For the last decade, the Democrats have scaremongered about “dark money,” a term for undisclosed donations from registered nonprofits.
Now, the Democrats are using dark money to win elections, according to a shocking new report from The New York Times.
The Times put it bluntly. “In 2020, the two main super PACs devoted to helping Mr. Biden’s campaign received $37.5 million in dark money. The main super PAC devoted to Mr. Trump received $20.3 million from a linked nonprofit,” two reporters wrote.
In other words, President Joe Biden may have received more dark money than former President Donald Trump during the 2020 election, according to the incomplete data currently available.
Earlier that year, Biden was touting his reliance on small-money donors during a Democratic debate with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
Biden’s hypocrisy may not come as a shock, but Sanders’ hypocrisy might. Sanders sloganeered about campaign finance reform, and then he took money from Our Revolution, a nonprofit that doesn’t disclose its list of donors.
In 2020, some far-left nonprofits may have energized their progressive base by promoting mail-in voting, as well as early voting. The Times singled out Sixteen Thirty Fund as a nonprofit especially invested in registering groups likely to vote blue. Meanwhile, Trump may have discouraged conservative voters by making unproven claims about voter fraud in presidential elections. Sure enough, Biden became president.
Certain nonprofits — like labor unions and trade associations — are not required to disclose a list of donors, due to loopholes in the tax code.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that nonprofits can donate as much money as they can afford. Since then, some nonprofits have done exactly that. During election years, the nonprofit sector now routinely funnels tens of millions of dollars into political campaigns across the country.
A watchdog group coined the term “dark money” shortly after the 2010 midterm elections. The investigative reporter Jane Mayer popularized the term even further in a report from 2010 report, and she later released the full-length book Dark Money in 2016.
Mayer blamed the Democrats’ 2010 losses on the “Kochtopus,” the nonprofit network managed by two conservative heirs to the industrialist Fred Koch. She took issue with the Kochtopus for outspending the Republican National Committee.
However, Mayer reached an impasse shortly after the book’s publication. Trump won the 2016 election without any donations from the Kochs’ nonprofit… or any donations at all, for that matter.
In 2017, Mayer republished her book with a foreword, presumably trying to update her argument for the Trump years.
Even Jane Mayer, an early critic of dark money, was recognizing the changing times.
Five years later, Sixteen Thirty Fund is outspending the Democratic National Committee, according to the Times.
Now Mayer has even more explaining to do… and so do the Democrats.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.