonprofits than old-fashioned political action committees (PACs) like the DNC or RNC. Leftists realized they could weaponize charitable groups to do things like voter outreach, mass registration, and opposition research—with hefty financial advantages for the foundations and mega-donors funding them.
That fundamental change opened the money spigot for “progressive” groups to the tune of billions of dollars.
After Stein died in 2022, top Democrat operative David Brock told the New York Times that “it just changed the way people thought about their philanthropy . . . . It was revolutionary for our side, and over the last 20 years it was the sole reason why sustainable Democratic infrastructure got built.”
The alliance’s membership roster isn’t public, but reports suggest it numbers around 110 funders who went into overdrive after Trump’s 2016 upset over Hillary Clinton.
Mapping the First “Resistance”
In late 2017, the Democracy Alliance released a “Resistance Map” highlighting key political groups it recommended for donations from alliance members. This was, in effect, a rare snapshot of what top leftists considered their most effective groups for winning power. The categories were telling:
- Electoralizing the Groundswell (i.e. get-out-the-vote)
- Organizing
- Pressuring Elected Officials
- Litigation
- Advocacy
- Mass Mobilization
- Rapid Response
- Messaging/Media Monitoring
- Political Bundling (i.e. charitable money-laundering)
- Corporate and Government Ethics (i.e. pushing woke corporate policies)
- Protecting Direct Democracy
- Backend Services (i.e. fundraising technology)
- Innovation and Accelerators (i.e. social media)
- Storytelling
- Volunteer Matching
Democracy Alliance’s 2017 “resistance map.” Image credit: New York Times.
We remember the results: Endless marches, a mountain of lawsuits, and the first House impeachment, culminating in the biggest voter turnout operation in U.S. history that ousted President Donald Trump from the White House in 2020.
This time around, though, the Left is dropping the pussy hat protesters for white-shoe lawyers. They’ve also dramatically scaled back the scope of the second Trump “resistance” to focus on defending the Deep State from Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the rest of Trump’s plucky band of anti-woke crusaders.
In other words, they’re playing defense.
(COMMENTARY: Democrats Corrupt Everything They Touch—Even Real Estate)
Saving the Deep State
We know that the Democracy Alliance’s emergency huddle in late November focused heavily on defeating Project 2025, a blueprint by the Heritage Foundation for guiding and staffing the next Trump administration which the Left (correctly) views as an existential threat to its power.
One of the lead groups identified is Democracy Forward, a litigation group created during the last “resistance” by Marc Elias—a top elections lawyer formerly of Perkins Coie—Clinton crony John Podesta, and ex-Obama campaign counsel Anne Harkavy. Its staff consists of veterans of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), CIA, National Women’s Law Center, Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
I’ve traced close to $40 million in contributions to the Democracy Forward Foundation, the 501(c)(3) which houses the group, since 2017. The top donor is the Sandler Foundation, a major financier of the investigative outlet ProPublica as well as the Center for American Progress and the Arabella Advisors “dark money network.” The late Herb Sandler, financier of the Sandler Foundation, was not coincidentally among the Democracy Alliance’s founding partners.
Other contributions came from the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, bankrolled by Warren Buffett; eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund; and the Arabella-run Hopewell Fund.
Democracy Forward runs the Democracy 2025 coalition, consisting of roughly 280 professional Left groups that have amassed 800 lawyers, notables listed below.
American Oversight is one of the first “resistance” groups founded in March 2017 to blast the new Trump administration with what became over 1,000 record requests and 56 lawsuits in 2018 alone. During Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle, it demanded documents from his time in the Bush White House aiming to prove he’d leaked secret grand jury information to the media (which records showed he hadn’t). American Oversight developed out of a secret January 2017 pitch to mega-donors at a Florida resort for an organization to generate a “steady stream of open records requests” and lawsuits to fuel “anti-Trump media coverage.” The overall goal was “resist[ing] the normalization of Donald Trump” and eventually impeaching him.
As of writing, American Oversight is already running investigations into now-withdrawn Attorney General nominee Matt Gaetz for alleged sex trafficking of a minor, as well as fearmongering about Republican bills to empower President Trump to “target [his] political enemies.”
Demand Justice is a spin-off of the Arabella network which popularized the Left’s court-packing plan in 2018 and bitterly fought Kavanaugh’s confirmation weeks before his name was even announced by Trump. Public filings list Ezra Reese, a Perkins Coie-turned-Elias Law Group lawyer, as a key officer. Today the radical group runs “No More MAGA Judges,” a smear campaign to force Justices Samuel Alito, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas to retire from the bench under the weight of ginned up “scandals.” Expect things to ramp up further should any justices retire and be replaced by the second Trump administration.
Accountable.US, another former Arabella project formed during the first “resistance,” ran the 2022 campaign to blacklist ex-Trump administration officials from working in private sector jobs for enabling “white supremacy” and the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol “insurrection.” It’s staffed by Arabella hands as well as Brad Woodhouse, a senior operative from David Brock’s network and the 2010 effort to pass Obamacare. After the 2024 election, Accountable.US launched the Trump Accountability War Room to track his Project 2025 “blueprint” and collect dirt on each of his nominees. To date, it’s published exposés on Gaetz, Education Sec. nominee Linda McMahon, and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid nominee Dr. Mehmet Oz.
Court Accountability is a project of the Center for Media & Democracy, a leading smear campaign group that publishes the anti-conservative attack website SourceWatch. Like Demand Justice, it blasts “MAGA-hijacked courts” and right-wing “dark money” for paving the way for Project 2025 policies targeting mail-in abortifacients, protecting Second Amendment gun rights, banning sex change operations for minors, and reverting redistricting powers away from the Justice Department and back toward states.
National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers are the nation’s biggest teachers unions and top spenders in 2024, blowing a combined $33 million to elect Democrats this cycle. Expect them to spend millions of dollars to protect the Education Department’s control over local schools.
The National Immigration Litigation Alliance files strategic lawsuits to support the Biden-Harris administration’s open borders policies. During the first Trump administration, the group sued to block the government’s family separation policy, expedited removal of illegal aliens, and efforts to block Temporary Protected Status recipients from applying for green cards.
The Public Rights Project, formed in 2017, runs the Election Protection Hub, which files lawsuits designed to cement Democrats’ last-minute election changes from the 2020 election. It opposes hand-counting ballots and public record requests against election offices, for instance, while pushing for ever-earlier voting and ballot drop boxes. The project takes credit for the liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decision to reinstate drop boxes earlier this year, overturning a 2022 high court decision that ruled them unconstitutional.
Democracy Forward 2025 coalition membership roster
Governors Against Democracy?
Another wing of the incoming “resistance” comes from a cabal of Democrat Governors, including Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, who launched Governors Safeguarding Democracy at the same time the Democracy Alliance met in November. Their strategy revolves around “Trump-proofing” blue states such as California and Illinois where Democratic voters are too exhausted to organize at 2017 levels, according to a private memo circulated in January 2024. That memo was authored by Arkadi Gerney and Sarah Knight, veterans of the Arabella and Soros networks, respectively. Knight is also a former Demand Justice panelist.
But it isn’t limited to blue states. Andy Beshear, Governor of bright-red Kentucky, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, and Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers are reportedly closet members. “Not all of these governors wish to be named publicly at this time for understandable reasons, including the potential threats states are facing,” a spokesman said ominously to the New York Times, the second-largest newspaper in the nation.
While it claims to be non-partisan, Governors Safeguarding Democracy is fiscally sponsored by Global Impact, a nonprofit that specializes in funneling money from mega-donors to left-wing groups including Tides Advocacy (sibling to the better-known Tides Foundation), Alliance for Gun Responsibility, and the Democrat-aligned PAC for America’s Future.
Indivisible, a pressure group from the first “resistance,” describes Governors Safeguarding Democracy’s mission as crafting a “blueprint for blue states to prepare for Trump 2.0” on immigration, climate, “LGBTQ+ rights,” abortion, and voting rights. “Taking on these fights involves real risk—MAGA will retaliate,” Indivisible warns. “Your elected officials will need you behind them to stay brave.”
Details are scarce, but we know the coalition aims to establish taxpayer-funded legal defense funds to block “federal interference” with abortion and radical climate policies. They want blue states to declare themselves sanctuaries for abortion and transgender surgeries, granting “protections” for people traveling across the red state Iron Curtain. They also demand blue states boycott private companies “that don’t uphold progressive values.”
Amazingly, the coalition even recommends trumpeting states’ rights: “Decline to implement federal policies in their states: A ton of federal programs or legislation is actually dependent on the states implementing them. Your governor could decline a pot of money earmarked for a police crackdown on peaceful protests or refuse to participate in a program that would require granting massive loopholes to giant corporate polluters. If there’s an opt-out, they should be taking it.”
The Lost Party
But will any of this work? To quote the Magic 8-Ball, “Chances are slim.”
For one thing, the money isn’t there… or at least it isn’t there yet. Activists capitalized on Trump’s surprise 2016 win to rake in record sums from top mega-donors—totaling billions of dollars over the last 8 years—and pull the Democratic Party further left. That happened in large part thanks to the Democracy Alliance’s infamous “resistance map.”
In contrast, leftist mega-donors may be furious at Trump’s 2024 comeback, but they aren’t converting that fury to fat checks. “It’s not been a flood,” admitted the head of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a far-left litigation group that supports pro-Hamas protesters and illegal immigration, and battled the first Trump administration repeatedly in court.
Speaking of illegal aliens, the National Immigration Law Center—which sues to give them driver’s licenses and block deportation—wants to triple its legal staff. “But donations are not keeping up with [leadership’s] ambitions,” writes the New York Times.
“Thus far, we have not seen the same levels of giving we experienced as compared to this time in 2016,” the group’s president recently lamented.
Ditto the Center for Biological Diversity, which pushes population control and opposed the border wall as well as Kavanaugh’s confirmation. The center filed 266 lawsuits against the first Trump administration, and would surely love to file hundreds more starting Jan. 21, 2025—but the cash isn’t flowing as it once did.
The fatigue is understandable, since donors blew $1 billion to beat Trump in the polls and flopped. That doesn’t mean the Left and its Deep States allies are vanquished, of course. But without an unending money spigot, it’s hard to see how a second “resistance” goes further than the drawing board.
Jeff Bezos, a key Democrat donor, famously blocked the Washington Post from endorsing Harris right before Election Day and quickly congratulated “our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory.” Bezos, who once feuded with the President over his criticism of Amazon and the Post’s partisanship, wished Trump success in “leading and uniting the America we all love.” What conservatives heard as a smart overture to the President-elect, “progressives” heard as a wallet slamming shut—maybe for good.
What really unites Bezos and other bankrollers is their sense that the country has changed.
Americans, excluding zealous leftists, are sick of obsessing over politics. A popular vote majority proved the nation’s hungry to unite around a powerful, optimistic vision for the future. The Left’s base is similarly imploding as millions of reliably blue voters flee the Democrat plantation for the sunnier America First camp, unlikely to ever return.
It’s telling, for instance, that compared with 2020 Trump improved with every demographic while Harris improved only with black women, white women, and college-educated women—collectively the far Left’s most radical footsoldiers and the most reliable Democrat voting bloc.
That’s evidence of a clear realignment—or, to put it differently, the beginning of a new consensus. We’ve seen it before in 1980, 1932, 1860, 1828, and the patriots’ victory in 1783. Each period was preceded by a “culture war” that ended with voters leaving one party in the dust for a generation or longer. Will Donald Trump and J.D. Vance cement 2024 as the next realignment election?
Ask the Magic-8 Ball.
This post was originally published on here
