The Left Is Weaponizing Nonprofits to Keep Democrats in Power

As conservatives ramp up their efforts to chip away at liberal centers of power, they should not neglect one key—yet often overlooked—component of the left’s political and cultural largess: nonprofits.

For decades, one of the Democrat Party’s most powerful tools in steering the country leftward has been the weaponization of tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organizations against conservatives. According to the Internal Revenue Code, these organizations are “absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.” Nonetheless, these organizations have, under the guise of charity and nonprofit work, played a significant role in promoting Democrat politicians and political causes.

As a December 2023 Real Clear Investigations report revealed, the left-wing nonprofit apparatus has “taken on an outsized part of the Democratic Party’s election strategy” by way of meticulously working “around legal restrictions on nonprofits that accept tax-deductible donations by selectively engaging in nonpartisan efforts including boosting voter education and participation.” (“Voter education and participation,” it should be noted, is often used as cover for left-wing nonprofits to promote certain political candidates.)

In a 2022 talk at the National Conservatism Conference, Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, broke down this phenomenon in detail.

“Since 2005 at least, the nonprofit tail has wagged the Democratic Party dog,” he said. “It is much more important who is the president of the Ford Foundation or the Open Society Foundation or Arabella Advisers than it is who happens to be chairing the DNC this afternoon—that’s not very important.”

Walter observed that there are “three rivers that empty into the gulf of elections”: traditional political donations (or what he calls “hard dollars”), dark money (or “soft dollars”), and funds from the 501(c)(3) charitable sector.

During the 2018 midterm election cycle, Walter said, political money from the charitable sector accounted for $20 billion—or four times the size of the other two sectors combined ($5 billion was spent in traditional donations and only $130 was spent million in so-called “soft dollars”). Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of these funds went to Democrat-adjacent causes—including 78 percent of 501(c)(3) dollars, whereas only 22 percent went to conservatives.

The jarring extent to which the progressive nonprofit machine has wielded control over our election process can be traced in part to campaign finance legislation. Although previous campaign finance policy—most notably the McCain-Feingold Act of 2002—has generally made it tougher for candidates to raise money through traditional means, it has had virtually no effect on the power of 501(c)(3) organizations to funnel their money to semi-political causes and stealthily influence election outcomes.

Meanwhile, campaign finance reform continues to rank near the bottom of voter priorities, suggesting that 501(c)(3)s and other advocacy organizations—not the American voter—have been the driving force behind such “reform” policies.

Thanks to legislative initiatives like McCain-Feingold, Walter noted, donations to tax-exempt charity organizations are anywhere from two to five times more effective in creating political change than donations made directly to political campaigns. As he pointed out, Arabella Advisors’ nonprofit entities raised a total revenue of $1.2 billion in the 2018 election cycle and then $2.4 billion in 2020 or more than double the revenue of the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee combined.

Among the most notorious examples of left-wing nonprofits is Arabella Advisors, an organization originally founded by a former Clinton administration staffer with the purported mission of “environmental preservation and protection.” In the years since its founding, however, Walter observes that the group has morphed into a “backbone of the left” that has “concocted a new and darker legal structure” with the apparent goal of electing Democrats and undermining Republicans.

In 2020, Arabella spent more than $1.7 billion on its various political efforts, eliciting funds from donors ostensibly to fend off so-called “political fearmongering,” “attacks on voter registration,” “viral misinformation,” and “post–Election Day violence.”

Of course, the left’s influence in the nonprofit realm extends far beyond just Arabella. As the Real Clear Investigations report notes, groups like the Tides Foundation, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the New Venture Fund (an arm of Arabella) are also aggressively invested in pouring money into left-wing get-out-the-vote campaigns and funding partisan left-wing causes like abortion, gun control, election reform, and the left’s “equity” agenda. (The Capital Research Center’s Influence Watch has compiled a wide-ranging database of left-wing nonprofits with summaries of their political activity.)

“Courting, creating, and funding nonprofits by progressives is now a core Democratic Party strategy, one that has proven successful as Democrats have prevailed or outperformed historical expectations in national elections,” the RCI report states.

To date, the GOP establishment has hardly attempted to match the left’s gargantuan 501(c)(3) apparatus—and has failed to even acknowledge that such a systemic disadvantage exists in the first place. But the reality that dozens of powerful nonprofits operate almost like Democrat Party get-out-the-vote machines should be alarming not only to every conservative, but also to every American who claims to value democracy, transparency in our elections, and a free and fair voting process.

If the GOP is serious about delivering victories for conservatives in 2024 and beyond, it has no choice but to reckon with—and perhaps first simply acknowledge—this deep-rooted problem before it is too late.

Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.