When Political Mega-Donors Join Forces: How the …...When Political Mega-Donors Join Forces: How...

When Political Mega-Donors JoinForces: How the Koch Network andthe Democracy Alliance InfluenceOrganized U.S. Politics on theRight and Left

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Assistant Professor,School of International and Public Affairs,Columbia UniversityTheda Skocpol, Victor S. Thomas Professor ofGovernment and Sociology, Harvard UniversityJason Sclar, Graduate Student, Department ofGovernment, Harvard University

As economic inequalities have skyrocketed in the United States, scholars have started paying more attention to theindividual political activities of billionaires and multimillionaires. Useful as such work may be, it misses animportant aspect of plutocratic influence: the sustained efforts of organized groups and networks of politicalmega-donors, who work together over many years between as well as during elections to reshape politics. Ourwork contributes to this new direction by focusing on two formally organized consortia of wealthy donors thathave recently evolved into highly consequential forces in U.S. politics. We develop this concept and illustrate theimportance of organized donor consortia by presenting original data and analyses of the right-wing Koch seminars( from 2003 to the present) and the progressive left-leaning Democracy Alliance ( from 2005 to the present). Wedescribe the evolution, memberships, and organizational routines of these two wealthy donor collectives, andexplore the ways in which each has sought to reconfigure and bolster kindred arrays of think tanks, advocacygroups, and constituency efforts operating at the edges of America’s two major political parties in a period of inten-sifying ideological polarization and growing conflict over the role of government in addressing rising economicinequality. Our analysis argues that the rules and organizational characteristics of donor consortia shape theirresource allocations and impact, above and beyond the individual characteristics of their wealthy members.

As inequalities of wealth and income have skyrock-eted in the United States, pundits and scholars alikehave started paying more attention to the politicalactivities of billionaires and multimillionaires. Mediastories feature famous contributors such as TomSteyer, Charles and David Koch, Michael Bloomberg,and Sheldon Adelson, while academic researchers

increasingly track aggregate election contributionsfrom large numbers of wealthy donors.1 Useful assuch work may be, it misses an important aspect ofplutocratic influence in American democracy—the

Email: [email protected]@[email protected]

1. See, e.g., Adam Bonica, “Mapping the Ideological Market-place,” American Journal of Political Science 58, no. 2 (2014): 367–87; Benjamin I. Page, Larry M. Bartels, and Jason Seawright,“Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans,” Per-spectives on Politics 11 no. 1 (March 2013): 51–73; Darrell West, Bil-lionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust (Washington, DC: TheBrookings Institution, 2014).

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sustained efforts of organized groups and networks ofpolitical mega-donors, who work together over manyyears between as well as during elections to reshapepolitics and agendas of public policy. Only recentlyhave political scientists started to look into thesekinds of institutional and network ties amongwealthy political donors.2

Our work contributes to this new direction byfocusing on two formally organized consortia ofwealthy political donors that have recently evolvedinto highly consequential forces in U.S. politics. Onthe right, the Koch seminars directed by Charles andDavid Koch and their close associates were launchedin 2003 as twice-yearly gatherings of very wealthy con-servatives aiming to push the Republican Party andU.S. government toward libertarian and ultra-free-market politics. Meanwhile, the Democracy Alliance(DA) was launched in 2005 to bring together morethan a hundred left-leaning wealthy liberals to meettwice a year and channel contributions to advocacyand constituency organizations operating on the leftedge of the Democratic Party. We have assembledunique membership and organizational data onboth consortia, enabling us to track their develop-ment and compare their impact at the two ends ofthe U.S. partisan spectrum.

This article presents early findings from two kindsof analyses. At the aggregate individual level, wedescribe the social and economic characteristics ofthe very wealthy Americans who have joined theKoch seminars and the DA and, at relevant points,consider the impact of those characteristics on con-sortium operations. More importantly, we probe theorganizational rules and routines of the Koch and DAconsortia, to discover how they structure member par-ticipation and direct large sums of donor money toadditional arrays of think tanks, advocacy groups,and constituency-mobilizing groups active on theleft and right edges of America’s two major politicalparties. Understanding how donor money is raisedand channeled allows us, in turn, to explain the differ-ent kinds of influence these two consortia havewielded in contemporary U.S. politics.

To briefly foreshadow our bottom line: As the Kochseminars have fueled a tightly integrated politicalmachine capable of drawing national and stateRepublican officeholders and candidates toward theultra-free-market right, the DA has orchestratedmore limited results by channeling resources tolarge numbers of mostly nationally focused and pro-fessionally managed liberal advocacy and constitu-ency groups. Both donor consortia have helped to

reshape American politics, but the Koch impact hasbeen much greater and has encouraged both right-ward-leaning polarization and rising inequality.

As we develop our analysis, we consider alternativeexplanations for the greater impact of the Kochnetwork—including suggestions that conservativemega-donors are simply more numerous or inher-ently more ideological and unified than progressivewealthy donors. Over recent years, in fact, liberalwealth holders have become more prevalent in theUnited States, and the leftist DA initially attractedmore donors than the early Koch seminars. What ismore, both Koch and DA donors espouse variedand at times conflicting political priorities and world-views. Rather than reduce these donor consortia toindividual member characteristics, we present evi-dence that their divergent strategies and impacthave been shaped by contrasting organizationalrules and strategic choices implemented at key junc-tures in recent national political time. Simply put,the Koch seminars have encouraged members tosupport a highly centralized and strategically nimblepolitical operation, while DA rules encourage thedecentralized scattering of member contributionsand give individual donors substantial authority overwhich priorities, tactics, and groups the DA supports.As a result, the Koch seminars were well-equipped toseize on conservative discontent, first under the Bushpresidency and later the Obama administration, toshift state and federal policy to the right. In contrast,the decentralized DA rules left the consortium poorlysituated to address rising political threats from the farright by making it hard for the DA to prioritize newissues or build enduring cross-state organizationalinfrastructure.

The remainder of our article proceeds as follows:We begin by outlining our concept of donor consortia,indicating the special combination of functions wesee these organizations as performing and situatingconsortia in comparison to other forms of concertedpolitical funding. After this conceptual introduction,we discuss our sources of evidence and briefly summa-rize the origins and evolution of the Koch seminarsand the DA. With the stage thus set, we unfurl inturn the results of our analysis of individual character-istics of consortium members and proceed to exploremembership rules and procedures for aggregatingand deploying donor resources to support other con-servative or liberal organizations. In the final sections,we weigh alternative explanations and offer prelimi-nary hypotheses about the sharply contrastingeffects of the Koch seminars versus the DA on thelarger organizational terrain of U.S. politics.

CONCEPTUALIZING DONOR CONSORTIA

We propose five features that, taken together, set orga-nized donor consortia such as the Koch seminars and

2. For initial investigations, see Hans J. G. Hassell, “PartyControl of Party Primaries: Party Influence in Nominations forthe U.S. Senate,” Journal of Politics 78, no. 1 (2016): 75–87; JakeM. Grumbach, “Campaign Contributions and the Extended Net-works of Activist Groups” (unpublished paper, Department of Polit-ical Science, University of California, Berkeley, 2016).

ALEXANDER HERTEL-FERNANDEZ, THEDA SKOCPOL AND JASON SCLAR2

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the DA apart from other well-known examples of con-certed political fund-raising that share some but notall of these defining characteristics.

1. Continual giving by members. Wealthydonors in the Koch seminars and the DAdo not simply write one-off checks asthey might to political action committees(PACs) or advocacy groups. The consortiaattract member donors in order to fosterlonger-term commitments among like-minded wealthy people who give at orabove a predictable minimum level yearafter year. DA partners who are individualsor two-member households pay $30,000annually in dues and pledge donationsto DA-recommended or DA-approvedorganizations that total at least $200,000each year.3 Analogously, Koch seminarmembers contribute (apparently individu-ally) “at least $100,000 a year to the causesCharles Koch and his brother Davidpromote.”4 Such membership rules, plusthe fact that many donors, especiallyKoch donors, clearly donate a lot morethan the annual minimums, ensure thatthese organized consortia have muchmore predictable access to deep and con-tinuous pools of funding than typical PACsor advocacy groups.2. A time horizon beyond individual elec-tion cycles. Because they can deploy sub-stantial and sustained resources, donorconsortia can do more than simply try toelect or reelect Democrats or Republicans.They can focus on advancing sets of prin-ciples and policies over time, and they canchannel resources to idea creation, civicaction, leadership development, andpolicy formulation unrelated to winningparticular election contests. Consortiahave some similarities to foundations,because they can, in principle, play thelong game and make risky investmentsthat might take a long time to realizeobjectives such as shifting American polit-ical culture, reorienting policy agendas, orempowering future generations of politi-cal leaders.3. Focus on a wide range of politicalendeavors and policy issues. While other

donor groups focus laser-like on oneoverall goal (such as the Club forGrowth, which seeks to block tax increasesand fight for tax and spending cuts toshrink government), donor consortia areguided by overall political worldviews andget involved in many domains of policyand politics. The Koch seminars, forinstance, fund activities ranging from aca-demic work on libertarian thought tomore directly political activities such asdefeating policies to address climatechange. And unlike foundations, consor-tia are far less restricted by tax laws ornorms in the kinds of political activitiestheir donors support.4. Focus on supporting fields of organiza-tions, not just candidates. Support forindividual candidates is certainly encour-aged by donor consortia—for instance,when particular GOP or Democratic can-didates, party committee leaders, orheads of PACs are invited to Koch or DAsessions where they can impress andcourt wealthy donors. And consortium-supported organizations do channelresources into election campaigns.

Nevertheless, the overarching agendasof donor consortia focus on fundingentire arrays of political organizations,including those involved in educationand the production of ideas, as well asadvocacy groups and constituency-mobi-lizing organizations. Sets of organizationsfunded through the consortia operateboth within and between elections andfocus both on getting particular kinds ofcandidates and staffers into office and,even more, on changing public policy.5. A major social component. Last but notat all least, donor consortia build andleverage social solidarity—weaving tiesamong wealthy donors and betweendonors and other political players. Partici-pation in an organized consortium offersdonors opportunities to attend recurrentmeetings with a mix of serious discussionsand social events held over several days inposh locations. At these meetings, donorsattend sessions with important politicaloperatives, media figures, advocacy groupheads, and the occasional intellectualfrom their side of the ideological spec-trum. Even more to the point, thewealthy donors get to know one anotherand, in the process, construct a purposefulcommunity where they come to sharepolitical vocabularies, values, and morallygrounded perspectives on political

3. Democracy Alliance, “Membership Benefits and Participa-tion Options,” Washington, DC: The Democracy Alliance.(Handout obtained by the authors from the Democracy Alliance;shown in full in Appendix C.)

4. Patrick O’Connor, “Donors Who Fund the Koch Brothers’Causes Say They’re Tired of Being ‘Demonized,’” Wall StreetJournal, August 3, 2015. See also Kenneth Vogel, “Koch World2014,” Politico, January 24, 2014.

WHEN POLITICAL MEGA-DONORS JOIN FORCES 3

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challenges to be addressed.5 In variouscities and regions, smaller, self-organizedgatherings of Koch and DA donors alsooccur in between the formal nationalmeetings, including get-togethers whereestablished members can reach out topotential new consortium members.6

Such social activities further set consortiaapart from PACs or even foundations.

The Koch seminars and the DA are far from theonly organized groups of wealthy donors engaged inU.S. politics. For many decades, issue-oriented politi-cal organizations have channeled member donationsinto lobbying and electoral contributions—as dogroups like the American Israel Public Affairs Com-mittee, the Sierra Club, the Natural ResourcesDefense Council, the National Organization forWomen, and Planned Parenthood. However, mostsuch groups reach beyond the ranks of very wealthydonors to gather smaller contributions from largenumbers of middle-income participants. Moreclosely resembling the wealthy donor consortia exam-ined here are two other issue advocacy groupsfocused on blocking tax increases and enacting taxcuts that shrink government. Both the Club forGrowth, founded in 1999, and Americans for TaxReform, launched in 1985, recruit wealthy conserva-tive members to provide large-scale funding to lobby-ing campaigns and selected Republican primary andgeneral-election candidates.7 Nevertheless, the Kochand DA consortia are distinct because they tackle abroader range of issues and channel resources tomany other political organizations engaged in a fullarray of politically relevant activities.

Another set of kindred organizations to considerspecialize in election funding. The current periodof relaxed U.S. campaign finance laws has enabledthe proliferation of “super PACs” that amass anddeploy unlimited election contributions from individ-uals, companies, or unions, so long as the PACsoperate independently of candidates. Like the Kochand DA consortia, PACs such as Karl Rove’s GOP-ori-ented American Crossroads GPS and the Democratic-leaning Priorities USA use contributions from wealthydonors to support functions once controlled by polit-ical parties such as voter outreach, strategic research,and messaging. Furthermore, donor consortia andsuper PACs both attempt to coordinate partisanefforts. For example, Priorities USA serves as a focal

point for major groups on the liberal end of the Dem-ocratic Party coalition—convening strategy sessionswith donors and with other electoral funders likePlanned Parenthood, the American Federation ofTeachers, and the Human Rights Campaign.8 Still,there are differences, because the wealthy donor con-sortia require members to make regular annual con-tributions and go well beyond funding electoralactivities to support idea generation, policy develop-ment, and legislative campaigns. Nor can the Kochand DA consortia be understood as responses toshifts in campaign finance rules such as the landmark2010 Citizens United decision by the United StatesSupreme Court. Both consortia were well establishedby that year—and much of what they do would be pos-sible regardless of campaign finance regulations,however strict or loose.

Beyond PACs, the DA and the Koch seminars alsoshare important features with philanthropic founda-tions. Like more politically oriented charities, suchas the Olin and Scaife Foundations on the right, theKoch and DA consortia encourage long-term invest-ments aiming to reshape the American political land-scape for decades to come.9 Both the politicallyoriented foundations and the consortia accomplishthis goal by spreading investments across a variety ofother organizations: universities, think tanks, grass-roots groups, and lobbying operations. In principle,too, both foundations and donor consortia canmake risky bets, given the breadth and longevity oftheir investments.10 Nevertheless, despite some simi-larities to traditional philanthropic foundations, thedonor consortia we study face few legal or practicallimits on the money they can raise and spend.Using multiple legal devices in the U.S. tax code,members of the DA and the Koch seminars caninvest in consortium-featured electoral or lobbyingefforts that many charitable foundations cannotsupport for legal or cultural reasons. Another distinc-tive feature lies in the fact that consortia involve largenetworks of wealthy members who regularly meet andconfer with one another, establishing a social ground-ing not seen in foundations that usually rely onbequests from deceased donors or infusions from afew living benefactors.

A final set of organizations that resemble the con-sortia examined here involve what political scientist

5. See the lists of twice-yearly Koch and DA meetings in Alex-ander Hertel-Fernandez, Theda Skocpol, and Jason Sclar, “WhenWealthy Political Contributors Join Forces: U.S. Donor Consortiaon the Left and Right” (paper presented at the Annual Meetingof the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA,September 2016).

6. O’Connor, “Donors Who Fund the Koch Brothers’ CausesSay They’re Tired of Being ‘Demonized.’”

7. Matt Bai, “Fight Club,” New York Times, August 10, 2003.

8. Matea Gold, “Priorities USA Positions Itself as Center ofGravity for the Left in the Trump Era,” Washington Post, December20, 2016.

9. On conservative political philanthropies, see especiallySteven Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Alice O’Connor, “Financingthe Counterrevolution,” in Rightward Bound: Making America Conser-vative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian Zelizer (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

10. On the (theoretical) ability of philanthropic foundations totake on risky investments, see, e.g., Rob Reich, “What Are Founda-tions For?” Boston Review, March 1, 2013.


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Daniel Schlozman calls the “anchoring politicalmovements” that have backed twentieth-century U.S.political parties—particularly organized labor forthe Democrats starting in the 1930s and the Christianright for the Republican Party starting in the 1970s. AsSchlozman and others have documented, the partiesreoriented their core agendas in return for themoney, activists, and ideas those movements couldprovide.11 There are indeed real parallels betweenthe party reorientations achieved by the modernU.S. labor movement and the religious right andthe right or left reorientations the Koch seminarsand the DA have tried to accomplish in the earlytwenty-first century. Both then and now, groupleaders have tried to pull an entire party towardtheir favored political agendas. But there are also dif-ferences, because the wealthy donor consortia ana-lyzed here are formal organizations, rather thanloosely knit coalitions of various groups, activists,and leaders. In addition, very wealthy individualsand families play a much more central role in thetwo consortia we examine. Although affluent donorshave supported many Christian right organizations,for instance, the churches and pro-life associationscentrally involved in that anchoring movement alsoinclude millions of grassroots citizen members. TheKoch seminars and the DA may channel funds tokindred constituency-mobilizing efforts, but theythemselves lack grassroots participants.

In short, despite various overlaps with other politi-cal formations, the donor consortia featured in thisarticle stand out because they have all five of the keydefining features enumerated above, not just someof those characteristics. Because of their combinedfeatures, the Koch seminars and the DA have thepotential to achieve political clout beyond similarlypartisan super PACs and single-issue advocacygroups. As we argue below, there is good reason tothink that the Koch seminars and the DA successfullyuse social ties to sharpen moral and ideologicalpurpose and enhance the collective impact of politi-cally engaged wealthy Americans. To date in U.S.history, we believe that the Koch seminars and theDA are the only full-blown instances of the wealthydonor consortia we conceptualized here. But there

is nothing to say that additional iterations of thiskind of political funding collective will not emergein the future. We tend to assume that such future var-iants will happen, so we see it as worthwhile todescribe and analyze the workings and impact oftoday’s Koch and DA consortia.

SOURCES OF EVIDENCE

What about data? Anyone who follows media coverageor has even superficial familiarity with current U.S.laws knows that billionaires and millionaires involvedwith political funding entities are able to operatelargely in secret.12 We have had to pull together infor-mation from many sources. For both of our donorconsortia, muckraking journalists on the right andthe left have gathered many documents on whichwe happily rely—including leaked conference pro-grams and documents dropped or left behind bymistake at Koch seminar gatherings or DA confer-ences.13 One of the two consortia examined here,the DA, has provided us with organizational materialsbeyond those found and publicized by journalists,including copies of the programs for fall and springDA conferences from 2005 to the present and listsof the liberal organizations DA partners have sup-ported over the years. One of the authors (ThedaSkocpol) has been an invited speaker on specificpanels at three different DA conferences over thepast decade and has therefore had the opportunityto observe parts of these gatherings (apart from ses-sions restricted to DA donor partners). We do nothave access to DA’s yearly confidential lists of individ-ual wealthy members, so we have instead worked toassemble partner names from conference programsand various public sources.

We face even greater challenges in documentingthe Koch seminars. We have consulted legallyrequired Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filings forthe Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce,which has helped organize the seminars in recentyears; and we have consulted op-eds by wealthypeople who openly proclaim their seminar member-ships. Mainly, though, we have assembled information

11. Daniel Schlozman, When Movements Anchor Parties (Prince-ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). See also KathleenBawn, Martin Cohen, David Karol, Seth Masket, Hans Noel, andJohn Zaller, “A Theory of Political Parties: Groups, PolicyDemands and Nominations in American Politics,” Perspectives on Pol-itics 10, no. 3 (2012): 571–97; David Karol, Party Position Change inAmerican Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,2009); Katherine Krimmel, “The Efficiencies and Pathologies ofSpecial Interest Partisanship,” Studies in American Political Develop-ment 31, no. 2 (2017): 149–69; Eric Schickler, Racial Realignment:The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965 (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Richard M. Skinner, MoreThan Money: Interest Group Action in Congressional Elections(New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).

12. Recently, both the DA and the Koch seminars have set upwebsites and released a bit more public information about theiractivities and meetings. The Koch seminars now invite selectedreporters to attend the opening sessions of their twice-yearly confer-ences, on condition that they not release the names of donorattendees who do not want to be identified. But transparencyremains strictly limited for both organizations—and neither ofthem publishes their membership or provides a full historicalrecord of their evolving activities.

13. For Koch conference leaks, see, e.g., Daniel Schulman andAndy Kroll, “The Koch Brothers Left a Confidential Document atTheir Donor Conference,” Mother Jones, February 5, 2014. ForDemocracy Alliance conferences, see, e.g., Lachlan Markay, “Exclu-sive: Democracy Alliance Network Revealed,” Washington FreeBeacon, May 19, 2014.


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from journalistic reports and internet sources, includ-ing full Koch seminar programs for spring 2010 andspring 2014 Koch meetings, plus a fall 2010 invitationletter from Charles Koch that included a full list ofthe names and home locations of more than 200wealthy participants in the previous spring 2010Koch seminar held in Aspen, Colorado.14 OtherKoch information comes from crumpled documentsleft behind in hotel rooms and from audio recordingsof speeches captured surreptitiously by participantsor hotel workers and passed to media outlets.15 Spe-cific data sources will be cited as we go. Overall, weare very indebted to investigative journalists as wellas conservative and liberal muckrakers who haveunearthed important information about the DA andthe Koch seminars—and our work shows that politicalscientists can benefit from systematically assemblingand coding such discoveries.

ORGANIZING BIG POLITICAL DONORS RIGHT AND LEFT

Both the Koch seminars and the DA are creatures ofthe 2000s, drawing together subsets of wealthy Amer-icans, highly politically attuned individuals and fami-lies recruited from the burgeoning ranks of U.S.millionaires and billionaires whose personal fortuneshave ballooned in an era of income and wealthconcentration. But the origins of the two donor con-claves are quite different—as are their membershiptrajectories.

The Koch SeminarsLaunched in 2003, the Koch seminars were the brain-child of Koch Industries chieftain Charles Koch alongwith his brother David and a handful of close advisors,especially former academic and political strategistRichard Fink.16 The first seminar met in Chicago,where fewer than twenty business leaders, mostlyfriends of Charles, joined Koch insiders to hear

nonstop, dry lectures about libertarian philosophyand free-market economics.17 Even fewer participantsturned up next time. In due course, the seminarswere spiced up with invited speakers from theworlds of GOP politics and conservative media, andattendance trended up from 2006.18 After DemocratBarack Obama moved into the White House, risingnumbers of wealthy conservatives clamored for invita-tions, and the twice-yearly seminars “exploded asantagonism toward Obama built among the 0.01percent on the right.”19

Importantly, the Koch donor seminars were notsome brand new, stand-alone venture; they havealways been a symbiotic part of an integrated set ofpolitical endeavors known by now as “the Kochnetwork.” Figure 1 portrays the evolution of thatnetwork.20 For decades, Charles and David Koch(called “the Koch brothers” in the popular media)have poured money from their rapidly growing indus-trial fortunes into efforts to reshape U.S. politics andpolicies. Currently, Charles and David have a networth of more than $49 billion apiece and were tiedfor sixth place on the Forbes list of the 400 wealthiestAmericans in 2018. A half century ago, the brotherswere stalwarts of libertarian third-party politics, andthey set out to encourage the spread of libertarianideas and fund educational ventures by making sus-tained contributions to the Cato Institute, theCharles G. Koch Foundation, and the MercatusCenter at George Mason University.21 In the 1980s,Charles and David turned away from the LibertarianParty and added funding for lobbying and policyorganizations like the 60 Plus Association, a groupfocused on privatizing social insurance programsand repealing the estate tax, and Citizens for aSound Economy, an advocacy group that attractedcorporate funding to fight regulations and taxes.

Believing that government should do very littlebeyond securing order, the Kochs were for manyyears skeptical of Republicans as well as Democrats.If the Republican Party “is our only hope then weare doomed,” Charles once explained to a businessgroup, because the GOP accommodates governmentand supports “the prevalent statist paradigm.”22 In theearly 2000s, the Kochs’ worries about the GOP andinsider consultants like Karl Rove reached a newpeak when President George W. Bush invaded the

14. Charles Koch, “Invitation Letter for January 2011 KochSeminar” (Koch Industries, Wichita, KS). Available along withprogram and list of attendees from Spring 2010 seminar Understand-ing and Addressing Threats to American Free Enterprise and Prosperitythrough ThinkProgress at https://images2.americanprogressaction.org/ThinkProgress/secretkochmeeting.pdf.

15. For hotel room leaks, see Schulman and Kroll, “The KochBrothers Left a Confidential Document at Their Donor Confer-ence.” For leaked recordings, see Ryan Grim and Paul Blumenthal,“Koch Brothers’ Real Fear Revealed in Secret Audio: LiberalMoney,” Huffingtonpost.com, September 9, 2014 (updated Septem-ber 10, 2014), available at https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/09/koch-brothers-democracy-a_n_5790896.html; JaneMayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind theRise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016), chap. 14;Lauren Windsor, “Exclusive: Inside the Koch Brothers’ Secret Bil-lionaire Summit,” The Nation, June 17, 2014.

16. Rich Fink, “From Ideas to Action: The Role of Universities,Think Tanks, and Activist Groups,” Philanthropy Magazine (Winter1996). Daniel Schulman, “Charles Koch’s Brain,” Politico, Septem-ber–October 2014.

17. Bill Wilson and Roy Wenzl, “The Kochs’ Quest to SaveAmerica,” Wichita Eagle, October 13, 2012.

18. As quoted in Roy Wenzl, “How to Change a Company and aCountry,” Wichita Eagle, October 31, 2015.

19. Mayer, Dark Money, 7.20. Further information about core organization appears in

Appendix A.21. Daniel Schulman, Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers

Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty (New York:Grand Central, 2014); Wilson and Wenzl, “The Kochs’ Quest toSave America.”

22. As quoted in Schulman, Sons of Wichita, 107.


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Middle East and proposed the addition of an expensiveprescription drug benefit to Medicare.23 In response,the brothers unveiled a bold new third phase ofpolitical organization building. In 2003, they startedthe Koch seminars, and in 2004, they launched anew political-party-like federation called Americansfor Prosperity (AFP) to synchronize lobbying andgrassroots mobilization for elections and policybattles across dozens of states as well as in Washington,DC.

A nation-spanning organization, AFP is by far themost important political organization in the overallnetwork supported by the Koch seminars—and tell-ingly, AFP was launched while Republicans, not Dem-ocrats, held power in Washington, DC. This belies anyinterpretation that sees the contemporary Koch polit-ical operation as primarily a defensive reaction toDemocrats or the presidency of Barack Obama. By2007, before Barack Obama even declared his candi-dacy for the presidency, AFP had installed paid direc-tors and usually additional paid operatives in fifteenstates spread across all U.S. regions and encompassing

close to half the U.S. population (as well as their rep-resentatives in Congress and state legislatures)—andby now, AFP has become a massive political-party-like operation with paid staff and contact lists of mil-lions of volunteer activists stretching across thirty-sixU.S. states that are home to more than 80 percentof the population.24 In key states like Wisconsin andNorth Carolina, AFP has a network of local officesas well as a state headquarters.

In recent years, the Kochs have added specializedpieces to the network mix, including constituency-mobilizing organizations focused on military veter-ans, young people, and Latinos, plus the Center forShared Services to provide personnel and othersupport to all Koch organizations and a data opera-tion called “Themis/i360” focused on collectingand analyzing voter data (similar to Catalist on theleft).25 In 2016, the previously separate Koch

Fig. 1. The Evolution of Koch Core Political Organizations: Ideas, Policy Advocacy, Donor Coordination, Con-stituency Mobilization, and Utilities.

23. Stephen Moore, “Private Enterprise,” Wall Street Journal,May 6, 2006.

24. For more details on Americans for Prosperity, see ThedaSkocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, “The Koch Networkand Republican Party Extremism,” Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 3(September 2016): 681–99.

25. For constituency outreach, see Tim Higgins, “Koch Broth-ers Nurture Rise of Hispanic Republicans,” Bloomberg.com, March17, 2016; Alicia Mundy, “The VA Isn’t Broken, Yet: Inside the


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organizations Generation Opportunity, the Libre Ini-tiative, and Concerned Veterans for America werefolded into AFP, meant to operate as distinctively“branded projects” within the dozens of state chaptersthat make up the Koch network’s “main politicalarm.”26 Starting in 2012, a centerpiece “Koch politicalbank” called the Freedom Partners Chamber of Com-merce took over running the fast-growing Koch sem-inars, and in 2014, an affiliated political actioncommittee was set up to allow Koch donors to makefederal campaign contributions through an affiliatedsuper PAC.27 By 2017, the whole Koch operation wasrebranded as “the Seminar Network” with its ownwebsite.28

The Democracy AllianceLaunched in 2005, the DA at first attracted a largerdonor membership than the contemporaneousKoch seminars. But the DA advantage was short-lived, as Figure 2 shows. Net recruitment of DApartners stalled after 2009, even as reportedKoch membership trended upward—despite a dipfor the Koch seminars right after Barack Obama, toconservative dismay, was re-elected to the presidencyin 2012.

It is important to note that Koch seminar trends dis-played in Figure 2 are approximate individual seminarattendance numbers reported in the media (usingthe higher number for the two seminars in a givenyear if two different numbers were reported forwinter and spring/summer). Furthermore, especially

in the current period, donors can be formal membersof the Koch seminars and Freedom Partners withoutattending every meeting. Our DA numbers are frominternal DA reports and reflect a more institutional-ized definition of the yearly numbers of donor“partner units,” which include individuals, two-person family households, and multihouseholdfamily clusters (like parents and children). In recentyears, up to twenty-three foundations and nine otherinstitutions, most of them labor unions, have alsobeen tallied as DA partners. To translate the DApartner trends into something closer to the Kochseminar participant trends, we have (conservatively)used a 1.5 multiplier to approximate as best we canthe number of wealthy donor members that likely cor-respond to the yearly totals of partner units. Neverthe-less, the within-consortium trajectories in Figure 2 aremuch more meaningful and reliable than the abso-lute levels between consortia, given data uncertaintiesand divergent definitions of DA partners and Kochseminar participants. The key takeaway is that DApartner counts have grown only modestly in recenttimes, mostly through institutional memberships,while Koch seminar attendance has ballooned.

The impetus behind the creation of the DA dif-fered from the Koch seminars. To the extent thatthe DA was the brainchild of one individual, thatfounder was not an ideologically motivated multibil-lionaire industrialist, but a veteran of DemocraticParty politics named Rob Stein, who had worked forthe late Democratic National Committee chairmanRon Brown and served on the Clinton-Gore transitionteam and as chief of staff at the U.S. Department ofCommerce during President Bill Clinton’s firstterm. As journalist Matt Bai tells the story, in theearly 2000s, Stein became alarmed at conservativedominance and put together a “killer slide show” enti-tled “The Conservative Message Machine’s MoneyMatrix.” His PowerPoints dramatized the decades-long accomplishments of wealthy conservative fami-lies who built up think tanks, policy advocacygroups, and media efforts to shape agendas ofpublic debate in sustained ways. Starting monthsbefore the 2004 elections, Stein toured the countrysharing this presentation in confidence with smallclusters of Democratic Party donors and key politicalplayers, aiming to spark discussions about a new stra-tegic approach. Later, Stein would recall that “therewas an unbelievable frustration . . . among the donorclass on the center-left, with trying to one-off every-thing—with every single one of them being a single,‘silo,’ donor and not having the ability to communi-cate effectively with a network of donors.”29

Koch Brothers’ Campaign to Invent a Scandal and Dismantle theCountry’s Most Successful Health Care System,” WashingtonMonthly (March/April/May 2016); Peter Overby, “Koch PoliticalNetwork Expanding ‘Grass-Roots’ Organizing,” Npr.org, October12, 2015; Ashley Parker, “Koch Brothers Woo Hispanic Voterswith Turkeys and Questionnaires,” New York Times, November 25,2015. For support for conservative candidates, see Kenneth Vogel,“How the Kochs Launched Joni Ernst,” Politico, November 12,2015. For the Center for Shared Services (now Freedom PartnersShared Services within the Seminar Network), see Kenneth P.Vogel, “How the Koch Network Rivals the GOP,” Politico, December30, 2015.

26. Matea Gold, “In Major Shift, Koch Consolidates Network ofAdvocacy Groups into Americans for Prosperity,” Washington Post,September 16, 2016.

27. Kenneth Vogel, “Koch World 2014”; Kenneth Vogel, “TheKoch ATM,” Politico, November 17, 2015.

28. See http://seminarnetwork.org. In this and other public-facing presentations, the Koch network splashes pictures of ordi-nary Americans from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds topresent itself, and especially AFP, as a “grassroots” endeavor. Littleto no information is provided about the authoritative, centralizedstructure and direction of the network or about the very wealthydonors who sustain it. In actuality, the Koch network is not demo-cratically governed; it is structured like a private investment corpo-ration and an ideological cadre-led political party. To attractdonors, it issues confidential documents like the Americans for Pros-perity Partner Prospectus: January 2017 (Arlington, VA: Americans forProsperity; available as a leaked document at https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3457972-Americans-for-Prosperity-Partner-Prospectus.html).

29. Krista Shaffer, “How Vast the Left Wing Conspiracy?” (tran-script of session at the Hudson Institute, Washington, DC, Novem-ber 30, 2006), 8.


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After John Kerry’s 2004 defeat, Stein’s project gotseed funding from the George Soros and PeterLewis families. In April 2005, some fifty of America’swealthiest liberals arrived at the DA foundingmeeting in Scottsdale, Arizona—with most travelingfrom major metropolitan areas on the East Coast aswell as from Hollywood, the Bay Area, and Seattleon the West Coast and from a few other spots suchas Denver and Dallas.30 At the retreat, answers to aquestionnaire revealed that three-quarters of thefounding partners did not want the DA to have“close ties to the Democratic Party,” although thatseems to have meant simply that they wanted thenew group to remain under the separate control ofits staff and wealthy members.31

In this way, there are important similarities betweenthe founding of the DA and the Koch seminars. Thecreation of both organizations was in part motivatedby a sense of political threat: purported Bush admin-istration betrayals of libertarian, small-governmentprinciples for the Kochs and their initial donors,and John Kerry’s presidential defeat at the hands ofGeorge W. Bush for the DA. As the current head ofthe DA has put it, in his mind it takes “wildernessyears”—years when power appears far out of

reach—to foster audacious thinking and donor invest-ments for the long term.32 The importance of politi-cal threats in spurring mobilization of wealthyparticipants in the Koch and DA consortia resonateswith political scientist Isaac Martin’s chronicling ofU.S. antitax movements among the rich.33 As heshows, wealthy Americans undertook collectiveaction to lower taxes when they felt that their individ-ual tactics had failed and when antitax entrepreneurspresented them with opportunities for joint action.Even so, as we will see in tracking the evolution ofKoch and DA efforts, political threats alone are notsufficient to spur institutional and strategic changes,especially once consortia are founded.

Existing institutional rules and leadership arrange-ments can either facilitate or frustrate strategic recal-ibrations at moments of political loss and threat, andthe procedures of the Koch seminars facilitate strate-gic nimbleness much more than those of the DA.

To return to describing the origins of the DA, oncefounding partners came together, they made deci-sions about which other progressive organizations to

Fig. 2. Donor Participation in Koch Seminars and the Democracy Alliance.

30. Matt Bai, The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle toRemake Democratic Politics (New York: Penguin, 2007), 96–98.

31. Ibid., 99.

32. Shaffer, “How Vast the Left Wing Conspiracy?” 11.33. Isaac Martin, Rich People’s Movements (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2013), 11–16. There is also a strong parallel withelectoral losses motivating political party investment, too; see espe-cially Daniel Galvin, Presidential Party Building (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 2009), chap. 2.


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support—and how to raise and channel partner duesand annual contributions. By the fall of 2005, whensixty-five partners “representing two-thirds of . . .total membership” convened at the second DA con-ference in Braselton, Georgia, elaborate procedureshad been used by DA leaders and staffers to vet thefirst round of organizations to be recommended forpartner funding.34 Some long-standing organizationslike the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities wereincluded, but other recommended organizationswere recently established or new creations, includingsuch future mainstays of the Democratic Party estab-lishment as the Center for American Progress andthe data operation Catalist (originally called DataWarehouse). Recommended groups on the first DAlist were classified under four headings that suggestthe types of endeavors founding partners thoughtnecessary to counter the conservative “messagingmachine”:

† Leadership: Center for Progressive Leadership; Pro-gressive Majority† Ideas: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; Eco-nomic Policy Institute; Center for American Progress† Media: Media Matters for America; Citizens forResponsibility and Ethics in Washington† Civic Engagement: America Votes; Data Warehouse(later called Catalist)35

Also on the original recommended list was an“Innovation Fund” to be managed by the DA itself,to give “partners the option to fund organizationswith new and provocative ideas headed by youngand developing leaders.”36 Overall, more than $30million was channeled to the recommended entities,a third of that amount reportedly pledged by theSoros and Lewis families.37 DA rules and rhetoricstressed equality among partners and, certainly, theSoroses and Lewises were not directly in charge ofDA the way the Koch brothers have been in chargeof their consortium. Nevertheless, according to MattBai, the biggest DA contributors exercised a lot ofsway behind the scenes—and that surely remainstrue to this day, even if the ranks of the largest DAfunders have evolved (and has recently includedenvironmentalist Tom Steyer, for example).

From the start, the DA had its own professional staffmanaged by a DA president and supervised closely bya small elected board that has always included someelected donor members along with union leadersand philanthropists. This organizational pattern istypical for a liberal nonprofit organization, butunlike many such nonprofits, the DA has experienced

repeated leadership shifts. By 2006, in fact, founderRob Stein was pushed out of day-to-day DA manage-ment, to be followed by a succession of presidents,each of whom readjusted DA’s relationships to theDemocratic Party, to party-linked PACs, and to othergroups in the center-left landscape.38

Crucially, even though many DA founders believedthat their consortium ought to concentrate on sup-porting on a small, highly effective number of progres-sive organizations, within a few years the list ofrecommended liberal groups tripled.39 The DA wasformed following several decades of a proliferation ofprofessionally run liberal advocacy groups in thelarger U.S. civic landscape. Many wealthy donors theDA wanted to recruit as partners already had estab-lished ties to subsets of such groups—to environmentalor rights groups or women’s groups or left-leaningthink tanks, for example. As a result, foundingmembers and newly recruited partners in the earlyyears tended to press for the DA to add their favoritecauses to the recommended investment lists presentedto all partners for potential contributions.

As we will detail later, a modest number of long-standing organizations have always been on theDA-recommended list, but many others have beensubtracted or added across ever-changing versions ofthe core list. In 2014, the most recently installed DApresident, Gara LaMarche, a veteran of GeorgeSoros’s philanthropies, proceeded to take a hardlook at how the consortium had evolved and articu-late a new strategy.40 Currently, the DA aspires to benot only a list of progressive organizations recom-mended for philanthropic support, but also anational hub for movement building, where wealthydonors, labor unions, and many philanthropic foun-dations all work “in alignment” (as the organization’sfavored phrasing puts it) to further support progres-sive political goals. Since 2016, and especially follow-ing the Democratic presidential defeat in Novemberof that year, the DA has placed a strong emphasison mobilizing and directing contributions towardbuilding state-level electoral and policy capacities onthe left—to counter the accumulated clout of theKoch network and other right forces across nearlytwo-thirds of U.S. state governments.

34. Democracy Alliance, The Democracy Alliance: Investment Strat-egy Conference (conference proceedings, Braselton, GA, October27–30, 2005), 4.

35. Ibid.36. Ibid., 5.37. Bai, The Argument, 117–18.

38. For many of the twists and turns, see ibid., and Kenneth P.Vogel, Big Money: 2.5 Billion Dollars, One Suspicious Vehicle, and aPimp—On the Trail of the Ultra-Rich Hijacking American Politics(New York: Public Affairs, 2014).

39. Democracy Alliance, The Democracy Alliance Portfolio Summa-ries [included in confidential partner materials for Fall 2007 confer-ence on The Progressive Equation]; see also Figure 7 in a later sectionof this article.

40. Gara LaMarche, “Democracy Alliance 2020 Vision” (pre-sented at Democracy Alliance Portfolio Snapshot: Spring 2014 [confer-ence], Chicago, IL, April 27–30, 2014). This is an overview ofDemocracy Alliance development and planning for next steps, pre-sented to Democracy Alliance partners at their investment confer-ence. A version with full financial details is available through alink at Markay, “Exclusive,” published by the Washington Free Beacon.


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WHO ARE KOCH SEMINAR AND DA DONORS?

Because there are no publicly available, annuallyupdated lists of the wealthy Americans who join anddonate through the DA and the Koch seminars, wehave used an array of tactics and sources to assembleincomplete—but we believe indicative—datasets onthem.

† For the Koch seminars, our best sources include afull list of all 226 attendees at the spring 2010 seminarheld in Aspen, Colorado, supplemented by namesfrom documents or audiotapes from other seminarspublished by various journalists.41 In 2015, moreover,after Charles Koch called on seminar donors to havethe courage to speak publicly, some of them met witha Wall Street Journal reporter and wrote op-eds for theirhometown newspapers to proclaim their member-ships in the Koch seminars and Freedom Partners.42

† For the DA, we have relied on names listed in con-ference programs and reported in books, mediastories, and reports from conservative oppositionresearch groups such as the Capital ResearchCenter and the right-leaning Washington Times andthe Washington Free Beacon.

In assembling our master lists, we have done thebest we can to verify Koch seminar and DA member-ships. As indicated, we relied mainly on unchallengedmeeting lists or public quotes from wealthy members.Because certain internet sources turn out to haveassigned wealthy people mistakenly to these con-sortia, we do not use names from those sourceswithout additional confirmation from public quotes,meeting lists, or knowledgeable informants. Despiteour efforts, our lists surely still include a smallnumber of “false positives.” But the larger issue isthat we have inevitably missed quite a few peoplewho have been secret members of these consortia atsome point. In addition, we can only loosely datethe spans of membership for each individual donor.Despite all of the uncertainties, we believe we haveassembled sufficiently robust lists to construct broadportraits of DA and Koch seminar memberships.The units of analysis include both individuals andfamily groups (where marital or kin ties are appar-ent). Most of the family units are husband-wifecouples, who often participate together, especiallyin the Koch seminars; in addition, sibling sets or

parents and adult children sometimes join these con-sortia together.

Using the overall Koch seminar and DA lists, ourresearch team drew from as many sources as possibleto find and code various characteristics for individualsor families—including primary residences (by city andzip code); service on corporate boards (using data fromBoardEx, a commercial repository of boards of direc-tors); industry of primary wealth (using media recordsand BoardEx and coding by the classificationsemployed by the federal government); and majorinvolvement in philanthropic activities (using mediasources and data from BoardEx on participation onnonprofit boards of directors). The following com-parisons use the data we have been able to assembleto date. In some parts of the analysis, we benchmarkour Koch seminar and DA donors against aggregatedescriptions that Lee Drutman has offered for thetop “1% of the 1%” of wealthy political donors to elec-toral campaigns in 2012.43 This allows us to get somesense not only of how the DA and Koch seminar par-ticipants compare with one another, but also howeach group compares with very active politicaldonors in general.

Where Do Koch and DA Donors Live?The residences of wealthy political donors involved inthe DA and the Koch seminars cluster across the U.S.geography much as we might expect for progressive-liberals versus ultraconservatives. As Table 1 shows,DA donors are disproportionately likely to hail fromthe West and Northeast, while residences in theSouth and Midwest are much more common forKoch seminar participants.

For comparison purposes, Table 1 also shows thatthe residences of Drutman’s 2012 donors from thetop 1 percent of the 1 percent tended to be spreadacross the South, West, and Northeast, but leastoften located in the Midwest. Overall, the locationsof Drutman’s donor residences look more like thoseof our DA partners than the residential patterns ofthe Koch seminar participants—especially becauseso many Koch seminar participants come from theSouthwest, mountain states, and Midwest, areaswhere Drutman found relatively fewer top donorresidences.

Offering more detail, the map in Figure 3 displays149 Koch donors and 175 DA donors based on thezip code of their primary residence. (Clustering byzip code is randomly jittered to show the density ofobservations—otherwise, most of the dots would beon top of the major cities). This drives home thepoint that DA partners mostly have primary

41. Koch, “Invitation Letter for January 2011 Koch Seminar.”42. See Holly Deason and Doug Deason, “What Do the Koch

Brothers Want? To Defend the American Dream,” editorial,Dallas Morning News, February 2, 2015; O’Connor, “Donors WhoFund the Koch Brothers’ Causes Say They’re Tired of Being‘Demonized’”; Bill O’Neill, “Defending the Koch Brothers beforethe Ohio 2016 Campaign Heats Up,” editorial, Cleveland.com,April 26, 2015; Chris Rufer, “End This Corporate Welfare,” edito-rial, New York Times, March 23, 2015; Ken Yontz, “The Kochs AreFighting for Your Future,” editorial, Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal-Sentinel, May 1, 2015.

43. For Drutman’s analysis, see Lee Drutman, “The Political1% of the 1% in 2012,” Sunlight Foundation Blog, June 24, 2013,http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/06/24/1pct_of_the_1pct/.


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residences in just three areas—the Acela corridor onthe East Coast, the Bay Area, and Los Angeles, whileKoch seminar members come from all over thecountry. Certainly, the Koch seminars are attractingmore wealthy contributors from the heartlands.

Donor Activities and Sources of WealthAvailable evidence about donors who sit on corporateboards shows that Koch seminar donors are muchmore involved in business leadership than are DApartners. More than a third of Koch donors (37percent) are currently serving on a corporate board,and 40 percent of them have served on corporateboards at one point or another. In sharp contrast,only 14 percent of DA partners currently sit on corpo-rate boards (and only one in ten have in the past).

DA partners are more often primarily involved withphilanthropic activities, often at family foundations.One-fifth of the DA participants are coded this way,compared with only 6 percent of Koch participants.Although we have not so far been able to pin thisdown, DA partners may have inherited their wealthmore often than Koch donors. We do have informa-tion, however, on the sectoral sources of the wealthpossessed by Koch and DA donors. Not surprisingly,given the ballooning of the financial sector in theU.S. economy over the past half century, the singlemost important source of wealth for around a thirdof each set of donors is “finance, industry, and realestate.”44 More broadly, however, the sectoralsources of Koch and DA wealth are quite different,as Figure 4 shows. For Koch donors with a readilyidentifiable industrial sector as the main source oftheir wealth, the most common sectors (beyondfinance, insurance, and real estate) are mining andnatural resource extraction (21 percent) and manu-facturing (18 percent). In contrast, the mostcommon DA wealth sources (beyond finance, insur-ance, and real estate) are found in professional ser-vices (20 percent, and especially concentrated in

the legal services fields) and the information industry(23 percent). In general, the wealth of Koch donorscomes from a broader array of sectors than DAdonor wealth. Appendix B includes a tabular presen-tation of the data displayed in Figure 4 and includes,for comparison purposes, the wealth-sector profile forDrutman’s 2012 donors, who tend to be more similarto the DA partners than to the Koch seminarparticipants.

Now that we have defined donor consortia, offeredbrief overviews of the Koch seminars and the DA, andexplored the characteristics of their wealthymembers, it is time to focus on the primary activitiesand impact of these two donor consortia. How,exactly, do these consortia attract and channel big-money contributions to arrays of other organizationson the right and left?

CHANNELING RESOURCES TO ARRAYS OF POLITICALORGANIZATIONS

The stated missions of the Koch seminars and the DAstress their aspirations to reconfigure organizationalresources and ties across the U.S. political landscape.The Koch seminars are central supporters of a largerset of networked organizations all pushing candidatesand officials to adopt ultra-free-market agendas. Sim-ilarly, in the words of DA founder Rob Stein, the“Democracy Alliance is focused on creating a moreintegrated and consistently coherent center-left insti-tutional infrastructure.”45 Both of these consortia aimto raise money from many wealthy donors to supportother politically significant groups—indeed, theseconsortia aspire to fund such infrastructural supportabove and beyond the normal individual politicalgiving of donor members. But how exactly do theDA and the Koch seminars accomplish this distinctivekind of political fund-raising? To shed light on thesecrucial issues, we have pulled together as much infor-mation as possible on the similar and different fund-raising routines of these consortia and the ways inwhich they channel funding to other organizations.

Meanings and Obligations of MembershipThe rhetoric of membership is quite different for theKoch seminars versus the DA, as suggested by tellingstatements whose phrasings resemble many othersin meeting programs and explanatory documentsfrom these two groups. In a 2011 letter to privilegedinvitees, Charles Koch explained that joining theKoch seminars means signing on to a band ofwealthy comrades determined “to combat what isnow the greatest assault on American freedom andprosperity in our lifetimes.”46 The seminars, Charles

Table 1. Residences of Koch, DA, and 1 Percent of 1 PercentDonors

Region KochSeminars

DemocracyAlliance

1% of the1%

(n ¼ 149) (n ¼ 175) (Drutman)

Northeast 11% 34% 24%Midwest 26% 4% 16%West 26% 41% 25%South 37% 21% 35%Total 100% 100% 100%

44. Similarly, as Appendix B shows, 39 percent of Drutman’stop political donors in 2012 had fortunes generated from thissame sector.

45. Quoted in Shaffer, “How Vast the Left Wing Conspiracy?” 8.46. Quotation from Koch, “Invitation Letter for January 2011

Koch Seminar.”


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Fig. 3. Residences of Koch and DA Donors, mid-2000s.

Fig. 4. Sources of Wealth for Koch and Democracy Alliance Donors.


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stressed, are about more than “fun in the sun” andfocus on more than just the next election (althoughsome sessions do address immediate electoral oppor-tunities and evaluate past campaigns). “Our networkof business and philanthropic leaders,” he explained,brings together “doers who are willing to engage in thehard work necessary to advance our sharedprinciples. . . . Our goal for these meetings must beto advance ideas that strengthen . . . freedom, beatback the unrelenting attacks and hold electedleaders accountable.” Participants in Koch seminarsare not called “conservatives” or “Republicans”—indeed, those labels are rarely used—but are insteadcharacterized as leaders dedicated to advancing afree, entrepreneurial American society.

Joining the DA is likewise a value-oriented commit-ment for wealthy people who do not usually proclaimtheir party label, but the DA conceptualization ismuch drier and more transactional. Rather thanheeding a call to battle, DA members become “part-ners” who (in the words of a 2015 DA documentreproduced in Appendix C) enjoy

access to . . . benefits and services. . . includingunique investment, networking, and commu-nity building opportunities, and a chance toexplore in-depth the issues that will definethe progressive agenda for the 21st century.Through participation in the DA, Partnersgain a strategic perspective of the political land-scape and increase the impact of their progres-sive philanthropy.

Wealthy donors who join the DA certainly embrace“progressive” as a label for their general political ori-entation—the word is repeated everywhere in DAcommunications and conference agendas. But what,exactly, “progressive” means is rarely, if ever, spelledout or debated. Early efforts to define a DA visionwere remarkably thin and short-lived.47 Currently, amore robust “20/20 vision” is publicly presented onthe DA website and handed out in brochure form atevery conference. In this statement, many specificobjectives are arrayed under three “larger goals”: cre-ating “a fair democracy where everyone can partici-pate,” promoting “a growing economy that worksfor all,” and ensuring “a planet that is healthy andsafe” (https://democracyalliance.org/investments/strategy/). As has been true since the DA launch,the organization promotes loosely linked center-leftpriorities, each of which resonates with the concernsof subsets of DA partners and approved organiza-tions. Unlike the Koch seminars, the DA does not pro-claim any unified political strategy.

Procedurally, membership in the Koch seminarswas, at the start, vaguely defined, apparently basedon little more than taking part in one of the

gatherings hosted by Charles and his associates. Forsome years, the Koch seminars have had a family-ori-ented rhetorical framing, with “guests” urged toattend as husband-wife couples. Nevertheless, afterFreedom Partners took over managing the seminarsin 2012, membership became more formally speci-fied, as DA membership always has been. Just as DApartners must pay yearly dues and contribute$200,000 to recommended organizations, so toomust Koch participants pledge $100,000 or moreeach year to network undertakings (whether thereare obligations to pay other fees, we do not know).

Following standard fund-raising techniques, recentKoch seminars have also encouraged giving wellabove the minimum by setting aside special “invita-tion only” sessions for “top donors.” Although DApartners vary enormously in the amounts theydonate through their consortium, DA documentsand meeting agendas never indicate that certainevents or meetings are open only to top donors.

As for membership benefits, DA partners haveaccess to the organization’s professional staff based inWashington, DC, and Koch seminar participants havesimilar access at the Freedom Partners Chamber ofCommerce based in Arlington, Virginia. Theseoffices dispense information and help members struc-ture donations, no doubt with an eye to tax conse-quences and public disclosures. However, invitationsto consortium meetings are the chief membershipperk. As long as members meet annual dues andpledge requirements, they can cover their own traveland hotel expenses to attend either the DA’s “invest-ment conferences,” held each spring and fall, or theKoch seminars, convened each winter (usually inJanuary) and again in the late spring or summer.Attended by hundreds of honchos, these conclavesare where the action is—where like-minded wealthypeople mingle and conference organizers try to steer“investments” in concerted directions. In addition, toreinforce ties and reach out to potential new recruitsbetween biannual conferences, both consortia encour-age social and informational gatherings in major cities,often convened at members’ homes.

How Consortium Meetings Focus Donor AttentionWe have a virtually complete run of DA conferenceprograms, but we have found full Koch programsonly for the late June 2010 Aspen, Colorado,seminar, entitled “Understanding and AddressingThreats to American Free Enterprise and Prosperity,”and the mid-June 2014 Dana Point, California,seminar, “American Courage: Our Commitment toa Free Society.” For comparison purposes, we usethe DA’s “Progress 360” conference held in in lateApril to early May 2010 in Laguna Beach, California(not far from where the 2014 Koch seminar met),and also the DA’s “A New Progressive Era?” confer-ence held in late April 2014 in Chicago, Illinois.47. Bai, The Argument, 110–13.


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Fortuitously, these paired sets of meetings happenedjust before momentous midterm U.S. elections. Fur-thermore, the 2010 meetings fell at roughly the mid-point in the life spans of these consortia, and the 2014meetings exemplify recent developments.48

Both the Koch seminars and the DA sponsor several-day meetings that mix plenary sessions with breakoutgroups and intersperse serious sessions with meals,cocktail parties, and recreational opportunities. Atboth conclaves, some sessions feature media celebri-ties, top political officeholders, and the occasionalauthor or even university-based academic. But acloser look makes it clear that the Koch seminarsand DA conferences bring together quite different seg-ments of the right and left political worlds and choreo-graph activities in distinctive ways. At typical Kochseminars, hundreds of wealthy, mostly white-male busi-ness leaders, many joined by their wives, hear from amodest number of invited speakers and a coupledozen top leaders of Koch organizations, themselvesmostly white men. In contrast, at typical DA confer-ences, about a hundred mostly white-male and somewhite-female “partners” are joined by more diverseleaders of DA-affiliated labor unions and foundations.Both sets of DA donors interact with several dozen pro-fessionals (many of them women or persons of color)who lead the many think tanks, advocacy groups, andgrassroots-focused organizations that receive (oraspire to receive) contributions from DA partners.

At DA conferences, furious networking is the orderof the day—as invited professional leaders of liberalendeavors do their best to attract attention andimpress potential donors about their respective orga-nizations. The DA’s basic structure encourages thispattern, because it raises money primarily by exposingdonor members to “recommended” progressiveorganizations whose goals, resources, staffing, andachievements are vetted by the DA each year.Getting (and remaining) on the regularly updatedcore list of DA-recommended organizations is a bigdeal, because it ensures attention from DA donorsand a chance to attend the conferences and hobnobwith donors in person. Even if most approved organi-zations do not get high percentages of their budgetsfunded through DA-encouraged donations—andmost have not since the very earliest years—theirleaders still value the visibility and connections thatinvitations to attend DA conferences can bring. Fortheir part, many DA partners strive to get visibilityfor their favorite causes, issues, and organizations.

Given the multiple DA constituencies—individualpartners, institutional partners, foundation allies,and leaders of DA-approved organizations—DA staff-ers face quite a challenge as they assemble panels andsessions. To appear inclusive and hold partners in thefold, DA staff let many individual partners or sets ofpartners take ownership of particular conference ses-sions, especially breakout groups, meal-time meet-ings, or workshops focused on particular issues orgroups those partners consider vitally important.(At the Koch seminars, as far as we can gather,donor “guests” almost never take formal charge ofparts of the biannual programs.) In addition to allow-ing donors to set parts of the agenda, DA conferenceorganizers set up sessions and panels to allow as manyDA-supported progressive organizations as possible totout what they are doing or promising to do. Big-picture plenaries address overarching topics such ascurrent political challenges or strategies for fightingeconomic inequality—and presentations on thosepanels feature leaders or representatives of multipleDA-supported organizations such as the Center forAmerican Progress or Media Matters for America.

The resulting DA confabs are, quite literally,stuffed with speaking slots for as many progressiveorganizational leaders as possible—above all forleaders of longtime DA-supported organizations.For example, the spring 2010 Progress 360 confer-ence was spread over three and a half days and fea-tured ten general plenaries, five partner plenaries,and nineteen breakout sessions (offered in fourperiods). Setting aside dinnertime talks and thelast half-day when groups of partners ran a numberof workshops, most conference panels had four tosix speakers. One plenary session, remarkably, hadten speakers—including six heads of that year’score DA-funded organizations: the Center for Amer-ican Progress, the Center for Community Change,Media Matters for America, Third Way, the Centeron Budget and Policy Priorities, and the Center forSocial Inclusion. Indeed, the leaders from fullythree-quarters of the core organizations recom-mended for DA funding that year appeared onspring 2010 conference panels. Most other speakingslots went to leaders from other progressive organiza-tions, including groups working on current issueslike health reform and organizations that would inthe future win inclusion on the core DA-recom-mended list. Overall, the spring 2010 conferencehad more than three dozen speakers from assortedprogressive political organizations. Some conferencesessions focused on broad themes such as an over-view of the 2010 election and “The Progressive Nar-rative and Lessons Learned in 2009,” while othersconsidered specific policy challenges like immigra-tion or money in politics, or reviewed ways to mobi-lize key constituencies such as Latinos andmillennials. The politicians present that springwere mostly officials from the Obama White House.

48. A more complete analysis of the full run of DA confer-ences, using all of the programs except one in 2006 that has notbeen located, appears in Vanessa Williamson, Curtlyn Kramer,and Theda Skocpol, “Wealthy Progressive Donors and the ShiftingOrganizational Terrain of American Politics: The Impact of theDemocracy Alliance, 2005 to 2016” (paper presented at theAnnual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association,Chicago, IL, April 2017).


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Four years later, in the spring of 2014, the DA con-ference again followed a similar script, so much sothat we need not dwell on all the details. Onceagain, sets of four to six speakers from about threedozen progressive organizations populated thirteengeneral plenaries and sixteen breakouts (organizedin six periods)—with sessions spread, this time, overjust two and a half days. Two partner-only sessionswere also held. Once again, 2014 was a midterm elec-tion year, and some sessions focused on the upcomingNovember contests. Other sessions dealt with hottopics like gun control and criminal-justice reform,while a number of plenaries focused on economicchallenges. Presidents from DA-member unionswere more prominent on the spring 2014 programthan they had been four years earlier, yet the headsof most major DA-supported organizations stillclaimed much of the limelight—including theheads of longtime DA partner favorites like theCenter for American Progress, Media Matters, andthe Center for Community Change. Also featuredwas one aspiring Democratic Senatorial candidate,Alison Lundergan Grimes of Kentucky.

The 2014 conference marked the beginning ofGara LaMarche’s DA presidency, which would soonpropel the consortium in new directions—placing areinvigorated emphasis on state-level and grassrootsorganizing and focusing initiatives around corethemes of fighting economic inequality, slowingclimate change, and reforming U.S. democracy.Some panels, accordingly, included fresh faces fromorganizations like the New York Working FamiliesParty, NextGen Action, Color of Change, and the Res-taurant Opportunities Center. Also prominently fea-tured were leaders from Demos and the RooseveltInstitute, soon to be recommended for partnersupport in yet another revamp of the list of core DAorganizations.

By the time DA partners leave DA fall or springinvestment conferences, they have heard aboutdozens of possible groups and priorities to whichthey might donate. Wrap-up sessions sometimesurge partners to make specific commitments. Butno matter when partners finalize their contributions,they usually do not write checks to the DA itself.Instead, DA partners choose which among dozensof liberal or progressive groups they want tosupport and then make donations directly to them(perhaps with some DA staff advice and help). Insome periods, the DA has set ideal annual targetsfor partner support to each core recommendedgroup and has tried to persuade donors to makechoices that fulfill those targets. Recently, the DAhas set up a number of special “funds” supervisedby committees of partners and staffers, entitiesmeant to disperse grants to smaller progressivegroups doing grassroots outreach or working in spe-cific state and local polities. For the most part,however, DA leaders (unlike Koch network leaders,

as we will see) do not collect tens to hundreds of mil-lions of dollars to deploy as they see strategically fit.Instead, the DA staff and board manage a kind of pro-gressive investment marketplace, which selects andcertifies dozens of worthy groups and funds, so part-ners can scan the possibilities and make their ownchoices.

Koch seminars are much more focused affairs thanthe DA organizational bazaars. While DA conferencesare crowded with speakers from separate organiza-tions and issue networks, the Koch gatheringsexpose conservative wealth holders and theirspouses to libertarian and free-market ideas andoutline the latest version of a regularly updated coher-ent strategy for shifting U.S. political culture, politics,and policies toward the far economic right. As wediscuss below, the seminars and their agendas gener-ally set aside social policies, like those involving abor-tion, gay marriage, or religion, even though manyKoch donors themselves care intensely about theseissues and often support groups espousing themwith donations delivered apart from the Kochnetwork. This downplaying of social issues sets theKoch seminars apart from the DA, which features ses-sions on social issues like women’s reproductivefreedom and gay marriage, as well as sessions on eco-nomic topics. Notably, sessions at the Koch seminarsfeature leaders of a small set of interrelated politicalorganizations run by leaders designated by theKochs and their close associates. This game plan isapparent from the types and sequences of sessionslisted in Koch seminar programs.

At the very start of the June 2010 Aspen seminar, forexample, the Koch’s political-strategist-in-chief,Richard Fink, led “An Introduction to these Meetingsfor First-Time Participants” to enable them “to learnabout the strategic framework that has guided pastsuccess and that guides future action.” Four yearslater at the June 2014 Koch seminar in Dana Point,two such orientation sessions happened—one led byDavid Koch and Richard Fink on “Saving America:Our Fight to Advance Freedom and Reverse theCountry’s Decline” and another on “Understandingthe Network: A Discussion with Capability Leaders.”At the second orientation session, five major headsof core Koch organizations—Freedom Partners,AFP, the Libre Initiative, Generation Opportunity,and the Charles G. Koch Foundation—explainedtheir interrelated efforts to redirect U.S. politics. DAconferences, in contrast, always have welcome recep-tions for new partners, but not special orientation ses-sions. The DA newbies are deemed up to speed just bybeing there, whereas the Koch first-timers are consid-ered in need of careful instruction about the pur-poses and organizational arms of the overall Kochnetwork.

More broadly, Koch seminars have a standardchoreography, featuring a logical sequence ofplenary sessions through which attendees are


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herded (pleasantly, of course, with meals and breaksfor socializing in between). At the 2010 seminar,twelve of fifteen sessions (80 percent) were plenariesand three were breakout sessions (two periods offer-ing alternative workshops plus the one breakoutrestricted to first-time attendees). At the 2014seminar, the proportion of plenaries dropped totwo-thirds (15 out of 23), and there were eight break-out periods. But only some of those 2014 breakoutperiods involved alternative sessions any donorcould attend, because many segregated first-timeversus repeat participants and, at times, drew “topdonors” into specialized breakout sessions such asmeetings with important GOP politicians. Duringboth the 2010 and 2014 Koch seminars, plenaries fol-lowed a coherent pattern, starting with an openingspeech by Charles Koch—who in 2010 outlined“The Threats to American Freedom and Prosperity”and in 2014 spoke about “American Courage: OurCommitment to a Free Society.” In both gatherings,subsequent plenary sessions explained threats toliberty and strategies for responding. Then strategysessions outlined immediate and longer-termefforts: to deploy resources for the next electionand to shift ideas and policy agendas in Americansociety overall. In 2014, for instance, panels aboutelection “opportunities” introduced promising GOPcandidates for the upcoming November contests,while equally prominent panels informed donorsabout the Koch strategy to transform U.S. higher edu-cation in the years ahead.

As Koch seminars convey the master narrative insequenced plenaries, the high-dollar donors in atten-dance are exposed to the leaders of two sets of Kochorganizations that stand ready to counter perceivedthreats to American liberty. On the one hand,donors hear from officials at the Charles G. KochFoundation and the Mercatus Center, both of whichsupport libertarian scholars, policy research, and edu-cational efforts. On the other hand, donors hear fromstrategists directing policy and electoral campaigns atAFP, the Libre Initiative and Concerned Veterans forAmerica, as well as from experts at the Koch dataoperation Themis/i360. (Brief descriptions of coreKoch organizations appear in Appendix A.) Onlyoccasionally do people from independently ledoutside organizations appear on Koch seminarpanels, and the tendency to feature insiders seemsto be getting more pronounced as the Kochnetwork matures. In 2010, certain plenary panelsincluded, side by side with inner Koch honchos, thepresident of the American Enterprise Institute andthe head of the National Right to Work advocacy orga-nization. But by 2014, organizational representativeson seminar panels were almost entirely core Kochleaders. (The chief exception was the head of theUnited Negro College Fund, which had just receiveda $25 million grant from the Charles G. KochFoundation.)

In addition to organizational leaders, spring 2014Koch seminar sessions also featured leading GOP pol-iticians, including Senate leader Mitch McConnelland three aspiring Senate candidates: Cory Gardnerof Colorado, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, and JoniErnst of Iowa. Gardner and Ernst were at the timelittle-known politicians, and our research shows thatboth got bump-ups in contributions from Kochdonors after their appearances at the spring 2014meeting.49

Beyond hearing Koch leaders and favored GOPofficials or candidates speak, selected donor guestsalso get one-on-one briefings. Following the winter2014 Koch seminar, someone left behind in a hotelroom a crumpled sheet detailing dozens of smallmeetings between forty named donors (individualsor family sets) and subsets of leaders from twenty-nine Koch organizations.50 The Koch leadersinvolved in those sessions included ten national offi-cials and state directors from AFP, the head of theLibre Initiative and the president of i360, three offi-cials from the Charles G. Koch Foundation and onefrom the Mercatus Center, and a dozen top Kochmanagers affiliated with Freedom Partners, KochIndustries, and Koch Industries Public Sector. Someintimate sessions involving the wealthiest donorswere held off-site, including at a nearby Koch per-sonal residence.

The tight choreography of the Koch seminar pro-grams and encounters has a purpose. By the timethe gatherings wrap up and donors are thinkingabout where to direct their contributions, they havehad plenty of chances to hear about strategy andtactics from people in charge of most of the core orga-nizations in the integrated Koch network that willreceive the bulk of their donations (as we will soonshow). Unlike partners in the DA, Koch seminarguests contribute directly to and through Koch-con-trolled organizations, with most of their donationsgoing to the core network entities listed above inFigure 1. Seminar members may donate throughFreedom Partners, the conduit now used by theKoch network to disperse general-support grants topolitical organizations. They can donate to therecently established Freedom Partners PAC.51 Orthey can give directly to Koch entities—including bydirecting anonymous, tax-deductible contributionsto support educational missions pursued by the Mer-catus Center, the Charles G. Koch Foundation, orfoundations affiliated with AFP. Whichever of theseroutes they choose, however, Koch seminar

49. Hertel-Fernandez et al., “When Wealthy Political Contribu-tors Join Forces.”

50. Schulman and Kroll, “The Koch Brothers Left a Confiden-tial Document at Their Donor Conference”; see also Hertel-Fernan-dez et al., “When Wealthy Political Contributors Join Forces.”

51. Darren Goode and Kenneth Vogel, “Kochs Launch NewSuper PAC,” Politico, June 16, 2014 (updated June 17, 2014).


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participants fulfill their membership obligation in avery different way than DA partners meet theirs.Each individual DA partner chooses from long listsof recommended or permitted groups to fashion hisor her own menu of progressive organizations tosupport in fulfillment of the annual membershippledge, but Koch seminar guests concentrate theirgiving on interrelated groups directed by the Kochinner cadre.

How Much Money Is Raised?Big-money donor consortia have remarkable capaci-ties to aggregate and direct political funding, asboth the Koch seminars and the DA do on theirrespective ends of the U.S. political spectrum. Butavailable evidence suggests that fund-raising by theKoch operation for its affiliated organizations sub-stantially outpaces resource mobilization by its leftistcounterpart. This is apparent in Figure 5, which juxta-poses reported two-year totals for Koch donor pledgesto two-year aggregations of donations to recom-mended groups made by DA partners.52 The DAtotals in Figure 5 include reported partner donationsto both core recommended groups and to othergroups approved for partner donations (dozens ofwhich are listed on a larger DA “progressive infra-structure map” included in each conferenceprogram). These totals come from reports of theKoch seminar pledges made to the media or leakedby investigative reporters, along with internal DArecords.

Earlier we noted that while membership in theKoch seminars has increased sharply in recent years,the ranks of DA partners have grown only modestly.To be sure, the DA has recently broadened itsresource capacities by adding more institutional part-ners and affiliates—including such major labor orga-nizations as the Service Employees InternationalUnion, Communications Workers of America, theAmerican Federation of State, County, and MunicipalEmployees, the National Education Association, andthe American Federation of Teachers. Such institu-tional partners owe higher dues than individuals($60,000 per year) and pledge higher annual contri-butions (at least $1 million per year). In addition,up to twenty-three affiliated foundations can nowsend representatives to DA conferences and makeuse of DA services, with the understanding that theywill make grants to DA-listed organizations of about$200,000 per year (see Appendix C). Nevertheless,recent DA increases in both individual/family part-nerships and institutional partnerships or affiliationshave not matched the growth of Koch seminar

memberships. And there are reasons to believe thatmany Koch donors give at much higher levels thanmost DA partners do, since the total Koch seminarpledges each year exceed what we would expectgiven the minimum contributions required of Kochseminar participants.53 Accordingly, it should comeas no surprise that the overall resources raisedthrough these two consortia have diverged.

As tracked in Figure 2, since 2009–10, membershipin the Koch seminars has overtaken DA partners, andmore recently, the hundreds of millions generated bythe Koch seminars exceed DA giving by two- to three-fold (see Figure 5). For the Koch side of the equation,Figure 5 includes a conservative estimate of pledgedspending in the 2015–16 cycle. That funding wasoriginally planned for up to $889 million—andCharles Koch told the Wichita Eagle that about $500million of this two-year target was actually raised andspent in 2015.54 In 2016, the Koch network endedup redirecting funding from presidential to Congres-sional races, after Donald Trump, not a Koch brothersfavorite, won the GOP nomination. But there is everyindication that hundreds of millions were still spenton 2016 elections.55

Where Does Koch and DA Money Go?The divergent money-raising trajectories we see forthe Koch seminars versus the DA would be significanteven if the two consortia were allocating the dona-tions they amass or coordinate in analogous ways.But that is not at all the case. Simply stated, theKoch seminars are not only raising greater sumsthan the DA, they are channeling those heftierresources to a more compact set of organizationsdirectly controlled by the Koch network itself. By con-trast, DA partners are spreading more limitedfunding across a much larger number of center-leftorganizations and funds, most of which the DA itselfdoes not manage.

Data assembled from internal reports for Table 2tell the basic DA story. Even in its earliest years, theDA expanded its core list of groups recommendedfor partner support faster than it added to the ranksof donating partners—although the tens of millionsof dollars raised to beef up the center-left infrastruc-ture did grow through 2008. By 2011, however, aggre-gate DA donations were declining even though thenumber of groups on the core recommended listrose to a high point. From 2011 to 2012, the recom-mended list of core organizations was pruned signifi-cantly, but at that same juncture, a longer secondarylist of groups was placed on a “Progressive

52. The table uses data from LaMarche, “Democracy Alliance2020 Vision”; Democracy Alliance, 2020 Vision Portfolio Snapshot:Spring 2015 (prepared for Spring 2015 Democracy Alliance Invest-ment Conference, San Francisco, CA).

53. Eric Lach, “Meet the Man Who Runs the Koch Brothers’Secret Bank,” TalkingPointsMemo, September 16, 2013.

54. Wenzl, “How to Change a Company and a Country.”55. See, e.g., Americans for Prosperity Partner Prospectus: January

2017, which outlines AFP’s involvement in the 2016 down-ballotraces.


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Infrastructure Map.” Partner donations to thosedozens of additional groups counted towardmeeting their yearly minimum required contribu-tions of $200,000. In recent years, total partner dona-tions to the additional approved groups haveregularly exceeded donations to core recommendedgroups.

In very recent years, the DA’s approach of supple-menting individual with institutional membershipshas allowed it to orchestrate more funding for bothcore recommended groups and additional approvedentities. At the same time, however, the core recom-mended list of groups has seen many changes andhas expanded through the addition of new organiza-tions, as well as many new DA-managed special fundsfocused on supporting state-level political groups.56

By late 2016, the full array of highly recommendedcore DA organizations and funds stood at forty-three, a longer list than ever before—and dozensmore groups appeared on the 2016 version of theDA’s Progressive Infrastructure Map, any of them

fair game for DA partners looking to fulfill theirannual pledge commitment. “There are so manyworthy groups,” a DA board member exclaimed toone of the authors—and clearly there are notenough donated millions to meet the demand fororganizational sustenance on the left.

Meanwhile, Koch seminar dollars have followedquite a different trajectory. In Figure 5 we note that,since 2009–10, Koch seminar pledge targets have bal-looned and now reach the hundreds of millions. Asfar as we can tell, pledge targets have been met, butpublic documentation about where all the fundshave gone is incomplete. In particular, we do notknow much about donations made directly by Kochseminar members to the Charles G. Koch Founda-tion, the Mercatus Center, and other think tanksand educational entities. We know from Kochseminar programs that these organizations and theirprojects are touted to donors, and interviews givenby Charles Koch indicate that roughly 40 percent ofpledge monies may go to support network efforts toshape ideas, research, and policy debates.

Beyond educational contributions, Koch seminarmembers also channel major funding directly or indi-rectly to political organizations engaged in citizenmobilization, policy campaigns, and election-relatedactivities or spending. But which organizationsbenefit? Obviously, Koch-orchestrated donations

Fig. 5. Fund-raising by the Democracy Alliance and the Koch Seminars.

56. Democracy Alliance, 2020 Vision Framework for the DemocracyAlliance (prepared for Spring 2015 Democracy Alliance InvestmentConference, San Francisco, CA); Democracy Alliance, 2020 VisionPortfolio Snapshot: Spring 2015. Matea Gold, “Wealthy Donors onLeft Launch New Plan to Wrest Back Control in the States,” Wash-ington Post, April 12, 2015.


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could go to a wide variety of organizations on the U.S.right. A well-known portrayal of the Koch network in2012—the “Maze of Money” map issued by OpenSe-crets and the Washington Post—suggested that theKochs and their donors routinely spread grants to awide array of independently run conservative organi-zations.57 That OpenSecrets chart suggested thatKoch money is used to bankroll a vast tangle of con-servative organizations from business groups to pro-gun and right-to-life efforts. We find, however, thatthe 2012 juncture was unusual; in other years, espe-cially since 2012, contributions from seminar donorshave been used primarily to support other organiza-tions inside the Koch network.

Before 2012, possibilities for donating to politicalorganizations inside the Koch network were some-what limited. The Freedom Partners Chamber ofCommerce was not set up until late 2011; beforethen, well-established Koch groups that engaged inelectioneering and public campaigns were limitedto AFP plus a trio of policy advocacy groups: the 60Plus Association, the American Energy Alliance, andthe Center to Protect Patient Rights (CPPR, alsoknown as American Encore). During the Koch net-work’s fierce fight against President Obama’s Afford-able Care Act and the conservative crusade to defeatObama in 2012, CPPR served as a major conduit tofund political ads.58 Reportedly, Koch donors alsoused additional political funding conduits during

the early Obama years, including a group favored bymany conservatives called Donors Trust and anotherKoch-tied group called the TC4 Trust.59 However,from 2012 on, the Koch’s own “political bank,”Freedom Partners, took over as the major politicalfunding conduit, displacing CPPR.60 By then, therewere many more Koch-run political groups fordonors to support—including the Libre Initiative,Generation Opportunity, Concerned Veterans forAmerica, Themis/i360, and Aegis Strategic (seeAppendix A). In 2014, Freedom Partners alsolaunched its own super PAC.61

Empirically, we have no way to trace the specific des-tinations for any Koch seminar-inspired donationsthat flowed some years ago through Donors Trust.But for recent years, we can use IRS 990 reports thatlist donations for “general support” that went tovarious political groups through Koch conduits,including the TC4 Trust, CPPR, and Freedom Part-ners. Figure 6 sums up the grant totals from theseconduits in recent years—and also indicates the per-centages of total funding that went to the Koch net-work’s own political organizations during eachperiod.62

From these data, we can see that more than $350million in political funding channeled throughKoch conduits was widely distributed during the2011–12 election cycle—the juncture at which Open-Secrets prepared its Maze of Money chart. At that

Table 2. Democracy Alliance Trends, 2005–2016

TotalPartners/

Units

GoverningPartners

PartnerInstitutions

Foundations $ to CoreGroups/Funds

(millions)

Core Groups& Funds

Supported

OtherEligibleGroups

$ to OtherGroups

(millions)

2005 82 $32.9 92006 96 $63.8 252007 93 $53.3 302008 98 $55.6 322009 84 $48.1 272010 87 $50.9 302011 85 $45.2 332012 92 70 13 9 $39.1 19 96 $55.72013 90 69 13 8 $35.5 21 151 $40.52014 105 80 9 16 $38.0 21 152 ??2015 109 82 8 19 $75.0 38 139 ??2016 113 80 8 23 $71.0 43 143 $75.0

57. “The Koch Network: A Cartological Guide,” OpenSecrets.org,January 7, 2014, available at https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2014/01/koch-network-a-cartological-guide/.

58. Robert Maguire and Viveca Novak, “Koch Group’s IRSReport Unlocks a Few Mysteries,” OpenSecrets Blog, September 18,2013; Robert Maguire, “A Least 1 in 4 Dark Money Dollars in2012 Had Koch Links,” OpenSecrets Blog, December 3, 2013;Mayer, Dark Money.

59. Maguire and Novak, “Koch Group’s IRS Report Unlocks aFew Mysteries.”

60. Lach, “Meet the Man Who Runs The Koch Brothers’ SecretBank”; Vogel, “Koch World 2014”; Vogel, “The Koch ATM.”

61. Goode and Vogel, “Kochs Launch New Super PAC.”62. Koch organizations are defined as those listed in Appendix

A, plus the Institute for Humane Studies, which the Kochs startedsupporting decades ago.


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moment, about half of funding through these con-duits went to Koch-run political operations like AFP,but the other half funded grants scattered to severaldozen other conservative and business organizationsengaged in constituency mobilization, advocacy, andpolitical messaging in the 2012 election cycle. Inthat election cycle, the Koch network still lackedmany political capabilities of its own, so the networkchanneled grants to many other conservativegroups—including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,the Club for Growth, the National Rifle Association,and assorted Christian right organizations.

But after the 2012 efforts fell short, Koch leadersdelayed the winter 2013 Koch seminar from Januaryto April, so that the results of their network’s autopsyand strategic reevaluations could be presented todonors.63 From that point, as Figure 6 suggests, dona-tions to political organizations flowed overwhelminglythrough Freedom Partners, now the central conduitfor Koch political funding. Equally important, nolonger were grants spread around to business associa-tions and independent conservative groups outsidethe Koch orbit. Instead, Freedom Partners channeledlarge amounts in general-support grants to core Koch

groups—including $23 million to AFP, $5 million toGeneration Opportunity, and another $14 million toConcerned Veterans of America.

For a final comparison between the politicalfunding strategies of the DA and the Koch seminars,we have pulled together the pie charts in Figure 7 todramatize their respective 2013–14 patterns of orga-nizational funding. We use this time point becauseit is one where, thanks to leaked documents as wellas IRS records, we have relatively full informationon allocations by the two consortia. (However, theKoch funding allocations explored here are onlyabout half of all the monies that network deploys.As noted earlier, these data only show the explicitlypolitical donations channeled from Koch donorsthrough Freedom Partners and then regranted toother organizations disclosed on tax returns; addi-tional hundreds of millions have also gone in untrace-able ways to the Charles G. Koch Foundation andother educational entities in the larger network.)

In the DA pie chart, we classify organizations towhich partners donated into three categories: long-time core recommended groups that had been onthe main DA funding list continuously since 2007–09, all other core groups on the 2013–14 recom-mended list, and the remaining groups on the DA’svery large Progressive Infrastructure Map listingdozens of organizations to which partners may

Fig. 6. Grants from Koch Funders: How $936 Million Was Allocated by American Encore and/or FreedomPartners, 2009–2015.

63. Andy Kroll, “Exclusive: Read the Koch Brothers’ Plans forTheir Upcoming GOP Donor Retreat,” Mother Jones, April 23, 2013.


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donate in fulfillment of their membership pledges. Inthe much simpler Koch pie chart, recipients ofFreedom Partners grants are sorted into two catego-ries: political organizations controlled directly by

the Koch organization versus all others (seeFigure 1 for this classification; unlike with the DA,we do not know if the Koch seminars use an“extended” approved list to classify groups).

Fig. 7. Funding for Political Organizations through the Democracy Alliance and the Koch Seminars, 2013–14.


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The bottom line contrast is clear. Even in a two-yearperiod where roughly similar amounts of donormoney were given by DA partners and to explicitlypolitical groups through the Koch seminars/Freedom Partners conduit, the patterns of deploy-ment were quite different. The DA encouraged(and allowed) relatively small gifts to many dozensof organizations, while Koch seminar members whochanneled donations through Freedom Partnersended up concentrating their support on eight coreKoch political organizations.

ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS

At this point, it makes sense to step back and consideralternative theoretical explanations to the historical-institutional approach we are invoking here to makesense of the contrasting features and activities of theKoch and DA consortia. We have argued that thedivergences are attributable, in part, to the specificpolitical junctures at which each consortium wasformed and the strategies consortium leadersdevised to respond to political challenges. Above all,we stress the impact of the different organizationalstructures put in place for these consortia, especiallytheir membership rules and very different proceduresfor directing member contributions to arrays ofkindred right or left political organizations. Kochseminar rules concentrate donor resources inwardin support of an integrated political network thatcan nimbly form and revise overall strategies, whileDA rules have promoted scattering of resources andundercut possibilities for advancing any coherentstrategy.

But our explanatory approach is not the only possi-bility. Some scholars might reason that Koch versusDA differences are better understood as straightfor-ward expressions of the underlying individual charac-teristics of U.S. millionaires and billionaires (in termsof their wealth or fundamental ideological orienta-tions), while others might attribute the evolution ofthese donor groups to the partisan threats they havetried to counter, namely, progressive Democraticclout for the Koch network and GOP rule for theDA. We consider such alternative lines of explanationhere and, in the process, sharpen our own explana-tory account involving organizational rules andstructure.

According to one line of argument, the prefer-ences of most U.S. wealth holders lean conservativeand donors who have joined the Koch seminars mayhave very unequal holdings. Consequently, this logicsuggests, the Koch consortium finds it easier toenroll big donors than the DA—and wealth differen-tials among Koch members allow the extraordinarilywealthy Charles and David Koch to impose centraldirection on donors with less financial clout. Butthere are clear reasons to question such economic-

reductionist reasoning. Although the political lean-ings of very wealthy Americans do lean right overall,in the wake of upward-tilted wealth concentrationsince 1979, there are currently many multimillion-aires and billionaires on both ends of the partisanspectrum. Using the Forbes 400 annual rankings ofthe wealthiest Americans, political scientists AdamBonica and Howard Rosenthal have matched namesto political donation records and devised scores indi-cating each person’s ideological leanings.64 Theirdata show that Democratic donors have gainedground on the Forbes 400 lists, rising from about athird in 1983 to about 40 percent in 2012—a develop-ment that has unfolded as high-tech and informationbusinesses (which lean left) have gained ground andolder right-leaning manufacturing industries havereceded in the U.S. economy. By the time the Kochseminars and the DA were formed in the early2000s, both consortia could fish for members invery large pools—and in its earliest years, the DA actu-ally attracted more members than the Koch seminars(see Figure 2).

Nor can we say that there are big differences in thedistribution of wealth within the consortia. Becauseour lists of DA and Koch members are not complete,we cannot compare the exact wealth distributions oftheir memberships. Still, on the (incomplete) mem-bership lists we do have, both consortia have manyForbes 400–listed members. The Koch seminarshave always had many more Forbes 400 listees thanjust the two Koch brothers, suggesting that Koch lead-ership cannot simply be attributed to holdings thattower over all others in their consortium. And theDA has always included multibillionaires from theForbes 400, too—indeed, George Soros helpedlaunch the group and has always been very influen-tial, and others such as Peter Lewis, Marion Sandler,and Tom Steyer have been DA partners over the years.

A second alternative to our historical-institutionalapproach focuses on political beliefs instead of justwallets. The pedigree of this theoretical approachstretches back to 1967, when Lloyd Free and HadleyCantril argued that Americans tend to be, simultane-ously, “philosophical conservatives” and “operationalliberals”—that is, committed to general values favor-ing free markets and individual liberty and at thesame time supportive of many specific governmentefforts that deliver benefits to subsets of individuals,families, and businesses.65 Repeatedly since then,political scientists have translated this insight into atheory of modern U.S. party differences. The most

64. Adam Bonica and Howard Rosenthal, “The Wealth Elastic-ity of Political Contributions by the Forbes 400” (paper presented atthe Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association,Chicago, IL, April 2015).

65. This landmark argument is developed in Lloyd A. Free andHadley Cantril, The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of PublicOpinion (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press).


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recent version appears in Asymmetric Politics: IdeologicalRepublicans and Group Interest Democrats by Matt Gross-mann and David A. Hopkins, who argue that Repub-licans have long been ideologically united aroundfree-market, antigovernment positions, while Demo-crats argue about scattered policies that benefitvarious interest groups and constituencies.66 TheGrossmann-Hopkins theory is rigorously substanti-ated with data about U.S. public attitudes, votingtrends, and the styles of argument used by activists,politicians, and disclosed election donors. Althoughthe organized Koch and DA consortia of verywealthy donors consortia are not discussed, the Gross-mann-Hopkins logic implies that the Koch seminarsare able to concentrate donor resources on a strategi-cally unified set of organizations because their indi-vidual wealthy members are happy to advancefree-market principles in all realms of politics. Con-versely, according to this line of argument, the DAscatters largesse because, like other liberals, wealthyprogressives are invested in many different policycauses and specific social constituencies.

Is it as simple as that? Do the Koch seminars andthe DA merely reflect inherent, enduringly differentproclivities between U.S. conservatives and liberals?For various reasons, we do not find this account con-vincing. In the first place, there are reasons to doubtthat wealthy members of the Koch seminars agreemore than their DA counterparts. DA partners cer-tainly vary in their policy priorities, for example,between those who stress the fight against globalwarming and those who worry most about socialequity. And DA partners also disagree about politicalstrategies, with some stressing policy research and lob-bying, while others favor empowering outside constit-uencies. But Koch donors have diverse passions, too,as evidenced by the varied conservative groups andcauses they support outside the network itself—ranging from Christian right or Zionist organizations,for example, to pro-gun groups, libertarian causes,and antiabortion groups. Although the Kochs them-selves prioritize libertarian and free-market economicpolicies and steer clear of issues like restricting abor-tion, immigration, and LGBT rights, donors to theirnetwork espouse many additional conservative com-mitments. Members of the DeVos family, whichincludes patriarch Richard DeVos as well as daugh-ter-in-law and current Trump Secretary of EducationBetsy DeVos, have been participants in the Koch sem-inars while also being longtime supporters of theChristian right.67 Similarly, even as the Templetonfamily was singled out for praise from Charles Kochfor giving more than $1 million through the seminars,

its evangelical Christian members have given largecontributions to efforts fighting the legalization ofgay marriage.68

Nor do Koch donors concur in presidential politicsany more than DA partners do. In the 2015–16 GOPpresidential cycle, for instance, the Koch brothersand many of their donors opposed Donald Trump,who was nevertheless (sooner or later) supported byother Koch seminar participants such as Robert andRebekah Mercer, the DeVos family, and SheldonAdelson.69 This resembles the DA situation, wherepartners divided in 2008 to back Hillary Clinton,Barack Obama, or John Edwards (early on), andsplit again in 2016 between Clinton versus BernieSanders.70 Both the DA and the Koch seminarsencourage discussion of various electoral candidatesbut do not try to force overall agreements.

In the Koch seminar quest to bring memberstogether around a particular ultra-free-marketagenda, cross-cutting fault lines are downplayed orignored. If the Koch seminars were to feature reli-gious or social-conservative causes—which they donot—members would not all cheer for the same posi-tions. Furthermore, any discussions about the detailsof business policy could very well surface tensionsbetween the interests of the particular firms ownedby many Koch seminar participants versus calls bymany ultra-free-market-minded Koch participants toabolish business subsidies altogether.71 Our findingsare consistent with careful historical work by scholarssuch as Steven Teles, who stresses that conservativeleaders often have trouble knitting together diverseconstituencies active on the right—including social con-servatives focused on culture war issues, corporate inter-ests supportive of friendly government subsidies andregulations, and free-market libertarians determinedto oppose all forms of active domestic government.72

Still, without systematic interviews or access to atti-tude surveys, we have no direct measures of the indi-vidual preferences across all DA and Koch members.We do not know how attitudes are distributed or howthey have evolved. From personal interactions, weknow a bit about internal disagreements on the DAside, but for the Koch side, we only have access topublic rationales offered by members who write

66. Matt Grossmann and David. A. Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics:Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats (Oxford, UK:Oxford University Press, 2016).

67. Janet Reitman, “Betsy DeVos’ Holy War,” Rolling Stone,March 8, 2017.

68. Gavin Aronsen, “Exclusive: The Koch Brothers’ Million-Dollar Donor Club,” Mother Jones, September 6, 2011. On the Tem-pleton’s donations to block gay marriage efforts, see, e.g., DavidO’Reilly, “$1 Million for Their Own Two Cents Bryn Mawr CoupleAre Largest Individual Donors in Efforts to Ban Gay Marriage inCalifornia,” Philly.com, October 28, 2008, available at https://web.archive.org/web/20131216130758/http://articles.philly.com/2008-10-28/news/25263219_1_ban-gay-marriage-heterosexual-marriages-proposition.

69. Peter Stone, “How a Network Led by the Billionaire KochBrothers Is Riding the Trump Wave,” The Guardian, December 7,2016.

70. Bai, The Argument, afterword.71. See Rufer, “End This Corporate Welfare.”72. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement.


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op-eds or allow themselves to be quoted by name innews articles. Overall, such published rationales dolend some credence to the Grossmann-Hopkinstheory of a unified conservative rhetorical style,because Koch donors use almost the same phrasingsagain and again as they tout Charles Koch’s leader-ship to defend a “free society” and unfetteredmarkets from “big government” threats of regula-tions, taxes, spending, and subsidies. Indeed, entiregroups of Koch seminar members have endorsedsome such op-eds—such as the one that appearedin the Dallas Morning News in 2015.73 Tellingly, op-eds like this proliferated starting in 2015, whenKoch network leaders encouraged their donors todefend the Koch brothers and seminars againstliberal critics and, quite likely, provided them withtalking points and model language.74

Beyond ideological boilerplate, some of the Kochdonor rationales cite social ties and politicalstrategies of the sort we have stressed as distinctiveto contemporary donor consortia. On social under-pinnings, Minnesota television owner StanleyHubbard explained that, as of 2012, he had beenattending for years and offered that “I’ve gottenfriends to be involved, and I think others have, too,so I would guess, yes, that’s expanding.”75 In 2015,the chief executive of a lab equipment manufacturingcompany, Steve Hamilton of Reno, Nevada, explainedas he attended his fourth Koch meeting that he “rel-ishes the camaraderie of these events.”76 Also speak-ing in 2015, Michael Shaughnessy, former presidentof ColorMatrix Corporation, said he was recruited tothe seminars by a friend and now “organizes hisown twice-yearly meetings to recruit other Cleve-land-area conservatives to join the broader Kochnetwork.”77

As for strategic motives, a few public accountssuggest that wealthy conservatives may have thrownin with the Kochs out of frustration with Republicanelectoral politics as usual. “I don’t like to be

considered a Republican,” says longtime seminarattendee Bob Fettig, a Wisconsin business ownerwho is “proud to be affiliated with the groupbecause it’s more about principles.”78 Similarly, BillO’Neill, the retired Ohio president of LeasewayTransportation Corporation, “likes the groupbecause it isn’t just focused on election results andshort-term campaigns but rather on broadly influenc-ing society as a whole. ‘They’re looking at muchlonger time horizons,’ he said.”79 And the previouslyquoted Michael Shaughnessy explains that he joinedthe Koch seminars because “I was desperatelylooking for some way to do something significant,and not just write a $2,700 check” (the maximumdonation to particular candidates in federalelections).80

Even if the Grossmann-Hopkins theory resonateswith the overall rhetorical style displayed by Kochmembers, it cannot explain how the consortiachanged (or not) over time, with the Koch seminarsand larger Koch network moving from marginalityto centrality in the conservative U.S. organizationaluniverse of the early 2000s, even as the DA failed togain comparable momentum on the left. Despitethe fact that Charles Koch was, as always, pushing lib-ertarian, free-market ideas, the Koch seminars werein their first years tiny and not very attractive tomost conservative big-money people. Even after the2006 and 2008 elections, alarmed conservativewealth holders had other venues where they couldchannel attention and money—for example, Republi-can Party committees, the Chamber of Commerceand other business associations, and social-conserva-tive associations like the National Rifle Associationand Christian right operations. All of these were estab-lished core sectors in the Republican Party coalitionand the conservative organizational universe of theearly 2000s. Yet within a decade the rising Kochnetwork rivaled earlier core conservative players,including the Republican Party itself, in its capacitiesto raise and deploy resources. As we will describebelow, the centerpiece organization in the Kochnetwork—AFP—had by the 2014 election cycleabout as many field staff as the GOP.81

If constant philosophical proclivities cannotexplain post-2000 shifts on the U.S. right, theseimportant changes can be understood as a conflu-ence of national political shifts and organizationalchoices made by the founders of the Koch consor-tium. This brings us to yet another, very differentline of counterargument that some analysts mightmake to the institutional as well as historicallydynamic account we offer here. There is no question

73. Deason and Deason, “What Do the Koch Brothers Want?”This op-ed was also cosigned by other wealthy Dallas Koch seminarmembers, namely, Thomas O. Hicks, Thomas Hicks Jr., Elaine Mar-shall, E. Pierce Marshall Jr., Sally and Forrest Hoglund, Tandy andLee Roy Mitchell, and Gayla and Jim Von Ehr, who all said theycould be reached through the Freedom Partners Chamber of Com-merce, “an organization they support and that organized the Kochbrothers’ recent gathering.”

74. The feistiness of wealthy Koch donors who resent beingcriticized by the left and have decided to “stand up” for what theybelieve comes through splendidly in O’Connor, “Donors WhoFund Koch Brothers’ Causes Say They’re Tired of Being ‘Demon-ized.’” This article provides a glimpse into social ties and moral sol-idarity that make the Koch seminars an excellent example of thesort of elite social movement sociologist Isaac Martin featured inhis book Rich People’s Movements.

75. Hubbard is quoted in Kenneth P. Vogel and Tarini Parti,“Inside Koch World,” Politico, June 15, 2012.

76. Hamilton is quoted in O’Connor, “Donors.”77. Shaughnessy is discussed in O’Connor, “Donors.”

78. Fettig is quoted in O’Connor, “Donors.”79. O’Neill is discussed and quoted in O’Connor, “Donors.”80. Shaughnessy is quoted in O’Connor, “Donors.”81. Philip Bump, “Americans for Prosperity May Be America’s

Third-Biggest Political Party,” Washington Post, June 19, 2014.


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that both the Koch seminars and the DA were formedat key moments in response to perceived threats theiroriginal wealthy members felt from the other side ofthe U.S. ideological spectrum—threats these foun-ders did not think their own side was adequatelymeeting. But the key threats were not just partisan,and the founders of each consortium put in placerules and procedures that ultimately shaped member-ship possibilities and clout thereafter.

On the Koch seminar side, we acknowledge thatmembership burgeoned after 2005 in response topartisan gains by Democrats in the 2006 Congressio-nal elections and, even more spectacularly, afterObama and Congressional Democrats both tri-umphed in 2008. But in our view it is crucial tonote that the Koch network’s institutional founda-tions and early organizational achievements werealready in place prior to these partisan shifts. TheKoch seminars were launched in 2003 and thuswere already meeting when, following 2006 and2008, growing numbers of wealthy U.S. conservativeswere jarred into looking for new ways to build extra-party power. Furthermore, the Kochs and theirseminar donors were already funneling resourcesinto AFP, which by 2006 and 2007 had state as wellas national organizational capacities to push ultra-free-market candidates and policies outside theGOP itself.

For wealthy U.S. conservatives frustrated with thelate Bush administration and with the GOP’s capacityto counter rising Democrats, the Koch seminars andKoch-created political organizations including AFPoffered something new and hardline.82 As more andmore wealthy conservative business people attendedKoch meetings in the mid-2000s, camaraderiekicked in—and participants responded favorably tothe political strategies outlined by the Koch brothersand their closest associates that had been previouslyestablished. Sufficient enthusiasm and loyalty wasbuilt to keep donors on board even when the Kochleaders had to recalibrate following defeats likethose in 2012. Very likely, conservative businessleaders appreciated that Koch-orchestrated reevalua-tions were prompt, much as they might have hopedwould happen when the sales of a business enterprisefell off. Unlike the Republican Party’s autopsies, Kochrecalibrations happened very fast and decisively.

Arguably, the structures and rules of wealthy donorconsortia go hand in hand with their appeals to poten-tial members. The Koch seminars have flourished at atime when wealthy conservatives are desperate to pushback against Democratic gains and policies—andwhen many do not see GOP politics as it existed

through the Bush era as adequate to the task. Aswealthy individuals—more so than corporate manag-ers with organizational reasons to be cautious—theKoch donors can respond enthusiastically to an ideo-logically pure message delivered in socially congenialmeetings they attend with spouses. But the Koch“guests” are also hard-headed elites used to gettingtheir way; they want to win elections and policybattles and build political power, not just talk. Aidedby the downs and ups of recent GOP and conservativefortunes, Charles Koch and other network leadershave convinced their millionaire and billionairedonors that they know more about how to build con-servative elite power than the GOP itself.

The centralized structure of the Koch seminars andnetwork allows for trial-and-error strategic nimblenessacross election cycles, along with longer-term effortsto pursue educational as well as political goals. Fur-thermore, the placement of the seminars within theoverall Koch network has prevented donors frombeing locked in or captured by any one grant-receiving organization or fixed strategic approach. Ifany given tactic or organization fails or does notbecome associated with political gains, it can bescrapped or revised. People can be moved aroundacross network efforts, and Koch-run political organi-zations funded by the consortium can be created,shut down, or merged as performance measureswarrant and strategies change.83 Empirically speak-ing, all of these things regularly happen in thelarger Koch political operation—in sharp contrastto the greater degrees of organizational and leader-ship lock-in that seem apparent in the hundreds ofseparate organizations operating on the U.S. politicalleft.

When the DA got going in 2005, the foundersexpressed a resolve to avoid doing the same oldthings, similar to the resolve of the post-2000 Kochnetwork builders. DA founders planned to redirectdonations to bolster a few innovative operations thatwould beef up the Democratic Party’s infrastructurefor policy planning, messaging, and voter mobiliza-tion. But in the formative phases these DA foundersadopted marketplace procedures for membershipand channeling donations that—perhaps uninten-tionally—encouraged actual and potential DAdonor partners to push for ever more preexistingU.S. liberal organizations to be added to the DA’s reg-ularly updated investment menus. Against the back-drop of the larger U.S. political context, thoseprocedures helped to set the early twenty-first-

82. We see the grassroots and elite reactions as somewhat sep-arate, although both aimed to push the GOP. On the Tea Party, seeTheda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remak-ing of Republican Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press,2012).

83. Perhaps most notable is the rigorous postmortem on the2012 election that the Kochs commissioned to “re-examine ourvision and the strategies and capabilities required for success.”See Paige Lavender, “Koch Brothers Postpone Post-ElectionMeeting,” Huffington Post, December 11, 2012, available athttps://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/11/koch-brothers-_n_2277700.html.


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century DA on paths not fully envisaged by thefounders.

Neither of the wealthy donor consortia featuredhere was launched on virgin terrain. As any histori-cal-institutional analysis recognizes, new organiza-tions are invariably established amid others alreadyin place. For the DA, in particular, the preexistingorganizational context was crowded. Between the1960s and 1990s, new waves of liberal advocacy andsocial rights groups emerged by the thousands inU.S. civic life, and they were usually led by highly edu-cated professionals pursuing nonprofit careers inWashington, DC, New York, and other liberal metro-politan centers.84 Wealthy donors of liberal benthad long been courted by such advocacy groupsworking on behalf of causes ranging from environ-mental protection to LGBTQ and minority rights topro-choice reproductive policy. By the time DA gotoff the ground in 2005, most of the wealthy donorsit sought to recruit had strong, preexisting organiza-tional commitments. As DA founder Rob Steinobserved in a 2006 symposium, the left already had“a lot of existing institutions” of the sort the DAhoped to foster.85 Thus when the fledgling DA putin place membership rules that required regulardebates about lists of liberal organizations to recom-mend for partner donations, the effect—perhapsnot foreseen at the time—was to create overwhelmingincentives for existing and new members to push fortheir favorite existing groups to be endorsed by theDA. That is exactly what happened (as Table 2shows). Over the years, much DA staff and donorenergy was devoted to arguments about adding orsubtracting listings of particular advocacy groups,think tanks, constituency-mobilizing efforts, and soforth.

Furthermore, resource flows through the DAtended to become locked into the accumulation ofrecommended groups, each run by its own profes-sional leaders who maneuvered to present theircause to DA donors at biannual conferences—andwho certainly fought any efforts to remove theirgroups from the recommended DA list. All of thishas made it difficult for DA consortium leaders topursue any overarching political strategy—and hasmade it cumbersome for even determined DAreformers of the sort that have recently emerged to

free up donor resources to meet new U.S. politicalchallenges as they arise.

In principle, something similar could have hap-pened on the right. Although the conservative inter-est group landscape in the early 2000s was probablyless fragmented than the liberal one, when theKoch seminars got started, there were many estab-lished conservative power players—including theU.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business asso-ciations, antitax groups like the Club for Growth, theNational Rifle Association and other gun rightsgroups, and a plethora of Christian right and pro-life associations. However, the Koch seminars neverinstalled any rules or procedures analogous to theDA marketplace arrangements. Even though leadersfrom independent conservative groups such as theU.S. Chamber of Commerce or the American Enter-prise Institute appeared on particular Koch seminarpanels, their organizations were never officiallyendorsed to receive ongoing Koch donations (infact, in one of our interviews, we were told that thehead of the American Enterprise Institute resentedthe Kochs for “stealing” his donors at a seminarmeeting).

Unlike the DA, the Koch consortium remained“free” of fixed entanglements to independent, profes-sionally run organizations, so donor money could bedirected to the Kochs’ own political operations andeducational charities, including some groups theKochs had already built up before the launch of theseminars. This could not have happened withoutagreement from actual and potential donors. Butbecause previous conservative power players falteredsoon after the seminars were started and conservativespanicked about the rise of Democrats and the effec-tiveness of the Bush GOP, the Koch network builderscould pick up the slack—offering a socially congenialand politically attractive outlet for right-leaningwealth holders determined to find new venues fortheir passions and their money.

WEALTHY DONOR CONSORTIA AND THE SHIFTING U.S.POLITICAL TERRAIN

If the chief missions of both the Koch seminars andthe DA are to bolster and reconfigure long-term orga-nizational infrastructures on the right and left, whatcan we say about their accomplishments to date?Although much more research remains to be done,we briefly suggest how the rise of these wealthydonor consortia has shifted organizational resourceson the right and left and influenced policy agendasand battles in national and state politics.

The Big Right TiltAt the start of our work on donor consortia and otherorganizations two years ago, we worked with existingliteratures and experts to draw up lists of all of the

84. On the recent explosion of liberal groups, see ThedaSkocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management inAmerican Civic Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,2003), chaps. 4–6; Jeffrey Berry, The New Liberalism (Washington,DC: Brookings Press, 1999); Kay Schlozman, Traci Burch, PhilipEdward Jones, Hye Young You, Sidney Verba, and Henry E. Brady,“Washington Representatives Study (Organized Interests in Wash-ington Politics)—1981, 1991, 2001, 2006, 2011” (ICPSR35309-v1,Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research,Ann Arbor, MI, September 15, 2014).

85. Shaffer, “How Vast the Left Wing Conspiracy?” 13–14.


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major think tanks, issue advocacy groups, constitu-ency-mobilizing associations, national political partycommittees, and donor organizations (apart fromindividual candidate PACs) as of 2002 and 2014. Wealso gathered data on groups’ annual budgets atthose junctures. Detailed in Appendices D and E,these left and right universe lists are not the onlyones that might be drawn up, but we are confidentthat they reflect the most important left and rightpolitical organizations operating at two nonpresiden-tial years before and after the establishment of the twowealthy donor consortia examined here. By examin-ing changes in the shares of the total budgetary piesfrom 2002 to 2004, we can see that especially tellingshifts occurred in the U.S. conservative universeover this short period.

On the right, there were startling shifts away fromparty control, as documented in Figure 8. Especiallytelling is the shrinking share of total right resourcescontrolled by Republican Party committees—a sharethat plummeted from 53 percent in 2002 to 30percent by 2014—and the correlative expansion inshares controlled by nonparty entities, and especiallyby right-wing donor groups and, above all, the Kochseminars. Although various old and new groups wereinvolved in the growth of the extra-party shares onthe right from 2002 to 2014, the expanding Kochnetwork was crucial, as we can see from the groupslisted in blue boldface in Appendix D. The Koch sem-inars, the Freedom Partners Koch funding conduit,and AFP all played big roles in shifting funding flowsand reconfiguring the organizational universe towardthe ultra-free-market right. The Kochs and their

donors say they want to push and pull Republicanofficeholders and candidates in order to move thecenter of gravity in U.S. politics and policymakingtoward the antigovernment, ultra-free-market right.Shifting organizational patterns and resource sharessuggest that they have done just that.

In contrast, Democratic Party committees did notlose ground compared to nonparty organizations.The DA may have played a small role in boostingshares for some sectors but, overall, DemocraticParty committees and long-standing major liberalorganizations like the labor unions, the NAACP, andPlanned Parenthood continued to hold sway in2014 just as they had in 2002—and the overallshares of party versus nonparty resources remainedremarkably stable. Clearly, the DA did not displacethe Democratic Party in the same way as the Kochseminars have done for the GOP.

A second way to look at the impact of America’swealthy donor consortia is to consider whether—and how effectively—they have targeted cross-stateinfrastructure development. Because the UnitedStates is a federated political system, “national” politi-cal clout in Congress and the Electoral College isgrounded in widespread leverage across politicalgeography, not just in money and staffers deployedin big metropolises and Washington, DC.

Well before the Koch seminars and the DA werelaunched in the early 2000s, cross-state organizationalnetworks grew on both the left and right (beyond thetwo major political parties themselves). On the left,labor union federations were crucial—especially thepublic-sector unions, including teacher unions, that

Fig. 8. Shifting Organizational Resource Allocations of the U.S. Right, 2002–2014.


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had a presence and clout in many states and oftentook the lead in fights about taxes and social pro-grams generally. In addition, from the late 1980s,two cross-state networks, the State Priorities Partner-ship (earlier called the State Fiscal Analysis Initiative)and the Economic Analysis and Research Network,linked liberal policy research organizations spreadacross the states.

Meanwhile, the right built its own state-level thinktank network, called the State Policy Network(SPN), from 1986 on; after starting small in 1973,the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)became very effective from the 1990s on at linkingbusinesses seeking state-level policy changes to draft“model bills” for Republicans to introduce in state leg-islatures.86 Over several decades, these cross-stateorganizational networks were supported by theKoch brothers and donors who would eventuallyjoin their seminars. Tellingly, however, when theKoch donor consortium was established in the2000s, it did not just keep doing more of the same.Instead, it added to conservative cross-state capacitiesby building up AFP as a federated organization able todeploy money, paid staffers, and volunteer activists instate-level elections and public policy battles.

As Figure 9 displays, the spread of AFP was steadyafter its launch in 2004—and notably, the organiza-tion quickly expanded into long-standing liberal andDemocratic Party strongholds. By 2005 AFP hadalready installed a paid director in the state of Wiscon-sin and started to build capacities the Koch networkand right-wing allies would use to help defeat laborunions and reshape that state’s politics and public pol-icies. North Carolina was an early AFP target, too. In2008–10, even as Democrats controlled the presi-dency and both houses of Congress in Washington,DC, the right-wing “troika” (as we label the combina-tion of SPN, ALEC, and AFP) was positioned to shapepolicy agendas and legislative outcomes in dozens ofstates as soon as Republicans gained new governor-ships and legislative majorities starting in 2010.

On the other end of the partisan spectrum, the DAfrom its inception has recurrently tried to build capac-ities at the state level. Key staff leaders and groups ofdonors have repeatedly focused on particular states,especially those that are home to many partners.And the DA’s lists of core recommended organiza-tions have always included the Center on Budgetand Policy Priorities, which coordinates liberalresearch organizations across many states throughthe State Priorities Partnership.

Furthermore, since Gara LaMarche took the DAhelm in 2014—and especially after Hillary Clintonlost her bid for the White House in November

2016—the DA has ramped up efforts to build infra-structure and coordinate donor work in the states.New state-focused DA funds have been added tothe core investment menus, and starting in 2014,the DA also began recommending support forthe newly launched State Innovation Exchange, orSiX for short. This organization seeks to counterALEC by supporting self-identified “progressive”officeholders in state legislatures across the country.In 2017, SiX announced the creation of a new politi-cal arm called SiX Action to channel contributions tothe campaigns of progressive candidates in the states.

Despite such long-standing and recently intensifiedDA efforts, however, the progressive consortiumclearly remains far behind the Koch network in nur-turing cross-state capacities. Not only do left-leaningcross-state organizations receive much less largessefrom DA donors and work with much smallerbudgets than the conservative troika powerhouses,the overall reach of the left efforts falls far short ofthe reach of conservative cross-state networks.Unlike the Koch network’s AFP, even recentlyramped-up DA efforts mostly focus on friendly territo-ries. So far, for example, SiX and assorted DA-encour-aged state donor groups principally hold sway inliberal states like California, Minnesota, Washington,and Oregon, and do not reach into GOP or conserva-tive strongholds.

Why It Matters—Donor Consortia and Pivotal PolicyBattlesAmerica’s recently established wealthy donor consor-tia, as we outlined at the beginning of this article, setout to reshape the overall organizational terrain ofpolitics and governance—above all because theirdonor members hope to further very differentpublic policy agendas. Koch seminar members wantto shrink taxes, social spending, and government’sregulatory footprint in the market economy, whileDA donors favor government steps to promotesocial inclusion and socioeconomic equality. Thebottom line for both consortia, therefore, lies inreshaping public policy debates and governmentactivities at all levels of the U.S. federal system—andthe available evidence (which we can only briefly indi-cate here) suggests that the Koch seminars and Kochnetwork have had a much greater impact than the DAand its aligned organizations.

With the Koch seminars providing big money, theKoch network has very rapidly built virtually a thirdpolitical party machine in the United States—amachine that is intertwined with the GOP but notdirectly under the control of official party leaders orcommittees. With AFP and the Koch seminars at itsheart, this new machine both helps fund electioncampaigns for free-market-oriented Republicansand, once such GOPers win office, effectivelypushes them to legislate free-market policy goals in

86. Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, “Who Passes Business’s‘Model Bills’? Policy Capacity and Corporate Influence in U.S.State Politics,” Perspectives on Politics 12 no. 3 (2014), 582–602.


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the states and U.S. Congress, even when the policiesat issue are not popular. Elsewhere we have describedsome of the key Koch policy accomplishments inrecent years: persuading most Republicans in Con-gress to obstruct carbon taxes and other steps todeal with global warming, supporting state-levelcurbs of labor union rights, and rolling back pro-labor measures like minimum wage increases.87

On the left edge of the Democratic Party, mean-while, DA donors have contributed to groups thatadvocate for progressive policy stands such as a $15minimum wage, single-payer health insurance, andstronger regulations to fight global warming. Never-theless, such progressive regulatory gains and urbanordinances stand at risk of being undone by GOP-dominated state legislatures and by the post-2016Trump administration. For example, although some

twenty-six states have recently increased theirminimum wage levels and more than thirty citieshave followed suit, the right-wing troika of ALEC,the SPN think tanks, and AFP state organizationshas been quite successful in persuading GOP legisla-tures to block or undo pro-labor laws and have alsoused state legislative clout to preempt or roll backurban ordinances. As of 2016, nearly six in ten Amer-icans lived in a state that had preempted local-levelminimum wage hikes.88

The battles that have raged over comprehensivehealth reform since 2008 in Washington, DC, andacross the U.S. states are especially telling forunderstanding the contrasting accomplishments ofthe Koch versus DA consortia. As David Leonhardtof the New York Times pointed out, the Affordable

Fig. 9. The Growth of Americans for Prosperity.Sources: IRS reports, AFP prospectuses; media reports.

87. Skocpol and Hertel-Fernandez, “The Koch Network andRepublican Party Extremism.”

88. Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, State Capture: How Conserva-tive Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the AmericanStates—and the Nation (in press), chap. 7.


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Care Act enacted by Congress in March2010—following years of fierce partisan warfare—was the single most economic-equality-enhancingU.S. federal legislation enacted in half acentury.89 What is more, when the Supreme Courtupheld this law in June 2012, it also ruled that eachstate could decide whether or not to implement thenew federally funded expansion of Medicaid cover-age—setting off new partisan and ideological battlesthat have raged across the U.S. states ever since.

Through all phases of the enactment and imple-mentation of health reform, the wealthy donor con-sortia and their affiliated organizations playedpredictable partisan roles—but operated in tellinglydifferent ways to quite different effects.

From the start, the Koch network spearheadedunremitting opposition to health reform. At theJanuary 2009 Koch seminar meeting in PalmSprings, California, wealthy donors sounded thealarm about Democratic plans for health reform,prodding the network to launch comprehensiveefforts to block, undercut, and delay.90 This coincidedwith floods of new wealthy conservatives clamoring tojoin the Koch seminars and channel resources tofurther Koch-led efforts. As Congress deliberatedover health reform legislation in 2009 and 2010, AFPhelped organize “kill the bill” protests outside theU.S. capitol plus some 300 rallies across the country.Most visibly, AFP coordinated 2009 town hall proteststargeting lawmakers. As one Koch operativeexplained, “We packed these town halls with peoplewho were just screaming about this thing. . . .Weknew we had to make that summer absolute hell.”91

AFP again moved front and center after the 2012Supreme Court decision tossed Medicaid expansionchoices back to the states, because Koch networkleaders quickly realized that this ruling offered asecond chance to limit and eviscerate health reform.“From the very beginning, we turned to a state-by-state effort to stop the expansion of Medicaid,” AFP’shead Tim Phillips explained to a journalist, “Medicaidexpansion and Obamacare has been the issue we’veworked on more than any other single issue.”92 In2015 and 2017, AFP donor prospectuses ( found byjournalists) featured blocking implementation of theAffordable Care Act as one of AFP’s top priorities.93

Fueled by burgeoning flows of Koch donor money,

AFP and other Koch network groups ran ads againststate-level GOP lawmakers who so much as contem-plated acquiescing to pressures from many businessassociations to accept federal money to expand Medic-aid; AFP also organized opposition rallies on the stepsof statehouses and flooded legislators’ inboxes andvoicemails with messages from activists. Such effortswere not always successful, but research we have pub-lished elsewhere shows that they contributed signifi-cantly to blocking Medicaid expansion in many ofthe nineteen holdout states between 2013 and 2016.94

In contrast to the often successful contributionsKoch donors made to oppositional efforts, the DAhas been only a minor and temporary player inAffordable Care enactment and implementation.During the policy planning and grassroots mobiliza-tion efforts that happened from 2006 through early2010, the DA was just taking shape, building fromeighty-two partners in 2005 to eighty-seven in 2010.DA donors certainly cheered on Democratic andObama administration efforts to enact healthreform, and DA-connected organizations wereinvolved in the overall drama. But the DA itself wasnot central, because the lead role was taken by anumbrella group called Health Care for AmericaNow (HCAN).95 Launched in 2007, HCAN knittogether some 900 local, state, and national organiza-tions, including labor unions, community groups,and advocacy groups, and at its height, HCANdeployed forty-five state directors.

This multiyear, nationally federated HCANcoalition was funded not by the DA but by duesfrom participating groups and grants from privatefoundations—buoyed above all by tens of millions ofdollars from Atlantic Philanthropies, whose president

89. David Leonhardt, “In Health Bill, Obama Attacks WealthInequality,” New York Times, March 23, 2010.

90. Mayer, Dark Money, 185–97.91. Eliana Johnson, “Inside the Koch-Funded Ads Giving Dems

Fits,” National Review, March 31, 2014; Mayer, Dark Money, 238.92. Paige Winfield Cunningham, “Meet the Group Blocking

Obamacare’s Medicaid Expansion,” Washington Examiner, April 8,2015.

93. Americans for Prosperity, Partner Prospectus: Winter 2015(Arlington, VA: Americans for Prosperity) available at https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2035387-merged-document-2.html; Americans for Prosperity Partner Prospectus: January 2017.

94. Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Theda Skocpol, and DanielLynch, “Business Associations, Conservative Networks, and theOngoing Republican War over Medicaid Expansion,” Journal ofHealth Politics, Policy, and Law 41 no. 2 (2016), 239–86. Along theline of the work of Frank Baumgartner and his colleagues—FrankR. Baumgartner, Jeffrey M. Berry, Marie Hojnacki, David C.Kimball, and Beth L. Leech, Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins,Who Loses, and Why (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,2009)—a counterargument could be made that it is always easierfor lobbying groups to block legislative steps than to pass newones. This is true, but the Medicaid expansion struggle was notjust about whether GOP-dominated state legislatures would enactbills to expand a social benefit Democrats wanted. It was alsoabout whether ultra-conservative groups could keep other conser-vatives, usually business groups led by GOP governors, from accept-ing hundreds of millions to billions of dollars of incremental moneyfrom the federal government. Political scientists usually expectmassive amounts of fiscally flexible money to carry the day, espe-cially for state governments that must balance budgets annually.That had certainly been the norm in the Medicaid program inthe past; see, e.g., Frank J. Thompson, Medicaid Politics: Federalism,Policy Durability, and Health Reform (Washington, DC: GeorgetownUniversity Press, 2012).

95. Richard Kirsch, Fighting for Our Health: The Epic Battle toMake Health Care a Right in the United States (Albany, NY: SUNYPress, 2012), chap. 3.


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at the time was Gara LaMarche. It was fortunate forthe DA that it was not called upon to supportHCAN or an effort like it, because the fledgling pro-gressive consortium could not have met this chal-lenge at a time when DA donors were spreadingabout $50 million per year across some twenty-fiveto thirty progressive groups (see Table 2). Some ofthe DA’s beneficiary organizations were certainlyinvolved in HCAN, so the DA helped indirectly. ButDA donor contributions were small in relation tooverall needs. Furthermore, the DA in its first yearswas contending with strong pushes and pulls fromwealthy members or recruits pressing many particularliberal organizations and causes for DA support. Inthe DA world, there could be nothing comparableto the strategic recognition that dawned on topKoch network leaders in 2009 that America’s nextbig battle over redistributive social spending, thehealth reform wars, was worth pushing to the top ofthe agenda. DA leaders lacked the financial and stra-tegic capacities it would have taken to spearheadreform enactment.

Major reform legislation is, however, never accom-plished simply in the enactment phase. Implemen-tation battles rage for years, as happened forSocial Security in the past and has certainly proventrue for the Affordable Care Act now.96 So the DAhad later opportunities, beyond the enactmentphase, to get involved—especially when HCANfolded its tents. HCAN celebrated victory when theAffordable Care Act passed Congress in 2010,yet also kept its doors open, in reduced form,through the early judicial battles, initial administra-tive rulings, and Obama reelection campaign,before deciding to wind down most of their substan-tive operations at the end of 2013. Founder RichardKirsch explained that “HCAN had done its job ofwinning and securing the law. It’s leaving to otherorganizations the job of defending and improvingthe law.”97

For all of its comprehensive and impressive quali-ties, HCAN was a one-time coalition-building effort,a larger example of the sorts of ad hoc, temporarycooperation that liberal groups engage in constantlyto fight one or another legislative battle.

HCAN was not, and could not be, the equivalent ofthe kind of sustained federated organization buildingthat the Koch network of the 2000s was engaged in bymarrying the Koch seminar donors to a steadilyexpanding political machine centered in AFP.However, by the time HCAN disbanded at the endof 2013, why couldn’t the DA consortium fund

sustained and nationally federated efforts to fullycarry through health reform? In hindsight, it wouldhave been an ideal moment for the DA to step in—either to fund a new iteration of HCAN or to con-struct some kind of continuing replacement—espe-cially since HCAN had already involved many DAallies and funded organizations in creating a mean-ingful grassroots presence in so many of the Medicaidexpansion holdout states. By 2014, in fact, the DArecruited as its new president none other than GaraLaMarche, who had funded HCAN when he was thedirector at Atlantic Philanthropies, so it can hardlybe said that DA lacked leaders who understood whatHCAN had done and how crucial it had been topushing Democrats in Congress to enact healthreform in the first place.

But it was not to be. Considerable evidence sup-ports the conclusion that the DA has done little todraw attention to or support cross-state efforts onbehalf of Medicaid expansion. Since 2014, as wehave recounted, the DA-endorsed SiX has nevermade Medicaid expansion one of its priorities.And, more broadly, Medicaid expansion barely regis-tered on agendas of the DA as state battles raged.Reviewing the full run of DA conference agendasand programs from the spring of 2010, shortly afterthe Affordable Care Act was signed into law,through the fall 2015 meeting, we found only eightpanels or events that mentioned the health reformlaw, most of them convened before the 2012Supreme Court ruling that sparked the ongoingstate-level Medicaid battles.

In short, both before and after Gara LaMarchebecame DA president in 2014, DA investment in sus-tained cross-state organizing around Medicaid expan-sion was never a top consortium priority. Why not? Wecan rule out the possibility that alternative liberalorganizations were adequate to the challenge. Theleading federated labor union active on behalf ofhealth reform was the Service Employees Interna-tional Union, but its memberships and resourceswere concentrated in Democratic states. National pro-gressive advocates doing outreach into GOP statesnever had an amount of funding even close to conser-vative opponents, and pro-expansion coalitionsmostly had to be assembled state by state withoutaccess to the cross-state support available on theright through AFP and the other existing conservativefederated networks.98

Once again, we hypothesize that limitationsimposed by the DA’s structure may well explain theconsortium’s absence from this key struggle. Over itsentire life span, the left consortium’s marketplace

96. See, e.g., Eric M. Patashnik, Reforms at Risk: What HappensAfter Major Policy Changes Are Enacted (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 2008).

97. Harold Pollack, “The Group That Got Health ReformPassed Is Declaring Victory and Going Home,” Washington Post,January 5, 2014.

98. Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Vanessa Williamson, andTheda Skocpol, “Elite Donor Consortia and the Shifting Landscapeof U.S. Political Organizations” (paper presented at the AnnualMeeting of the American Political Science Association,San Francisco, CA, August 2017), 30–49.


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design has made it difficult for the DA to prioritizeany one specific issue or campaign, given all of thecompeting demands from partners. Unlike theKoch seminars, the DA is much more dependent onthe varied passions of its partners to set agendasand priorities—and Medicaid expansion just neverseemed to capture a lot of liberal donor imagination.This crucial redistributive battle was not constantly inthe national spotlight, and it received only sporadicattention at DA meetings amid all of the other poten-tial topics that concern partners—such as campaignfinance reform, climate change, gender equality,and candidate recruitment. What is more, duringthe crucial years at issue, the DA’s increasingly impor-tant institutional partners, the unions, were preoccu-pied with other concerns such as defending unionrights and advancing minimum wages and workerprotections.

Limited capacities for cross-state action are anotherreason for relative DA disinterest, we believe, becausestrategies and structures often evolve together. Even ifcertain DA leaders—like Gara LaMarche starting in2014—understand how important Medicaid expan-sion battles are in the larger U.S. political economy,the DA and its panoply of supported organizationssimply have not had much capacity to reach intoand across most U.S. states. The Koch seminars, bycomparison, could seize that moment to redirectAFP’s already widely institutionalized capacitiestoward Medicaid battles in dozens of states. Invest-ments in the cross-state capacities of AFP enabledKoch donors and their political network to makenimble and extensive contributions to dozens ofstate-level campaigns against Medicaid expansion,many of them successful. Meanwhile, the absent orunderdeveloped cross-state presence of organizationssupported by the DA may have weakened that consor-tium’s willingness as well as ability to help supportersof Medicaid in lagging states get over the finish line inthis pivotal battle over socioeconomic equality in theUnited States.

CONCLUSION: THE VALUE OF RESEARCH ON DONORCONSORTIA

Political scientists are increasingly paying attention towealthy political donors, but most research to date hastreated the nation’s growing ranks of multimillion-aires and billionaires as disaggregated contributorsto particular election campaigns. As we have shown,such approaches do not capture the full impact ofcurrent U.S. political philanthropy. Since the mid-2000s, newly formed conservative and progressivedonor consortia—above all the Koch seminars andthe DA—have magnified the impact of wealthydonors by raising and channeling ever more moneynot just into elections but also into full arrays of cooper-ating political organizations.

These consortia also matter socially and culturally,because they bring donors and political leaderstogether in repeated interactions that foster sharedidentities, priorities, and vocabularies. Furthermore,as we have shown in detail in this article, the rulesand institutional arrangements of donor consortiamatter above and beyond the characteristics andviews of their individual wealthy members. TheKoch seminars, from their inception, were runaccording to rules that allowed donations to be chan-neled into building a virtual third political party orga-nized around AFP, an overarching political networkable not only to electorally support the RepublicanParty but also to push and pull its candidates andoffice holders in preferred ultra-free-market policydirections.

Attention to organized donor consortia can speakto ongoing debates in political science about right-ward-tilted partisan polarization and the ways govern-ment fuels growing economic inequality. Research onthese innovative formations takes scholars wellbeyond traditional concerns with individual activismtoward sharper understandings of divergent organiza-tional capacities on the U.S. left and right. To thedegree that wealthy donor consortia have succeededin building organizational infrastructures, they haveshifted the resources available for developing policyproposals, pressing demands on lawmakers, andmobilizing ordinary Americans into politics. What ismore, as Steve Teles reminds us, the influence ofphilanthropists on organizations can reverberatewidely.99 When plutocratic collectives impose newagendas on political organizations seeking to attractfinancial resources, the funders reshape routines,goals, and centers of power in U.S. politics wellbeyond the budgetary impact of particular grants.

Our analysis of the Koch and DA consortia high-lights that a great deal of big-money influence flowsthrough mechanisms other than individual or busi-ness donations to the electoral and lobbying opera-tions highlighted by most existing studies of moneyin politics. To understand how the wealthy are reshap-ing U.S. politics, we need to look not just at their elec-tion and lobbying expenditures but also at theirconcerted investments in many kinds of political orga-nizations operating across a variety of fields and func-tions. Only in this way can we account for the starkinequalities in government responsiveness docu-mented by researchers such as Martin Gilens, LarryBartels, and Benjamin Page.100

99. Steven Teles, “Organizational Maintenance, The Funder-Grantee Nexus, and the Trajectory of American Political Develop-ment” (paper presented at Conference Honoring the Life andWork of James Q. Wilson, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA,April 4, 2013).

100. See, e.g., Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The PoliticalEconomy of the New Gilded Age, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2016); Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens,


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Finally, wealthy donor consortia raise normativelyweighty questions. If political organizations of allsorts are increasingly funded by purposeful groupsof very wealthy people, what reverberations doesthat have in U.S. democracy—including effects thatgo well beyond immediate expressions of shareddonor self-interest? Many DA partners, for instance,donate to progressive organizations that call forhigher taxes on the wealthy and business; while theKoch network, for its part, stresses opposition tomost government subsidies, including some thatprofit businesses. Despite such counterintuitive fea-tures, it may be that organized DA and Koch donorsweigh in overall against the values and concerns ofmost Americans. As Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels,and Jason Seawright have persuasively shown, regard-less of partisanship, the preferences of wealthy Amer-icans are often different from those of the lessadvantaged.101 Consequently, donor organizations

that magnify the values of the wealthy by concentrat-ing the financial clout of many like-minded privilegedpeople may undercut democracy even when they donot merely further elite economic interests.

Clearly, much more remains to be learned aboutdonor consortia as pivotal organizations in Americanpolitics. Although data are spotty, the facts can beassembled and analyzed much more systematicallythan political scientists have attempted so far, especiallyif scholars are willing to assemble new data sets onorganizations as well as individuals and are open topiecing together evidence from all available sources.Furthermore, additional empirical research and theo-rizing are not all we need. As scholars learn moreabout the activities, membership, and impact ofdonor consortia like the DA and the Koch seminars,we must continue to reflect on how these organizedefforts by the wealthiest Americans are reshapingU.S. democracy and governance for better and worse.

Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can DoAbout It (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

101. Page et al., “Democracy and the Policy Preferences ofWealthy Americans.”


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APPENDIX A. KOCH CORE POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS

IDEAS

Cato Institute (1977–): Libertarian think tank.Mercatus Center (1980–): Center based at George Mason University that sponsors libertarian research andeducation.Charles G. Koch Foundation (1980–): Family foundation that funds research and educational endeavors.

POLICY ADVOCACY

Citizens for a Sound Economy (1984–2004): Advocacy and lobbying group, some constituency building.60 Plus Association (1992–): Advocacy group that promotes Social Security privatization, free-market healthprograms for seniors.American Energy Alliance (2008–): Advocacy group that opposes cap and trade, promoting Keystone, carbonfuels.American Encore ( formerly, Center to Protect Patient Rights) (2009–): Advocacy group against ObamaCare,health programs.

DONOR COORDINATION

Koch seminars (2003–): Twice-yearly meetings of wealthy donors to orchestrate support for Koch ideas andpolitical strategies.Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce (2011–): Group that raises and directs political funding; now runsthe Koch seminars.

CONSTITUENCY MOBILIZATION—FOR BOTH POLICY BATTLES AND ELECTIONS

Americans for Prosperity (AFP) Foundation (2004–): Cadre-led federation for advocacy, elections, and constit-uency mobilization.Generation Opportunity (2011–16, then part of AFP): Group that promotes libertarian policies to youngpeople; runs issue ads.Libre Initiative (2011–16, then part of AFP): Group that does community and voter outreach in Latino commu-nities; runs issue ads.Concerned Veterans for America (2012–16, then part of AFP): Group that does constituency outreach and pro-motes privatization of veterans’ programs.

UTILITIES

Themis/i360 (2010–): Nonprofit and for-profit voter data bank and vendor.Center for Shared Services (2011–): Center that provides personnel and other support services to other Kochorganizations.


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APPENDIX B. SOURCES OF WEALTH FOR KOCH, DEMOCRACY ALLIANCE, AND 1 PERCENT OF THE 1 PERCENT DONORS

Sector Koch seminarparticipants(n ¼ 149)

DemocracyAlliance partners

(n ¼ 127)

1% of 1% 2012donors (Drutman)

Education or arts, entertainment, and recreation 0% 7% 0%Agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting 1% 0% 5%Construction 1% 0% 6%Utilities 1% 0% 0%Retail or wholesale trade 7% 0% 0%Transportation and warehousing 2% 0% 5%Health care 3% 2% 9%Accommodation and food services 4% 2% 0%Information 4% 23% 0%Professional, scientific, and technical services 5% 20% 18%Manufacturing 18% 7% 11%Mining 21% 2% 8%Finance, insurance, and real estate 34% 36% 39%


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APPENDIX C. DA MEMBERSHIP DESCRIPTION (2015)


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APPENDIX D. BUDGETS OF ORGANIZATIONS IN THE U.S. REPUBLICAN/CONSERVATIVE UNIVERSE (IN MILLIONS OF2015-ADJUSTED DOLLARS)


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APPENDIX E. BUDGETS OF ORGANIZATIONS IN THE U.S. DEMOCRATIC/LIBERAL UNIVERSE (IN MILLIONS OF 2015-ADJUSTED DOLLARS)

Type Name 2001–02 2013–14

Party committees Democratic national committees $463.31 $854.36Nonparty funder MoveOn $6.23 $4.59Constituency organization Center for Community Change $10.83 $42.09Constituency organization ACORN (disbanded) $0.31Constituency organization USAction $1.18 $3.02Constituency organization AFL-CIO $145.73 $158.03Constituency organization Service Employees International Union (SEIU) $173.31 $299.20Constituency organization American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) $41.53 $73.42Constituency organization American Federation of State, County, and Municipal

Employees (AFSCME)$137.75 $171.11

Constituency organization National Education Association (NEA) $294.54 $384.61Constituency organization American Federation of Teachers (AFT) $134.37 $179.77Constituency organization NAACP $44.19 $43.92Constituency organization National Council of La Raza (NCLR) $42.86 $44.31Constituency organization Communications Workers of America (CWA) $159.86 $150.38Constituency organization International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) $163.98 $151.76Issue advocate Sierra Club $23.62 $156.66Issue advocate League of Conservation Voters $7.04 $28.76Issue advocate National Resources Defense Council $49.30 $115.96Issue advocate NARAL $19.35 $4.99Issue advocate Planned Parenthood of America $62.09 $176.62Issue advocate Human Rights Campaign $10.20 $52.32Issue advocate National Organization for Women $5.85 $3.00Think tank Center on Budget and Policy Priorities $17.20 $37.59Think tank Economic Policy Institute $3.80 $5.59Think tank Campaign for America’s Future $1.67 $3.29Think tank Demos $1.32 $8.05Think tank Center for Economic Policy Research $0.46 $2.59Think tank Institute for Women’s Policy Research $1.41 $1.78Think tank Institute for Policy Studies $2.86 $2.91Think tank The Century Foundation $6.32 $21.64Think tank Democratic Leadership Council $7.04


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