On 17 March 2021, OpenSecrets.org headlined “‘Dark money’ topped $1 billion in 2020, largely boosting Democrats” and reported that,
The 2020 election saw more than $1 billion in ‘dark money’ pending at the federal level, a massive sum driven by an explosion of secret donations boosting Democrats in a historically expensive cycle. That’s according to an estimate from OpenSecrets. The billion-dollar sum includes a whopping $660 million in donations from opaque political nonprofits and shell companies to outside groups.
In many prior years, most of the dark money had been going to Republicans, but now this has apparently switched. Most of the billionaires now favor the Democrtic Party.
The current U.S. Presidential election is expected to cost well over two billion dollars just in recognized paid promotions, not even counting such things as billionaires using the news-media that they own, in such ways as to present the nominee that they favor, in a more favorable light to the public than the one they want to lose the election. And, for yet another example of this uncounted political money, think tanks and other nonprofits that hire and employ their staff in order to sway public opinion in the directions that their founders and biggest donors want the public to believe, are, likewise, not counted as being political donations. That’s at least as dark money as the official type of dark-money political spending is. Adding all of it together, it probably constitutes over half of all of the dollars that are being donated to U.S. political campaigns directly and indirectly. And this fact explains why it is that all of the political science analyses of whether the legislation that gets passed into law in the United States reflects the policy-preferences and priorities of the American public or instead the preferences and priorities of America’s super-rich and basically of only America’s billionaires, have found that the latter is the reality: the U.S. Government represents ONLY the billionaires. America is a democracy-in-name-only (a DINO). It is an aristocracy-in-reality (an AIR). (DINO=AIR.)
Since Kamala Harris now appears likely to win the current U.S. Presidential contest, this article will be focusing on her campaign. It’s significant that the PAC dollars which had been donated to the Biden campaign up until Biden left the contest to be carried on by his Vice President Kamala Harris, her campaign became the inheritor of all of those funds, which promptly then were announced as reflecting her enormous popularity among the general public. Her campaign consequently built upon Biden’s. In fact, though Harris had more than 25 days before the Platform of the Democratic National Convention, for it to be revised from the one that Biden’s campaign team had produced, she didn’t change even a word of it. She is running on Biden’s platform 100%. If she wins, she will start her Presidency as a super-energized version of President Biden, not weighed down with his low approval-ratings, and therefore far more likely than he would be in his second term to get Congress to pass everything that he was hoping to get passed in his first term. She would therefore be likely to be a much more effective version of what Biden was when he was President.
Biden was already beholden to lots of dark money. On 21 May 2024, the “Sludge” investigative-news site on political money headlined “More ‘Dark Money’ for President Biden,” and reported that, “A new FEC disclosure shows the president’s main super PAC continues to rely on dark money for the majority of its funding. … Dark money donors provided the majority of the $16.2 million that Future Forward reported.”
InfluenceWatch.org reports that,
Future Forward USA PAC (also known as “FF PAC”) is a Democratic Party-aligned super PAC based in Palo Alto, California. FF PAC reportedly spent $108 million in a “blitz” of spending during the last five weeks of the 2020 election to support President Joe Biden’s campaign by attacking then-President Donald Trump on his COVID-19 policies. 1 FF PAC has been criticized by the left-leaning Center for Responsive Politics for being funded by “dark money.” 2
History
FF PAC was created in 2018 by Future Forward USA Action, a left-of-center advocacy group. 3 Chauncey McLean is the president of FF PAC. McLean was previously the director of media tracking for the Democratic Party in 2012. 4
Donors
INDIVIDUAL DONORS
In 2020, FF PAC received several contributions from high-profile Democratic donors include Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz ($91,780,000), former Google CEO Eric Schmidt ($775,000), liberal mega-donor Kathryn Murdoch ($540,000), cryptocurrency exchange founder Samuel Bankman-Fried ($10,000,000), Jeffrey Lawson of Twilio ($5,500,000) and his wife Erica Lawson ($5,500,000), and Netflix founder Reed Hastings’ wife Patty Quillin ($2,000,000). 5 By October 23, 2020 Future Forward USA Action, the parent organization of the FF PAC, had reportedly contributed $29 million to the PAC. 6
In 2020, FF PAC received a large portion of its contributions from the CEOs and presidents of California- and New York-based technology companies, venture capital firms, and wealth management companies. These include Judith Estren of JLABS ($15,000), David Elenowitz of Zero Carbon Partners ($15,000), Amy Rao of HillSpire ($25,000), Andrew McCollum of Philo ($50,000), George Hume of Basic American Foods ($50,000), Ronald Conway of SV Angel LLC ($100,000), Joshua Bekenstein of Bain Capital ($500,000), Vincent Ryan of Schooner Capital ($250,000), Even Williams of Medium ($250,000), Molly Gochman of Stardust ($500,000), Nishad Singh of Almeda Foundation ($1,000,000), and Gregory Johnson of Bridgewater Associates ($2,000,000). 7
INSTITUTIONAL DONORS
In 2020, FF PAC also received funding from left-of-center grant making organizations and labor unions. The organizations that contributed to FF PAC have supported increased government spending on entitlement programs and increased taxpayer-subsidized intervention in energy markets. 8 9 Several organizations that contributed to FF PAC also contributed to the Trusted Elections Fund, a project of the New Venture Fund to prepare for and respond to alleged “crises” that the Fund claimed would take place during the 2020 presidential election. 10
…
Spending
For most of the 2020 presidential election, FF PAC was a little-known super PAC. The organization made national news when it went on a “blitz” of spending on television advertisements in support of President Biden during the last five weeks of the election. 14
The Super PAC received further attention after making more political expenditures in support of President Biden than any other independent organization, behind only the Democratic Party-aligned Senate Majority PAC and the Biden campaign committee. 15 16 FF PAC was reported to be on pace to have spent $108 million dollars on television advertisements in support of President Biden by the end of October 2020. 17 Other outlets have reported that the FF PAC spent closer to $141.6 million over the course of the 2020 election cycle, after accounting for non-presidential races. 18
On 23 July 2024, CBS headlined “Kamala Harris wins enough delegate support for Democratic presidential nomination after Biden drops out,” and reported:
The campaign says it’s taken in more than $100 million between Sunday afternoon, when President Biden announced he’s bowing out of the race, and Monday evening.
Democrats moved Monday moved to consolidate behind Harris for the party’s nomination, capping a dramatic 24 hours after Mr. Biden’s shocking announcement that he was exiting the race and, a short time later, endorsing Harris for the nomination.
CBS News estimates Harris has received the endorsement of a majority of Democratic delegates. If the total holds, she would become the Democratic nominee for president after the virtual roll-call vote expected in early August. …
A Democratic political action group, Future Forward PAC, announced Monday that it had raised $150 million, a staggering amount, given the lag in Democrats’ fundraising since Mr. Biden’s disastrous debate against Trump last month.
So, about 40% of that was dark money (contributed by nominally Future Forward).
And these reports are basically of the political investments that these donors had made in Harris up till around the time when the face of the Democratic Party switched from being Biden’s face and became instead Harris’s face.