Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on March 26, 2025.
Over the past eight years, left-of-center foundations and major donors have deployed billions of dollars to counter the rise of right-wing populism and the policies put forth by Donald Trump. While these efforts yielded important, short-term successes, liberal funders have so far failed to stop a MAGA movement that is now more powerful than ever. As a result, many of the achievements of liberalism and civil society over the past century are at risk — as well as the future of American democracy itself.
Philanthropy, of course, has been just one player in a sprawling struggle for the future of America. The media, political parties, tech companies and myriad civil society voices have also shaped recent history. Still, left-of-center foundations and top individual donors have played a singular role in how we arrived at the present moment. With deep coffers and a wide latitude to take risks, these funders have been uniquely positioned to push back against right-wing populism. Moreover, the stakes in this battle could hardly have been higher for liberal philanthropy — both to defend all it’s helped build and ensure the conditions for future progress, starting with a functioning democracy.
Collectively, these funders have won important battles over the past eight years. They underwrote effective pushback to Trump’s first-term policy priorities, such as repealing Obamacare, and helped stand up alternatives to neoliberalism, work that influenced the Biden administration’s efforts to address a broken economy that fails a large swath of Americans.
But while philanthropy won some key battles, it ultimately lost the war against right-wing populism. Why is that? What miscalculations did funders make in their assumptions, strategic approaches and choices of grantees?
To answer these questions and help understand a devastating defeat, I’ve spent the past few weeks talking to leaders across the progressive funding and nonprofit worlds, including foundation CEOs, leaders of grantmaking intermediaries, and the heads of key organizing and advocacy groups. These interviews were conducted on background so people could speak candidly.
Most of those I spoke with have worked around philanthropy for decades. Many trace how we arrived at the present moment back to the 1990s, when the right began its sharp turn toward a more radical and uncompromising politics. This is also my historical frame of reference. I wrote my first article about liberal philanthropy’s ineffectuality in the face of rising conservative extremism in 1995, with many to follow. Along the way, the right morphed from the once-familiar Reagan coalition to a more populist and authoritarian movement. What’s stayed constant is its fierce determination to dismantle much of what liberalism has built since the Progressive Era.
There are many moving parts to the story I’m going to tell in this article. But the short version is that most left-of-center funders have tended to shrink back in response to an intensifying attack on everything they care about. Others have stepped up, but with business-as-usual strategies that failed to account for deep shifts in the nation’s economy, information environment and political landscape. In some cases, out-of-touch grantmakers on the left have made things worse as they backed progressive activists who failed to connect with — or actively alienated — working-class people, including many Latino, Black and Asian American voters, who swung toward Trump last fall.
Here are six key mistakes funders have made, along with the outlines of a roadmap for moving forward.
1. Underestimating the threat
The conservative movement has been clear about its radical goals since the days of Reagan: rolling back the New Deal/Great Society welfare state, gutting regulatory agencies, reversing the gains made by social movements since the 1960s, and slashing taxes while shrinking the overall size of government. Trump has embraced most of these goals, with a few tweaks that depart from past right-wing orthodoxy — most notably, rejecting the liberal international order built after World War II.
It hardly needs to be said that this agenda poses a profound threat to the accomplishments of philanthropy’s biggest players. Starting in the 1940s, foundations like Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie helped create and promote a postwar order centered on alliances, trade and aid. They were later joined by funders like Hewlett, Packard and Bloomberg that promoted global collaboration on climate change, as well as major players like the Gates Foundation, with its crusade against infectious diseases, and the Buffett family, who have invested billions in global reproductive health.
A similar story can be told about the modern welfare and regulatory state. Foundations have worked closely with state and federal governments since the 1960s to expand the safety net, often by piloting interventions that later were brought to scale with public dollars. And they’ve provided a fortune in funding to bolster government regulation of everything from tobacco and junk food to guns and greenhouse gas emissions.
Philanthropy’s role in advancing social rights has been even more significant. A river of grant dollars over the past half-century from Ford and other funders helped extend and institutionalize the gains of the civil rights and women’s movements. Funders also bankrolled the LGBTQ rights movement, helping usher in marriage equality and related victories.
Since 2017, we’ve gotten a taste of how easily these hard-won gains could be reversed. Most spectacularly, philanthropy’s massive commitment over two generations to expanding and defending reproductive rights was dealt a devastating blow in June 2022 when the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade.
That kind of shock has become the order of the day with Trump 2.0. The gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) over the course of a weekend turned out to be a warmup for assaults on the EPA, Department of Education, financial oversight agencies, labor regulations and such key programs as Medicaid and Social Security. Everything is on the chopping block.
None of this is surprising to those who began sounding the alarm in the 1990s about the ultimate goals of a radicalized right-wing movement. The attacks we’re seeing now are the culmination of decades of deep investments and careful planning. Certainly, foundations were warned about the emerging threat. Most famously, Rob Stein — cofounder of the Democracy Alliance, a high-powered group of left-of-center donors — led a campaign two decades ago to educate grantmakers about how the right was building a powerful media and political machine to destroy liberalism. While the Democracy Alliance is still around today and draws support from some foundations, most top grantmakers ignored Stein’s warnings.
One explanation for this complacency is that many in the sector embraced a pollyannish reading of history, especially during the hopeful Obama years. “We in philanthropy assumed too much,” a foundation CEO told me. “We believed we arrived at a place of permanent social progress… that social progress was linear.” They added: “For anyone who understands American history, we know that’s not true.” In fact, the United States has experienced recurring waves of illiberalism, often triggered by fears that social inclusion and cosmopolitanism were going too far, threatening status hierarchies and traditional values.
More pointedly, philanthropy failed to fully reckon with how deep structural shifts in American economic life left increasingly large swaths of the population living in frustration and anxiety, planting the seeds of an explosive politics of resentment. Or how the Iraq War and the 2008 financial crisis discredited institutions. “We’re living in the collapse of the neoliberal consensus that has failed to deliver for people for a very long time,” said a top progressive grantmaker. “Liberal philanthropy failed abysmally to meet the moment. Most of it acted as if there weren’t an earthquake going on.” Worse, they said, much of the sector “has been a defender of the broken status quo.”
Even after Trump’s first election victory, many funders failed to grasp the roiling discontent and alienation in U.S. society — or how much darker the mood could turn.
2. Following a dated operating model
This complacency is not so surprising to anyone steeped in the cautious, technocratic ethos of American philanthropy.
Since the early 20th century, many top foundations have embraced a theory of change that goes something like this: Identify problems you want to solve, invest in research and policy development to find effective interventions, and then get those solutions implemented — either by bankrolling the work yourself or by collaborating with government and other partners to scale new programs. Grantmakers have also heavily funded policy experts, advocates and litigators to defend and build upon gains over time.
These strategies have done a lot of good in the world. But they assume certain conditions: that expert knowledge carries authority and the facts matter; that progress is possible under either political party, with both committed to democratic norms of governance; and that the federal judiciary is largely populated by impartial judges.
Those conditions began disappearing in the 1990s thanks to shifts in media and politics. By the time Trump took office in 2017, they had largely vanished. Liberal philanthropy confronted a drastically different environment. Elite experts are not only distrusted but often vilified. Facts matter less than the narrative, which can easily be shaped by misinformation. Partisan, right-wing judges increasingly dominate the judiciary. The Republican Party has become radicalized with little regard for democratic norms and an ever more expansive agenda for dismantling key institutions, starting with government. Illiberalism and dogmatism have also thrived in parts of the left, helping fuel polarization.
All these shifts have made it difficult for philanthropy to operate effectively using its traditional model. But perhaps none has been more confounding than changes in media and information. Simply put, it’s hard to drive forward solutions using reason and knowledge if the truth is endlessly contested in an era where most Americans get their news from digital sources with wildly varying levels of reliability.
When one of America’s first grantmakers, the Russell Sage Foundation, was created in 1907, it prioritized supporting social science research to advance its mission “of improving social and living conditions in the United States.” Such investments have remained a core strategy of elite philanthropy, trusting that data and evidence can drive better solutions to major problems. And while sometimes that’s still true, donors on the right have lately had more success with a very different strategy: “flood the zone with shit,” to quote Steve Bannon. Or, put more decorously, pump out so much slanted news and misinformation that people don’t know what’s real and what’s not, or who to trust — effectively rendering “facts” obsolete.
The sheer scale of the right’s media and influencer ecosystem is key to this strategy’s success. According to Accelerate Change, which invests in progressive media, right-wing media properties have “over 100 million active, trusted, weekly relationships with Americans” — three times more than liberal outlets. This ecosystem, which ranges from Fox News to Prager University and the video platform Rumble has deeply shaped the worldviews of tens of millions of Americans over three decades. It also shapes the “political weather” daily, driving narratives embraced and shared by a large swath of the population. These trends have sped up in just the past few years, and indeed months, as TikTok has veered right, Elon Musk has opened the spigots of misinformation on X, and Meta has dialed back content moderation, allowing MAGA influencers to “flood the zone” to an even greater degree. The avalanche of lies around USAID is a recent case in point.
This new information juggernaut may be the greatest challenge facing what Karl Rove once reportedly dubbed the “reality-based community,” of which philanthropy is a key pillar. How can you have a serious debate about, say, immigration when millions believe that migrants commit crimes at a higher rate than native-born Americans, which they don’t? Or about democracy, when a third of the country is still convinced that the 2020 election was stolen? Or about public health when anti-vaxxer messaging is shared at scale? Or about foreign aid, when people think USAID paid Angelina Jolie $20 million to visit Ukraine — a false claim the richest man in the world shared with his 216 million followers? In such an environment, good-faith “debate” becomes far less relevant than who has the best-funded and most persuasive megaphone — propaganda, in other words.
Foundations have had plenty of time to respond to these shifts in the information landscape, which first attracted attention during the Bush years and have metastasized ever since. Yet beyond a few initiatives here and there, such as Press Forward, this area hasn’t been a priority of philanthropy. In fact, it’s not even clear that most funders — who largely consume mainstream media — even realize just how much things have changed in how and where most people get their news.
I could go through the ways that other key shifts have effectively neutralized core parts of the traditional philanthropic model — for example, how conservative judges increasingly eviscerate the policies and rights that liberal foundations have backed and bolstered with decades of patient grantmaking. But let’s move on to the single biggest failure of philanthropy in recent years: its unwillingness to challenge an economic system that falls short for so many Americans.
3. Failing to confront a broken economy
When Americans voted last fall, surveys showed the economy was overwhelmingly their top concern. Polls also showed most voters, including many Latinos and young people, trusted Republicans more on this issue, which encompasses concerns about inflation and the cost of living, including necessities like housing and healthcare. This is by far the most important reason that Kamala Harris lost to Trump.
The centrality of the economy to 2024 voters was typical for a presidential election. Kitchen table issues are usually top of mind for voters in choosing a president, and tend to dominate most people’s concerns more broadly, with pessimism growing over the past two decades. Many Americans have little faith in their ability to get ahead or the likelihood that their children will do better than themselves.
But while economic concerns are central for ordinary Americans, especially working-class people, the same has not been true for philanthropy-backed groups.
The best-funded left-of-center advocates — which operate in close concert with elected Democrats to compete with the right for power — have largely not been speaking to the material concerns of most people over the past eight years, much less the past 20. They’ve been more focused on concerns that include racial justice, gender equity and climate change.
While these are profoundly important issues — and can deeply shape people’s economic opportunities — they consistently rank as far lower priorities for voters, particularly the non-college voters of all races who make up two-thirds of the electorate. Not surprisingly, working-class Americans have been steadily defecting from the Democratic Party. Harris lost this group by 15 points last fall. Joe Biden did only mildly better in 2020.
This is a big shift from the mid-20th century. Decades ago, the left-liberal coalition, heavily anchored in labor unions, put economic issues at the top of its agenda — and commanded the loyalties of working-class voters as a result. Over time, though, the Democrats and adjacent civil society groups have morphed into what Thomas Piketty has called the “Brahmin left,” a coalition that includes a huge swath of college-educated professionals and is increasingly focused on so-called “postmaterialist” issues, i.e., priorities other than economic security.
Progressives tend to explain lost Democratic support among working-class voters mainly as a result of racism. And to be sure, this is a major factor. The Democratic Party hasn’t won the white vote since 1964, when LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act, and surveys show racial resentment is a key motivator for many Republican voters. But it’s vital to note that nearly all left parties in advanced countries have lost working-class support as they’ve prioritized a postmaterialist agenda — declines that began well before European countries began experiencing large-scale immigration. It’s also important to note that Democrats have steadily lost ground with non-white working-class voters since 2012 as cultural issues have become increasingly central to messaging from the left-liberal coalition. Both here and abroad, fast-growing polarization by education ranks among the biggest trends now driving politics.
The perception that Democrats and the broader left are tuned out of people’s economic struggles was underscored by a New York Times poll in January that found voters thought the most important issues to Democrats were abortion, LGBTQ rights and climate change. Meanwhile, voters said the economy was the issue that mattered most to them.
Sen. Bernie Sanders and other progressive political leaders have offered harsh critiques of a Democratic Party that’s lost working-class support over a generation, thanks to its allegiance to wealthy donors and neoliberal ideology. Philanthropy has also played a role in this story. It has heavily favored groups focused on noneconomic issues while too often neglecting work that addresses Americans’ everyday struggles to make ends meet. That prioritization intensified starting in 2017, as Trump pursued reactionary policies that put vulnerable populations at risk, and intensified even more after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
Over the past eight years, the strong — and understandable — reflex to push back against MAGA’s retrograde cultural worldview helps explain philanthropy’s sidelining of economic concerns. But this neglect stretches back much further than that, and leaders in the sector offer different explanations. One is that philanthropy is largely run by highly educated professionals with little connection to the working class or material hardship. “Class has been put to the margins of a lot of progressive discourse and philanthropy,” said a foundation CEO. “There’s been a disappearing of that reality from elites on the left.”
But the larger problem may be that foundations and major donors are creatures of capitalism. Their wealth comes from business success, and it’s no surprise that funders — consciously or subconsciously — aren’t much interested in challenging the system that spawned them.
Even after Trump’s election in 2016 spotlighted the devastating political fallout from free trade and other neoliberal economic policies, much of philanthropy remained uninterested in examining these issues, much less backing hard-hitting organizing around the economy. A year before Trump’s narrow first win, made largely possible by the defection of working-class Obama voters in Rust Belt states, I wrote an article on how nearly no major foundations funded work that critically examined free trade. “Where are the foundations that care about the lower-income Americans that have been the losers of globalization?” I asked. “When will they pay more attention to some of the most powerful forces that structure economic opportunity in America?”
While philanthropy does support much economic mobility work, it’s typically in areas like community development, job training, education and housing assistance. “Philanthropy turns to individualistic solutions to economic inequality,” said a former foundation CEO. “We don’t have a willingness to actually critique capitalism.” Grantmakers like supporting “services for poor people,” they said. “They’re not interested in funding power-building around economic issues.” Another grantmaker agreed: “Most of the economic work is palliative.”
There are exceptions — like the Irvine Foundation, which shifted its grantmaking in 2016 to focus on helping low-income workers move up the economic ladder, including through increasing their power. Ford has been another leader, backing a set of new labor movement groups that include the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, joined by various other funders. In 2018, the Hewlett Foundation began work that explicitly critiqued the failures of neoliberalism and embarked on the search for an alternative economic paradigm. Other funders, including Omidyar Network, joined this effort, which helped influence the Biden administration’s efforts to strengthen manufacturing, challenge monopolies, and more.
But while this funding did influence policy, philanthropy’s overall efforts to address people’s everyday struggles to get ahead have remained too small and scattered to have much impact on broader narratives. In particular, state and local organizing groups focusing on power-building mainly through an economic lens have been chronically underfunded. Even as Biden worked hard to deliver for Americans who felt left behind economically, addressing a key driver of right-wing populism, he got little backup from progressive organizations, most of which were focused on other issues. Nor was the left’s badly underfunded media ecosystem able to offer much support.
By the time the 2024 election arrived, many Americans, including those in the Democratic base, knew almost nothing about the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to create a more inclusive economy. Field canvassers reported abysmally low enthusiasm for the Democratic ticket among many of the same lower-income voters who had put Biden in office.
4. Backing unpopular positions and unrepresentative messengers
Beyond their inattention to economic issues, Democrats and progressive groups have had another problem: some of the cultural positions they’ve taken are unpopular with voters, including many nonwhite voters.
In the wake of Harris’ defeat last fall, a number of commentators argued that donor-backed organizations had pushed Democratic leaders too far left on social issues, dooming the party’s chance of beating Trump. Among these critiques was a widely read Atlantic article by two longtime leaders in the immigrant rights community, Cecilia Muñoz and Frank Sharry, who wrote in December that “immigration has become a losing issue for Democrats over the past decade because elected leaders have followed progressive advocates to the left, beyond the political space available to them.”
Similar arguments have been made over criminal justice and climate change, where Democrats have also been out of step with public opinion. After the 2020 election, for example, many losing congressional candidates talked ruefully about the toxic effects of “defund the police” on their races, blaming Black Lives Matter activists — who pulled in millions in donor support — for popularizing the slogan. Democrats from fossil-fuel-producing regions have also talked about the political damage done by blanket progressive hostility to fossil fuels, views closely associated with philanthropy-backed environmental groups.
There’s a lot to unpack in these claims. Certainly, parts of the progressive cultural agenda are unpopular, particularly with noncollege voters who tend to be more conservative. This might not matter so much if Democrats were seen as mainly focused on the economy. As one longtime organizer told me: “If we lead with an economic message that is persuasive, it won’t matter what they say on trans rights.” But that’s not the situation.
Instead, the liberal-left coalition occupies the worst of all worlds — as a political movement that’s seen as prioritizing cultural issues above people’s most pressing economic concerns and is wedded to unpopular positions on some of those cultural issues. To many analysts, this is the most obvious reason the Democratic brand is so weak in large swaths of the country, including states in close contention just a few election cycles ago, like Florida and Ohio.
What’s less clear is how much blame to assign to philanthropy in this story. As I’ve said, funders have badly erred by failing to support challenges to an economy that doesn’t work for many Americans while over-indexing on postmaterialist causes. But should we also fault philanthropy because social justice groups have sometimes advanced positions well to the left of what mainstream politicians can successfully defend?
That’s a fraught question, one that I dissected with a range of left-of-center grantmakers. Many of these leaders firmly believe that philanthropy should be in the business of pushing forward the boundaries of social change, even if that means going against current public opinion. “Is it our job to get Democrats elected? I don’t think so,” said one foundation CEO. Said another: “Every single group that is oppressed in society should have the ability to advocate for themselves without having to apologize or worry about the political fallout… I reject the idea that a preoccupation with cultural issues is ever a problem.”
At the same time, there was acknowledgment that some of the progressive groups that funders supported had overreached, all but ensuring the powerful backlash that followed. In effect, hard-charging advocates misread the historical moment and wrongly assumed the inevitability of progress if only they seized the moment.
Should funders have tried to pull groups back from this overreach? Some critics think so. Former Hewlett Program Director Daniel Stid, for example, has argued that progressive funders helped worsen polarization — in effect, making philanthropy part of the problem in deepening national divisions, not part of the solution. My own reservations are different; I’m fine with grantmaking that contributes to polarization as long as it advances progress. Real change is often accompanied by intense political conflict. But as a keen student of the dark side of U.S. history, I also know how easily the forces of reaction can get the upper hand in such conflict thanks to missteps by social movements.
As America approached “peak woke” in 2020 and 2021, fueled by a wave of donor support, it seemed clear that things might not end well. On the one hand, the Black Lives Matter movement helped swing voters toward Biden in his bid to unseat Trump. On the other, progressive advocates were turning off moderates, as well as many liberals, and also helping fuel the MAGA base — underscoring an iron rule of politics, which is that ideological mobilization nearly always spurs countermobilization. And if the forces pushing back are likely to be more powerful than those pushing forward, you’re making a dangerous bet.
Yet even progressive funders who shared these same concerns struggled with their role. A few grantmakers pointed to how the instinct of many funders is to defer to progressive groups that they assume are in touch with communities on the ground. “We trust the people closest to the problem,” said a top grantmaker. “We want to listen. We don’t want to say you’re going too far. We don’t want to direct them on, say, ‘Here’s what you should do on immigration.’”
That may make sense if grantees are channeling the views of historically marginalized groups. But one thing that’s become apparent is that many progressive groups actually don’t seem to be in sync with the top concerns of the populations they claim to speak for.
For example, while Latinos overwhelmingly cited the economy as their top priority in 2024, philanthropy-backed Latino groups have mainly focused on immigration in recent years — and even on aspects of that issue, they proved to be out of step with many Latinos. Some polling showed these voters trusted Trump more than Harris on immigration and border security. While progressive leaders seemed to have assumed since 2016 that MAGA’s racism and xenophobia would deeply repel most if not all Latinos, this has not been the case. For example, despite derogatory comments by Trump supporters about Puerto Rico late in last fall’s presidential race, heavily Puerto Rican precincts in Lehigh, Pennsylvania, swung 22 points to Trump in 2024 compared to 2016, according to a preliminary analysis of voting returns by Equis Research.
“Democrats are losing ground with Latino voters because they’re making the wrong pitch,” Greisa Martínez Rosas, the head of United We Dream Action, wrote recently. “Many Latinos don’t primarily see themselves through the lens of systemic racial oppression. Rather, they see themselves as strivers pursuing the American dream, akin to past waves of Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants. That self-perception makes them more receptive to conservative messages on crime and immigration, especially when Democrats frame politics as a moral fight over racism rather than a populist argument about working families striving for economic security.”
Likewise, polling of Black voters last fall found that they overwhelmingly named economic issues as their top priority, with racial discrimination and police violence far behind, especially for Blacks without a college degree, with less than 6% citing such issues compared to more than 50% who named the cost of living and inflation. But despite stark and longstanding disparities between Black Americans and other groups in metrics like median household wealth and employment, economic issues have not been front and center in the work of philanthropy-backed progressive Black activists in recent years, who’ve been heavily focused on justice concerns — in some cases, taking positions out of step with Black voters. Most Black voters don’t want to defund the police; they want to reform policing.
Concerns over public safety were a key reason that many Blacks and Latinos swung heavily toward Trump in Democratic-controlled cities like New York and Los Angeles last fall. The recent influx of new migrants into urban areas is another issue that helped push these voters toward Trump, with polling showing a huge rise over the past four years in the number of Black and Latino voters who view immigrants as a drain, even as this has remained a minority view among these groups. Precincts in places like Compton, California, New York’s Chinatown, and the South Bronx shifted as much as 20 to 30 points right compared to 2020 — although, to be clear, Harris still handily won in these places.
A variation of this same story can be told for Asian Americans and young people, two other key “new American majority” constituencies who moved toward Trump in 2024. They didn’t see Democrats speaking to their top economic concerns and many weren’t supportive of the left’s positions on such issues as crime, immigration, K-12 education and trans rights. A post-election poll by Navigator, for example, found that AAPI voters narrowly trusted Trump more than Harris on immigration and border security, even as polls have consistently shown strong support in this group for expanded legal immigration and a path to citizenship. A post-election poll of young voters, who swung toward Trump by 18 points in 2024, found that 75% said that the cost of living was their top priority. Compare that to climate change (18%) and guns (8%), two issues that have been the focus of much funder-backed youth activism in recent years.
These swings toward Trump were not a one-off occurrence in 2024. Even as all nonwhite voters have continued to strongly favor Democrats, including last fall, they have moved notably to the right since 2012, especially those without a college degree. That shift hasn’t been seismic, contrary to some reports. (No, a majority of Latino men didn’t vote for Trump last fall.) But the racial depolarization of politics is a real trend, moving in tandem with growing education polarization, and it’s been enough to influence tight election outcomes in key states. The trend has occurred during a period of increased funding for progressive organizations focused on empowering nonwhite Americans, typically centering appeals around justice and identity. This raises obvious questions about the assumptions underlying such grantmaking.
Most philanthropy leaders I spoke with agree there are areas where some of their grantees have not been in alignment with the constituencies they claim to speak for. Said one leading funder of progressive work: “Many activist groups are out of touch with working-class people in every ethnic group. That is true.”
This disconnect has gone largely undiscussed in philanthropy circles, even as more data and examples have piled up. “It’s an uncomfortable conversation,” one longtime grantmaker told me — before plunging ahead with complaints about colleagues they saw as insulated in an uncritical groupthink bubble. Foundations, they suggested, have done too much “following” when they should have been asking their grantees tougher questions.
In discussing increased funding levels for social justice groups led by people of color over the past eight years, it’s important to keep in mind how modest such support has been relative to the philanthropy sector’s resources. For example, while the Black Lives Matter Foundation and the Black Voters Matter Fund raised more than $110 million between 2020 and 2023, much of this money came from small donors, not foundations — and donations rapidly fell off over time. Even MacKenzie Scott, widely lauded for funding activist organizations, has directed only a thin slice of her overall giving to groups challenging established power structures. Likewise, only a minority of the flood of racial reckoning pledges in 2020 by foundations has gone to power-building work.
Funding for social justice groups, already declining over the past two years, seems set to drop even further as grantmakers regret some of their judgment calls and grapple with political backlash. That’s unfortunate. In fact, the right lesson to learn here is that funders need to invest more deliberately, and at scale, in groups that are truly accountable to the communities they claim to represent.
5. Ducking the persuasion challenge
On the eve of Trump’s election in 2016, I wrote an article about how “philanthropy forgot about the white working class.” A key theme of the piece was that grantmakers clustered in urban areas had been largely tuned out from the economic devastation that globalization and other neoliberal policies had inflicted on industrial and rural America. I concluded, “After this election, the philanthropy world needs to think long and hard about what it can do to address the plight of struggling white Americans who feel forgotten.”
Trump won the electoral college that year by just 80,000 votes in three states where noncollege whites comprised half of all voters: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. A key to Trump’s victory was his huge margins in rural counties.
The 2016 election led to endless discussion about the collapse of Democratic support among white working-class and rural voters, as well as why Hillary Clinton hadn’t done better with women. Debate raged about the role of racism and misogyny versus economic dislocation. Yet, no matter where you came out on that question, one thing should have been clear: Liberal grantmakers needed to pay a lot more attention to people in the “flyover states.” To defuse the rising strength of right-wing populism, funders needed to support work to better understand and connect with voters drawn to Trump.
Philanthropy has largely failed to rise to that challenge. While funders have backed the Rural Democracy Initiative and a handful of other groups working in rural America, as well as some new organizing efforts focused on the white working class and moderate women, this support has been relatively meager. The overwhelming focus of philanthropy’s response to Trump has been to throw more resources at traditional progressive constituencies. In short, funders have placed nearly all their bets on mobilization over persuasion.
Strengthening base constituencies is an essential strategy for building power and winning elections. But it is not enough in a country where noncollege whites can determine outcomes in many states — especially in the crucial swing states — and much of the electorate describes itself as moderate. Joe Biden didn’t win in 2020 mainly because activist groups turned out the “new American majority,” as some claim. He won because of a combination of strong turnout by base voters and significant defections by whites to the Democratic ticket, according to data from Catalist.
In 2020, Biden won 37% of noncollege whites, compared to Hillary Clinton’s share of 35% four years earlier. A two-percentage-point gain may not sound like a lot, but it proved decisive in states like Michigan and Wisconsin. Harris, meanwhile, appears to have performed worse than Clinton with noncollege whites, which helps explain her loss. None of these three elections would have been close if Democratic presidential candidates had matched Obama’s 2012 performance when he won 40% of working-class whites.
What this data shows is not that Democrats should throw base voters under the bus to hustle after moderate whites. Rather, it points to the imperative of remaining reasonably competitive in rural and small-town America — in effect, to lose by less. That means organizing groups need to have the resources to show up in these places to engage people, listen to their concerns, and try to connect their sense of being left behind to progressive solutions.
Philanthropy has an important role to play here if it’s interested — which largely has not been the case. When I recently asked leaders in the sector what accounts for its rural blind spot, some pointed to how most foundations have their roots in urban areas, with funding flowing accordingly.
But the other point mentioned is that liberal grantmakers don’t view white people struggling with economic dislocation and its attendant problems, like opioid addiction, as oppressed enough. “The notion that white Americans were vulnerable was a hard sell to people,” recalled one funder, recounting internal debates at their foundation after Trump’s 2016 win. “You couldn’t convince people that this should be a higher priority” than directing all available funds to communities of color. In retrospect, they said, “philanthropy missed the boat on this.”
6. Underinvesting in civic participation
Margaret Thatcher once said about politics: “First, you win the argument, then you win the vote.” By this logic, 2024 was always going to be a tough election for Democrats, who had lost the trust of most voters on the economy, as well as immigration, crime and other issues. Protecting democracy, which should be an urgent concern for most voters, never had the traction many advocates hoped. People were too worried about the price of eggs and feeling generally down about America. A large share of voters, 83%, told exit pollsters that they wanted to see substantial change or a total upheaval in how the country is run.
Still, the 2024 election was potentially winnable for Democrats, given the country’s deep polarization and Trump’s uniquely toxic profile. Moreover, liberal philanthropy had a nearly existential stake in ensuring maximum turnout by pro-democracy voters, as well as effective efforts to persuade voters on the fence.
By 2023, the writing was on the wall: If Trump returned to office with Republican trifecta control of the federal government and the Project 2025 blueprint in hand, much of the legacy of liberal philanthropy could be destroyed in a few short years. The damage would not be confined to big-ticket national policy issues like climate change, healthcare, racial equity or the weakening of the liberal international order. Steep cuts to federal spending under a second Trump administration could also devastate global development organizations, universities, arts institutions, scientific research and public media while hitting social service nonprofits in nearly every corner of America.
On top of all of that, another threat loomed from a MAGA restoration: Civil society itself, and foundations specifically, could come under attack as part of a broader assault on democracy.
The prospect of Trump’s return to office should have triggered an emergency mobilization by philanthropy and a new openness to funding civic engagement work at an unprecedented scale — as the last hope of stopping an impending catastrophe.
That never happened. Entrenched in a dated operating model, including the idea that philanthropy should avoid “politics,” the vast majority of left-of-center foundations declined to pivot to a war footing as the MAGA army began to march on their world.
For better or worse, 501c3 grantmakers can legally fund numerous activities related to civic participation and voter education. As the 2024 election approached, funders had plenty of high-impact grantmaking opportunities in this area. Thanks to randomized controlled trials, as well as other means of measuring impact, funders can now have more confidence than ever that investments in 501c3 voter registration and education efforts will generate higher participation by constituencies that believe in a more equitable economy and inclusive democracy. Funding intermediaries make it easy for grantmakers to back such options by vetting the claims and methodologies of grantees. Many groups provide cost-per-vote estimates that spell out how much bang for the buck funders can expect. Experienced nonprofit lawyers are on standby to confirm the legality of these investments.
An increase in 501c3 civic participation funding since 2016 has played an essential role in scaling up national and state groups that have worked to engage and educate voters in recent elections. This nonpartisan work has become ever more important as more obstacles have emerged to voting, thanks to well-funded efforts on the right to pass voter ID laws, eliminate ballot drop boxes, purge voting rolls, restrict early and mail voting, make it harder for college students to vote, and more. According to a recent study, more than 3,500 foundations and high-net-worth donors gave more than $1 billion to about 150 nonprofits in 2020, 2021 and 2022 to erect barriers to voting that tend to disproportionately affect young people, as well as those with lower incomes and less information.
Still, the majority of big, left-of-center foundations steer clear of significant grantmaking in this space. Apart from a few well-known progressive funders like Ford and Open Society Foundations, most of the 501c3 giving for civic participation work has come from smaller foundations and individual major donors.
Many foundations with monumental stakes in the outcome of the 2024 election — like Robert Wood Johnson, Rockefeller, Mellon, Hewlett, MacArthur and Packard, along with hundreds of other grantmakers — directed limited or no funding to ensure that citizens who shared their values understood what was at stake in the election and were encouraged to cast a ballot. To be sure, some provided support to groups helping to secure the integrity of vote counting and other election tasks, which was critically important. But by neglecting to fund the most effective civic participation groups, foundations were either fighting with one hand tied behind their back or, more commonly, not fighting at all.
By the end of 2023, when nonprofit civic participation groups should have been staffing up, alarm bells were ringing about a shortfall of funding for voter outreach. “I’ve gotten more than a dozen calls recently from leaders describing similarly desperate situations: painful layoffs, program cuts and executive directors going without pay or burning out,” wrote Billy Wimsatt, the founder of Movement Voter Project (MVP), in a guest column Inside Philanthropy published that October. “The funding shortfall of 2023 in the local democracy and organizing sector is the equivalent of an extended nationwide drought.”
The picture brightened somewhat in the first half of 2024, thanks to a campaign created by the Democracy Fund to spur early electoral giving by foundations and major donors. The effort, All by April, catalyzed $155 million in a combination of 501c4 and 501c3 funding. Still, by early September 2024, MVP documented at least $165 million in budget shortfalls among voter organizations, with the total likely much larger. This meant planned GOTV efforts for the fall could not go forward. Much of the sidelined work involved outreach to Black and Latino communities, where the obstacles to casting a ballot tend to be highest. A poll found that 42% of Black voters and 45% of Latino voters hadn’t been contacted by either party or any civic organizations during the election campaign.
In discussing missed opportunities to increase turnout in the 2024 election, it’s important to keep in mind that many analysts think that 100% voter participation across the U.S. would have helped Trump win the popular vote by an even larger margin. More broadly, the growing polarization of the electorate by education has upended longstanding truisms about who benefits from higher voter turnout — underscoring both the limits of mobilization and the importance of persuasion. By ignoring this new reality, liberal philanthropy has failed to do enough to broaden the coalition of Americans that supports its priorities. Now, that coalition has shrunk.
Whatever the case, it’s no surprise that many foundations have been skittish about bankrolling civic participation work. It could open them to charges of partisanship and invite political blowback — fears that have greatly intensified in the new Trump era. However, I suspect the larger obstacle to such giving is the operating model that’s historically guided modern philanthropy — the idea that foundations are in the business of solving specific problems through pragmatic interventions grounded in evidence and best practices. “A lot of these foundations don’t connect the dots,” said one former longtime funder. “They don’t think about broader civic engagement as a tool. They leave that to somebody else.”
Yet, if ever there was a time to think differently and take risks, the lead-up to the 2024 election was it. Instead, most foundations stood down.
***
So where does liberal philanthropy go now?
Plenty of voices have been weighing in with ideas and strategies. Many funders are huddled in strategic reassessments to plot a way forward. Some takeaways from my analysis here can be summarized as follows:
First, all foundations that believe in democratic norms and a well-funded government need to recognize they’re in a battle with existential stakes. Whether you’re a national funder working on climate change, a regional arts funder, or a community foundation supporting direct services, everything you care about is at risk. That means a siloed approach to your work is no longer tenable. Helping build the power to push back against an illiberal right isn’t something you can leave to others.
Second, foundations need to focus much more attention on the everyday material struggles that rank as top concerns for most Americans. Funders need to internalize the sense of so many people that the economic status quo is broken and that dramatic change is needed. This crisis stems from systemic failures that demand collective solutions, not individualistic ones. Organizing groups working on the front lines of economic inequality need far greater levels of support to build capacity and power. Investing in work that centers class is likely, in the long run, to be a more powerful lever to pull for racial and gender equity than funding those priorities so directly — and to command far broader public support.
Third, grantmakers must look much more closely at the progressive groups they support. It’s important to prioritize groups that truly represent the populations they claim to speak for and focus on the top concerns of everyday people in their messaging and advocacy. Also, while funders should support work that’s out in front of public opinion, they should exercise political common sense and choose grantees that do the same — recognizing that the arc of history doesn’t necessarily bend in a straight line toward justice and backlashes can easily erase hard-won gains, as we’re seeing right now.
Fourth, foundations need to lean far more heavily into civic participation work within the boundaries of current law. The best of these efforts are indisputably effective. When people are engaged around public issues by trusted community organizations, they are more likely to feel a sense of civic efficacy and vote. Scaling up such work is essential to building a more inclusive democracy.
Fifth, funders need to invest much more heavily in efforts to connect with rural Americans and white working-class Americans who feel left behind and alienated from both political parties. The larger goal here shouldn’t be “building bridges” for its own sake; it should be to enlarge the coalition of Americans who support a just economy and multiracial democracy. There is no path to a progressive governing majority that sidesteps this hard work.
Sixth, philanthropy needs to respond at scale to dramatic changes in the media and information landscape. This shift affects everything funders do, and until there’s a counterweight to the right’s vast media ecosystem, liberal grantmakers will face acute limits to what they can accomplish. Related, philanthropy needs to better understand how deep currents of isolation, loneliness, alienation and anxiety have greatly complicated the work of social change. It’s not enough for institutions to solve problems and demonstrate results. What’s also needed is the articulation of a broader vision of human flourishing and the good life that people can believe in.
These are just a few ideas for how to move forward. There’s a lot else that funders should be thinking about and doing, including changing how they hire staff and structuring grantmaking to ensure more diversity of opinions and candid internal debate. What’s crucial is that a much larger circle of funders fully appreciates the threats at hand and moves quickly to fight harder to shape America’s future.
