Crunch Time: Democracy Funders Confront a Perilous Election—and Its Aftermath
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People line up for early voting in Arlington, Virginia. Rob Crandall/shutterstock
This article was originally published on October 15, 2020.
With only weeks until Election Day, the window is closing for philanthropy to drive voter engagement and safeguard this election cycle. The situation on the ground is looking as chaotic as many observers feared—even more so as COVID-19 has upended election administration and voter engagement. And yet, there’s still plenty of opportunity for funders to act, both before November 3 and after all ballots are in.
Every presidential election gets cast as a pivotal one, but this one may live up to that hype. Some fear that American democracy itself is in danger, and not simply on account of emboldened extremists, sensational news coverage or the current occupant of the White House. Those are all symptoms, many argue, of deeper strains on this nation’s social contract. For a growing section of the philanthropic world, democracy giving isn’t just about a single year’s election, although that’s a part of it. It’s about reviving an institution upon which nearly all philanthropic impact depends.
Short-term election protection work is crucial, said Kristen Cambell of Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE). But so is the longer view. “Much of the health of our democracy and social fabric rests on what is both ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ of politics and the voting booth—that needs to be resourced and advocated with equal urgency and intentionality over the long term,” she said.
Nevertheless, short-term needs loom large in 2020. Since COVID-19 upended democracy funders’ strategic outlook on what was already set to be a tempestuous year, election officials and voter engagement organizations have had to contend with a lack of resources and a legion of challenges. The Brennan Center for Justice estimated it would take at least $4 billion to ensure a free, fair and safe election season. The CARES Act allocated only 10% of that, with no further federal support since. Philanthropy finds itself in the familiar position of being asked to fund a basic civic and social need with only a tiny fraction of the public sector’s resources.
Still, there are bright spots. An unprecedented surge in racial justice activism this summer opened up new avenues for organizations working to drive engagement and fight suppression at the polls. Funders are stepping up, too. Not as much as some advocates might prefer, but certainly in much larger numbers and with updated strategies. Though the path ahead remains uncertain and possibly dangerous, this year’s turmoil could even spur lasting changes to how philanthropy interacts with democracy as an institution. Here’s just some of what’s going on, and what it might mean.
A Rising Tide of Democracy Giving
Philanthropy and the institution of democracy are hardly at odds: Both are meant to respond to human needs and improve society as a whole. But as a general rule, 501(c)(3) funders have long skirted around democracy work, treating it as too close to partisan politics for comfort. Though that’s still the case for much of the field, the picture is changing.
It’s hard to get a good sense of the numbers in real time, but at least since 2016 (and probably since 2010’s Citizens United decision redefined the landscape around interested money), there’s been a significant upswing in democracy and election-related (c)(3) funding. Much of that has been driven by funding for get-out-the-vote efforts and other work often aligned with the ideological left, where donors are getting savvier to how much the political realm affects all their other charitable priorities. But donor activity has been on the rise across the spectrum, bringing fresh resources to the many levers (c)(3) funders can pull to influence and shape elections.
To be clear, that includes funding to conservative groups working in the democracy arena. Increased liberal and progressive spending just tends to be easier to track because more foundations and collaborative entities fund this work on the left, whereas the right relies mostly on individual donors. Also, some of the biggest influxes of new (c)(3) funding in the democracy space have involved progressive-oriented voter engagement. Right-leaning donors more often fund that kind of thing via 501(c)(4) organizations.
Since this spring, as philanthropy grappled with meeting urgent needs during a pandemic, some institutional funders have found it within themselves to add or bolster their democracy portfolios. A few we’ve covered include the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which earmarked new short- and long-term funding to protect the election and foster democratic “habits of the heart,” and the smaller Langeloth Foundation, whose unprecedented democracy commitment now encompasses 20% of its assets.
The most significant single democracy gift of the past several months came from Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, whose $300 million commitment to promote safe and reliable voting has been filtering out to election offices nationwide. This week, the couple pledged another $100 million to that effort, bringing their personal giving to parity with the federal government’s entire elections outlay. Chan and Zuckerberg’s gift represents something largely unprecedented in American philanthropy: massive, nation-spanning 501(c)(3) support for election administration. Whether it marks the beginning of a larger trend remains to be seen.
Other institutional funders, like the Ford Foundation and the Wallace Global Fund, have taken the lead on encouraging the nonprofit sector to give its employees paid time off to vote, volunteer as poll workers and engage their personal networks. A full 14% of the U.S. workforce works in the nonprofit world, and thus regularly interacts with philanthropy, Ford’s Darren Walker and the Wallace Global Fund’s Ellen Dorsey wrote in a recent piece. That adds up to 20 million potential voters.
Another important trend in democracy philanthropy, both this year and over the past several, is a rising tide of collaborative funding. Since 2016, left-leaning funders in particular have come together in new and often innovative ways to address what they see as one of American democracy’s key failings: the active and passive disenfranchisement of certain groups, especially communities of color.
Whether that’s their focus or not, a variety of collaborative funding efforts have either sprung up in 2020 or significantly expanded their donor rosters. “Since the pandemic shifted all of our worlds in March… we have seen funders come together and pool resources like never before,” said Kristin Purdy of the Funders Committee for Civic Participation (FCCP). “This type of coordination of resources among funders can result in fewer redundancies, more dollars in the field, and more successful outcomes than would be possible had every grantmaker acted alone.”
Going It Together
The rising tide of funder coordination has taken many forms. One for Democracy, for instance, got its start when an informal circle of donors started talking about the gap between the size of their existing democracy commitments and the urgency they felt around this year’s election. They ended up organizing a kind of Giving Pledge for democracy in which participants promise to dedicate at least 1% of their assets to election protection and voter engagement this year. The effort has realized $63 million to date, with a portion of that money going out through One for Democracy’s dedicated 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) funds.
The New Venture Fund, a fiscal sponsorship platform for mostly progressive grantmaking initiatives, is hosting a number of important 501(c)(3) pooled funds for election protection and voter engagement. They include the Safe Voting Fund, which helps educate policymakers on safe voting practices during a pandemic and implement them at ground level, and the Voter Engagement Fund, which aims to boost voter participation among underrepresented people. Also housed at the New Venture Fund is the Trusted Elections Fund, which supports election crisis planning and banks rapid-response money to be deployed in the event of disruptions like foreign interference, violence on or after Election Day, or problems arising from a disputed result.
Mike Berkowitz, who heads the Democracy Funders Network (DFN), praised the Voter Engagement Fund and its 501(c)(4) counterpart as impressive examples of funder collaboration in the run-up to Election Day. DFN, for those unfamiliar with it, is much newer than affinity groups like FCCP and PACE. It only dates back to 2018, and seeks to provide “a convening space for donors to build relationships and learn together outside of the more partisan-leaning funder networks,” as Berkowitz put it. The network held its first major event last year alongside PACE and continues to gain steam—just this month, it launched its own nonpartisan pooled fund called the Election Integrity Fund.
Yet another new site for funder collaboration is Unite America and its Unite America Fund. Also formed in 2018, Unite America began as the Centrist Project, the brainchild of Economics Professor Charles Wheelan. The original idea was to combat extreme polarization by promoting independent candidacies. Unite America later shifted its strategy somewhat to electoral reform, while still decrying the “two-party doom loop.” One of its bigger backers is Kathryn Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s liberal daughter-in-law. The group apparently has dozens of other major donors and plans to disburse $100 million by 2023.
According to Unite America’s Executive Director Nick Troiano, remote voting has been the name of the game lately. “Vote at home was already one of the pillars of our reform strategy, but with the stay-at-home orders in place and primary elections ongoing, it rapidly became a focal point of our investment strategy,” he said.
Structural Challenges
Those are just a few of the collaborative efforts that got their start during Donald Trump’s presidency, no doubt with an eye toward this very election. Another group we’ve covered is Way to Rise, the (c)(3) arm of the progressive umbrella organization Way to Win. Most of them acknowledge that short-termism and cyclical funding isn’t what advocates want to see. “I… hope donors realize that even if Donald Trump—whose presidency brought many funders into this field—loses the election, the underlying challenges facing American democracy will still be there,” Berkowitz said.
Collaborative entities like pooled funds and funder networks can help the field overcome its non-election-year droughts by providing steadier support to election protection and voter engagement work. In that sense, these new funds are following in the footsteps of outfits like the State Infrastructure Fund at NEO Philanthropy, which has been funding voting rights litigation and grassroots engagement since 2010.
Collaboratives also help donors and foundations overcome the skittishness that has long accompanied anything smelling vaguely of politics. After all, funding together reduces the sense of risk that might accompany major solo giving. That’s the dynamic we may have to thank for the Democracy Frontlines Fund’s recent success in recruiting several new heavyweight donors to Black-led movement funding.
On the topic of philanthropy’s continued reticence regarding anything political, Troiano had this to say: “What we’re doing right now in improving and protecting our electoral systems shouldn’t be viewed as ‘political’ in the same way that donating to a partisan electoral contest is political; rather, it’s a long-term investment in an institution that matters to our country. If we want our democracy to survive for the next 50 years—hell, the next 50 days—we have to reform it in a way that ensures it’s still representative of the American people.”
Especially on the progressive side of things, organizers who share that view have been leaning into better representation, both in terms of who votes as well as which nonprofit strategies get money. “For too long, organizations that represent and advocate for people of color, low-income people, and those traditionally marginalized in America’s democracy have been excluded from investments in innovation, technology and democratic infrastructure,” said Nick Chedli Carter, who heads Resilient Democracy. Founded in 2018 to address that digital divide, Resilient Democracy operates yet another 501(c)(3) pooled fund, which saw the number of its funders triple over the past year.
Technology lies close to the heart of what the Resilient Democracy Fund wants to achieve, but not in the clinical, top-down sense we’ve come to associate with “modern” data-driven political campaigns. Instead, the organization’s trying to engage voters outside traditional channels, in part by supporting tech-savvy relational organizing. That’s a fancy term for the oldest form of political organizing in the book: empowering people to engage their own networks—usually family and friends—and thus cut through the noise.
“Philanthropy is, for the most part, still operating in a pre-digital-age mindset, stymied by outdated policies, metrics and strategies,” Carter said. He believes that COVID-19 has only accentuated the need to shift to forms of civic engagement that are not only tech-enabled, but also trust-based and culturally competent.
Existential Threats
Even as efforts like Resilient Democracy explore what more tech- and culture-savvy forms of bottom-up voter engagement might look like, some in philanthropy fear the next several months may bring existential challenges for their grantees—and even for funders themselves. In a recent op-ed in Inside Philanthropy, Dimple Abichandani of the General Service Foundation and Carmen Rojas of the Marguerite Casey Foundation implored grantmakers to do more in the face of “emerging authoritarianism.” In addition to going all-in on voter engagement and election protection, they argue funders should pay more attention to even direr threats, including to physical safety.
“If you start moving away from a healthy democracy, usually in that process, civil society is targeted,” Abichandani said. That could mean threats to the right to protest, the erosion of democratic norms, or the physical or verbal abuse of movement leaders and public officials—instances of which we’ve seen plenty this year. According to Abichandani, philanthropy’s response around these alarming trends has been muted.
“We’re watching our democracy being attacked and undermined, and there hasn’t been a very vocal response, not even one that says, ‘hey this is not normal,’” she said. “I’ve been struck by the silence, the gap between conversations we’re hearing among funders and among grantees.”
She cited, for example, philanthropy’s silence around changes at the U.S. Postal Service that could impact vote-by-mail, or a relative lack of attention to legal advocacy for protestors, even as millions took to the streets following George Floyd’s death. The General Service Foundation is also one of several backers of right-to-protest work via the Proteus Fund’s Piper Fund, which has engaged with a network of organizations to defend protest rights and distribute rapid-response grants. And that’s not to discount the funders and individuals who did step up this summer to support peaceful protestors, including by bailing them out of jail.
Nevertheless, Abichandani has a point: Speedy adaptation has never been this sector’s strong suit, and foundations often try to maintain an “above the fray” reputation that keeps them from fully engaging with the problems their grantees don’t have the privilege of ignoring. In a crisis-heavy, post-election landscape, funders will have to be ready to move quickly, not only to support the organizations they care about, but in the worst cases, to protect themselves from physical and cyber-threats.
“It’s very important for CEOs to be having conversations with their boards, preparing them for the fact that we’re moving into a time of uncertainty. At this point, if we’re not having those conversations, foundations will be prone to paralysis if a post-election crisis occurs,” Abichandani said.
A Civic Institution (Un)like Any Other
The events of 2020 have shone an undeniable light on the importance of good governance and a functioning political system to the overall health of a nation. Funders can differ on strategy and ideology, but it’s hard to deny that a better-functioning democracy would make philanthropy’s job easier. So the real question, even more than who’s giving in this space right now, is—you guessed it—why aren’t funders doing more? Why aren’t more foundations and individual donors leaning into the problems of gridlocked government, toxic politics and endangered voting rights?
Some observers have looked with trepidation upon Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s mammoth election giving, pointing either to partisan bias (which Zuckerberg denies) or to a creeping billionaire takeover of everything. While those qualms aren’t necessarily unfounded, the embattled couple’s mega-gift does deserve kudos as by far the largest single commitment from the super-rich to safeguard this election. It’s an important gesture at a time when the federal government has abdicated most of its responsibility to help states and localities hold free and fair elections in a time of crisis.
Similar levels of election giving have not been forthcoming from other top contenders on the Forbes 400. One conspicuous near-absence is that of Mike Bloomberg, whose costly dead-end presidential run and subsequent political spending are noteworthy, but haven’t come alongside much in the way of (c)(3) funding supporting democracy itself. MacKenzie Scott, on the other hand, has directed $72 million in philanthropic funding toward “functional democracy,” as she put it. That includes a gift to the Center for Election Innovation and Research, one of the two nonprofits Zuckerberg and Chan tapped to distribute money to local jurisdictions.
On the foundation side, plenty of funders may be stepping up in a cautious way, but the big players remain the same: places like Ford, MacArthur, the Democracy Fund, OSF and Carnegie, plus the Knight Foundation in the realm of local journalism. As a rule, foundations have been a lot quicker to step in with COVID-19 relief than with election-related funding.
Perhaps it’ll take the trauma of a seriously disputed election or even a constitutional crisis to change that state of affairs. But whatever happens over the next several months, 2020 may be a turning point for philanthropy’s traditionally hands-off attitude toward democracy work. Far from being off-limits to philanthropy, “Our democracy is in and of itself an institution,” said Unite America’s Nick Troiano. “And much like other cultural institutions that people might invest in—art museums, the ballet, historic buildings and neighborhoods, etc.—our democracy has to be maintained and invested in; it has to be cared for.”
Update:
On October 19, over 100 philanthropic leaders appeared as signatories on a letter calling on elected officials to uphold their obligations to democracy amid “giant warning signs for American democracy” including hyper-partisanship and a disturbing rise in the acceptance of political violence. The letter calls on officials to ensure that everyone eligible can vote and get their votes counted, to combat election-related misinformation, to repudiate political violence, and to commit to a peaceful transfer or continuation of power. The Democracy Funders Network and Philanthropy of Active Civic Engagement circulated the letter.
A range of leaders from across the ideological spectrum added their signatures. They include Roger Zakheim of the Ronald Reagan Institute and several of his colleagues, Dimple Abichandani of the General Service Foundation, Brian Hooks of Charles Koch’s Stand Together, Larry Kramer of the Hewlett Foundation, Crystal Hayling of the Libra Foundation, and Stephen Heintz of the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman also signed, as well as Kathryn Murdoch, Eric Braverman of Schmidt Futures, and Donald Gips of the Skoll Foundation, just to name a few.
