The Koch Seminars

Launched in 2003, the Koch seminars were the brainchild of Koch Industries chieftain Charles Koch along with his brother David and a handful of close advisors, especially former academic and political strategist Richard Fink.Footnote ¹⁶ The first seminar met in Chicago, where fewer than twenty business leaders, mostly friends of Charles, joined Koch insiders to hear nonstop, dry lectures about libertarian philosophy and free-market economics.Footnote ¹⁷ Even fewer participants turned up next time. In due course, the seminars were spiced up with invited speakers from the worlds of GOP politics and conservative media, and attendance trended up from 2006.Footnote ¹⁸ After Democrat Barack Obama moved into the White House, rising numbers of wealthy conservatives clamored for invitations, and the twice-yearly seminars “exploded as antagonism toward Obama built among the 0.01 percent on the right.”Footnote ¹⁹

Importantly, the Koch donor seminars were not some brand new, stand-alone venture; they have always been a symbiotic part of an integrated set of political endeavors known by now as “the Koch network.” Figure 1 portrays the evolution of that network.Footnote ²⁰ For decades, Charles and David Koch (called “the Koch brothers” in the popular media) have poured money from their rapidly growing industrial fortunes into efforts to reshape U.S. politics and policies. Currently, Charles and David have a net worth of more than $49 billion apiece and were tied for sixth place on the Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest Americans in 2018. A half century ago, the brothers were stalwarts of libertarian third-party politics, and they set out to encourage the spread of libertarian ideas and fund educational ventures by making sustained contributions to the Cato Institute, the Charles G. Koch Foundation, and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.Footnote ²¹ In the 1980s, Charles and David turned away from the Libertarian Party and added funding for lobbying and policy organizations like the 60 Plus Association, a group focused on privatizing social insurance programs and repealing the estate tax, and Citizens for a Sound Economy, an advocacy group that attracted corporate funding to fight regulations and taxes.

Fig. 1.

The Evolution of Koch Core Political Organizations: Ideas, Policy Advocacy, Donor Coordination, Constituency Mobilization, and Utilities.

Believing that government should do very little beyond securing order, the Kochs were for many years skeptical of Republicans as well as Democrats. If the Republican Party “is our only hope then we are doomed,” Charles once explained to a business group, because the GOP accommodates government and supports “the prevalent statist paradigm.”Footnote ²² In the early 2000s, the Kochs’ worries about the GOP and insider consultants like Karl Rove reached a new peak when President George W. Bush invaded the Middle East and proposed the addition of an expensive prescription drug benefit to Medicare.Footnote ²³ In response, the brothers unveiled a bold new third phase of political organization building. In 2003, they started the Koch seminars, and in 2004, they launched a new political-party-like federation called Americans for Prosperity (AFP) to synchronize lobbying and grassroots mobilization for elections and policy battles across dozens of states as well as in Washington, DC.

A nation-spanning organization, AFP is by far the most important political organization in the overall network supported by the Koch seminars—and tellingly, AFP was launched while Republicans, not Democrats, held power in Washington, DC. This belies any interpretation that sees the contemporary Koch political operation as primarily a defensive reaction to Democrats or the presidency of Barack Obama. By 2007, before Barack Obama even declared his candidacy for the presidency, AFP had installed paid directors and usually additional paid operatives in fifteen states spread across all U.S. regions and encompassing close to half the U.S. population (as well as their representatives in Congress and state legislatures)—and by now, AFP has become a massive political-party-like operation with paid staff and contact lists of millions of volunteer activists stretching across thirty-six U.S. states that are home to more than 80 percent of the population.Footnote ²⁴ In key states like Wisconsin and North Carolina, AFP has a network of local offices as well as a state headquarters.

In recent years, the Kochs have added specialized pieces to the network mix, including constituency-mobilizing organizations focused on military veterans, young people, and Latinos, plus the Center for Shared Services to provide personnel and other support to all Koch organizations and a data operation called “Themis/i360” focused on collecting and analyzing voter data (similar to Catalist on the left).Footnote ²⁵ In 2016, the previously separate Koch organizations Generation Opportunity, the Libre Initiative, and Concerned Veterans for America were folded into AFP, meant to operate as distinctively “branded projects” within the dozens of state chapters that make up the Koch network's “main political arm.”Footnote ²⁶ Starting in 2012, a centerpiece “Koch political bank” called the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce took over running the fast-growing Koch seminars, and in 2014, an affiliated political action committee was set up to allow Koch donors to make federal campaign contributions through an affiliated super PAC.Footnote ²⁷ By 2017, the whole Koch operation was rebranded as “the Seminar Network” with its own website.Footnote ²⁸

The Democracy Alliance

Launched in 2005, the DA at first attracted a larger donor membership than the contemporaneous Koch seminars. But the DA advantage was short-lived, as Figure 2 shows. Net recruitment of DA partners stalled after 2009, even as reported Koch membership trended upward—despite a dip for the Koch seminars right after Barack Obama, to conservative dismay, was re-elected to the presidency in 2012.

Fig. 2.

Donor Participation in Koch Seminars and the Democracy Alliance.

It is important to note that Koch seminar trends displayed in Figure 2 are approximate individual seminar attendance numbers reported in the media (using the higher number for the two seminars in a given year if two different numbers were reported for winter and spring/summer). Furthermore, especially in the current period, donors can be formal members of the Koch seminars and Freedom Partners without attending every meeting. Our DA numbers are from internal DA reports and reflect a more institutionalized definition of the yearly numbers of donor “partner units,” which include individuals, two-person family households, and multihousehold family clusters (like parents and children). In recent years, up to twenty-three foundations and nine other institutions, most of them labor unions, have also been tallied as DA partners. To translate the DA partner trends into something closer to the Koch seminar participant trends, we have (conservatively) used a 1.5 multiplier to approximate as best we can the number of wealthy donor members that likely correspond to the yearly totals of partner units. Nevertheless, the within-consortium trajectories in Figure 2 are much more meaningful and reliable than the absolute levels between consortia, given data uncertainties and divergent definitions of DA partners and Koch seminar participants. The key takeaway is that DA partner counts have grown only modestly in recent times, mostly through institutional memberships, while Koch seminar attendance has ballooned.

The impetus behind the creation of the DA differed from the Koch seminars. To the extent that the DA was the brainchild of one individual, that founder was not an ideologically motivated multibillionaire industrialist, but a veteran of Democratic Party politics named Rob Stein, who had worked for the late Democratic National Committee chairman Ron Brown and served on the Clinton-Gore transition team and as chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Commerce during President Bill Clinton's first term. As journalist Matt Bai tells the story, in the early 2000s, Stein became alarmed at conservative dominance and put together a “killer slide show” entitled “The Conservative Message Machine's Money Matrix.” His PowerPoints dramatized the decades-long accomplishments of wealthy conservative families who built up think tanks, policy advocacy groups, and media efforts to shape agendas of public debate in sustained ways. Starting months before the 2004 elections, Stein toured the country sharing this presentation in confidence with small clusters of Democratic Party donors and key political players, aiming to spark discussions about a new strategic approach. Later, Stein would recall that “there was an unbelievable frustration … among the donor class on the center-left, with trying to one-off everything—with every single one of them being a single, ‘silo,’ donor and not having the ability to communicate effectively with a network of donors.”Footnote ²⁹

After John Kerry's 2004 defeat, Stein's project got seed funding from the George Soros and Peter Lewis families. In April 2005, some fifty of America's wealthiest liberals arrived at the DA founding meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona—with most traveling from major metropolitan areas on the East Coast as well as from Hollywood, the Bay Area, and Seattle on the West Coast and from a few other spots such as Denver and Dallas.Footnote ³⁰ At the retreat, answers to a questionnaire revealed that three-quarters of the founding partners did not want the DA to have “close ties to the Democratic Party,” although that seems to have meant simply that they wanted the new group to remain under the separate control of its staff and wealthy members.Footnote ³¹

In this way, there are important similarities between the founding of the DA and the Koch seminars. The creation of both organizations was in part motivated by a sense of political threat: purported Bush administration betrayals of libertarian, small-government principles for the Kochs and their initial donors, and John Kerry's presidential defeat at the hands of George W. Bush for the DA. As the current head of the DA has put it, in his mind it takes “wilderness years”—years when power appears far out of reach—to foster audacious thinking and donor investments for the long term.Footnote ³² The importance of political threats in spurring mobilization of wealthy participants in the Koch and DA consortia resonates with political scientist Isaac Martin's chronicling of U.S. antitax movements among the rich.Footnote ³³ As he shows, wealthy Americans undertook collective action to lower taxes when they felt that their individual tactics had failed and when antitax entrepreneurs presented them with opportunities for joint action. Even so, as we will see in tracking the evolution of Koch and DA efforts, political threats alone are not sufficient to spur institutional and strategic changes, especially once consortia are founded.

Existing institutional rules and leadership arrangements can either facilitate or frustrate strategic recalibrations at moments of political loss and threat, and the procedures of the Koch seminars facilitate strategic nimbleness much more than those of the DA.

To return to describing the origins of the DA, once founding partners came together, they made decisions about which other progressive organizations to support—and how to raise and channel partner dues and annual contributions. By the fall of 2005, when sixty-five partners “representing two-thirds of … total membership” convened at the second DA conference in Braselton, Georgia, elaborate procedures had been used by DA leaders and staffers to vet the first round of organizations to be recommended for partner funding.Footnote ³⁴ Some long-standing organizations like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities were included, but other recommended organizations were recently established or new creations, including such future mainstays of the Democratic Party establishment as the Center for American Progress and the data operation Catalist (originally called Data Warehouse). Recommended groups on the first DA list were classified under four headings that suggest the types of endeavors founding partners thought necessary to counter the conservative “messaging machine”:

• • Leadership: Center for Progressive Leadership; Progressive Majority

• • Ideas: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; Economic Policy Institute; Center for American Progress

• • Media: Media Matters for America; Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

• • Civic Engagement: America Votes; Data Warehouse (later called Catalist)Footnote 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 organizations with new and provocative ideas headed by young and developing leaders.”Footnote ³⁶ Overall, more than $30 million was channeled to the recommended entities, a third of that amount reportedly pledged by the Soros and Lewis families.Footnote ³⁷ DA rules and rhetoric stressed equality among partners and, certainly, the Soroses and Lewises were not directly in charge of DA the way the Koch brothers have been in charge of their consortium. Nevertheless, according to Matt Bai, the biggest DA contributors exercised a lot of sway behind the scenes—and that surely remains true to this day, even if the ranks of the largest DA funders have evolved (and has recently included environmentalist Tom Steyer, for example).

From the start, the DA had its own professional staff managed by a DA president and supervised closely by a small elected board that has always included some elected donor members along with union leaders and philanthropists. This organizational pattern is typical for a liberal nonprofit organization, but unlike many such nonprofits, the DA has experienced repeated leadership shifts. By 2006, in fact, founder Rob Stein was pushed out of day-to-day DA management, to be followed by a succession of presidents, each of whom readjusted DA's relationships to the Democratic Party, to party-linked PACs, and to other groups in the center-left landscape.Footnote ³⁸

Crucially, even though many DA founders believed that their consortium ought to concentrate on supporting on a small, highly effective number of progressive organizations, within a few years the list of recommended liberal groups tripled.Footnote ³⁹ The DA was formed following several decades of a proliferation of professionally run liberal advocacy groups in the larger U.S. civic landscape. Many wealthy donors the DA wanted to recruit as partners already had established ties to subsets of such groups—to environmental or rights groups or women's groups or left-leaning think tanks, for example. As a result, founding members and newly recruited partners in the early years tended to press for the DA to add their favorite causes to the recommended investment lists presented to all partners for potential contributions.

As we will detail later, a modest number of long-standing organizations have always been on the DA-recommended list, but many others have been subtracted or added across ever-changing versions of the core list. In 2014, the most recently installed DA president, Gara LaMarche, a veteran of George Soros's philanthropies, proceeded to take a hard look at how the consortium had evolved and articulate a new strategy.Footnote ⁴⁰ Currently, the DA aspires to be not only a list of progressive organizations recommended for philanthropic support, but also a national hub for movement building, where wealthy donors, labor unions, and many philanthropic foundations all work “in alignment” (as the organization's favored phrasing puts it) to further support progressive political goals. Since 2016, and especially following the Democratic presidential defeat in November of that year, the DA has placed a strong emphasis on mobilizing and directing contributions toward building state-level electoral and policy capacities on the left—to counter the accumulated clout of the Koch network and other right forces across nearly two-thirds of U.S. state governments.

Where Do Koch and DA Donors Live?

The residences of wealthy political donors involved in the 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 from the West and Northeast, while residences in the South and Midwest are much more common for Koch seminar participants.

Table 1.

Residences of Koch, DA, and 1 Percent of 1 Percent Donors

For comparison purposes, Table 1 also shows that the residences of Drutman's 2012 donors from the top 1 percent of the 1 percent tended to be spread across the South, West, and Northeast, but least often located in the Midwest. Overall, the locations of Drutman's donor residences look more like those of our DA partners than the residential patterns of the Koch seminar participants—especially because so many Koch seminar participants come from the Southwest, mountain states, and Midwest, areas where Drutman found relatively fewer top donor residences.

Offering more detail, the map in Figure 3 displays 149 Koch donors and 175 DA donors based on the zip code of their primary residence. (Clustering by zip code is randomly jittered to show the density of observations—otherwise, most of the dots would be on top of the major cities). This drives home the point that DA partners mostly have primary residences in just three areas—the Acela corridor on the East Coast, the Bay Area, and Los Angeles, while Koch seminar members come from all over the country. Certainly, the Koch seminars are attracting more wealthy contributors from the heartlands.

Fig. 3.

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

Donor Activities and Sources of Wealth

Available evidence about donors who sit on corporate boards shows that Koch seminar donors are much more involved in business leadership than are DA partners. More than a third of Koch donors (37 percent) are currently serving on a corporate board, and 40 percent of them have served on corporate boards at one point or another. In sharp contrast, only 14 percent of DA partners currently sit on corporate boards (and only one in ten have in the past).

DA partners are more often primarily involved with philanthropic 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 this down, DA partners may have inherited their wealth more often than Koch donors. We do have information, however, on the sectoral sources of the wealth possessed by Koch and DA donors. Not surprisingly, given the ballooning of the financial sector in the U.S. economy over the past half century, the single most important source of wealth for around a third of each set of donors is “finance, industry, and real estate.”Footnote ⁴⁴ More broadly, however, the sectoral sources of Koch and DA wealth are quite different, as Figure 4 shows. For Koch donors with a readily identifiable industrial sector as the main source of their wealth, the most common sectors (beyond finance, insurance, and real estate) are mining and natural resource extraction (21 percent) and manufacturing (18 percent). In contrast, the most common DA wealth sources (beyond finance, insurance, and real estate) are found in professional services (20 percent, and especially concentrated in the legal services fields) and the information industry (23 percent). In general, the wealth of Koch donors comes from a broader array of sectors than DA donor wealth. Appendix B includes a tabular presentation of the data displayed in Figure 4 and includes, for comparison purposes, the wealth-sector profile for Drutman's 2012 donors, who tend to be more similar to the DA partners than to the Koch seminar participants.

Fig. 4.

Sources of Wealth for Koch and Democracy Alliance Donors.

Now that we have defined donor consortia, offered brief overviews of the Koch seminars and the DA, and explored the characteristics of their wealthy members, it is time to focus on the primary activities and impact of these two donor consortia. How, exactly, do these consortia attract and channel big-money contributions to arrays of other organizations on the right and left?

Meanings and Obligations of Membership

The rhetoric of membership is quite different for the Koch seminars versus the DA, as suggested by telling statements whose phrasings resemble many others in meeting programs and explanatory documents from these two groups. In a 2011 letter to privileged invitees, Charles Koch explained that joining the Koch seminars means signing on to a band of wealthy comrades determined “to combat what is now the greatest assault on American freedom and prosperity in our lifetimes.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The seminars, Charles stressed, are about more than “fun in the sun” and focus on more than just the next election (although some sessions do address immediate electoral opportunities and evaluate past campaigns). “Our network of business and philanthropic leaders,” he explained, brings together “doers who are willing to engage in the hard work necessary to advance our shared principles… . Our goal for these meetings must be to advance ideas that strengthen … freedom, beat back the unrelenting attacks and hold elected leaders accountable.” Participants in Koch seminars are not called “conservatives” or “Republicans”—indeed, those labels are rarely used—but are instead characterized as leaders dedicated to advancing a free, entrepreneurial American society.

Joining the DA is likewise a value-oriented commitment for wealthy people who do not usually proclaim their party label, but the DA conceptualization is much drier and more transactional. Rather than heeding a call to battle, DA members become “partners” who (in the words of a 2015 DA document reproduced in Appendix C) enjoy

Wealthy donors who join the DA certainly embrace “progressive” as a label for their general political orientation—the word is repeated everywhere in DA communications and conference agendas. But what, exactly, “progressive” means is rarely, if ever, spelled out or debated. Early efforts to define a DA vision were remarkably thin and short-lived.Footnote ⁴⁷ Currently, a more robust “20/20 vision” is publicly presented on the DA website and handed out in brochure form at every conference. In this statement, many specific objectives are arrayed under three “larger goals”: creating “a fair democracy where everyone can participate,” promoting “a growing economy that works for all,” and ensuring “a planet that is healthy and safe” (https://democracyalliance.org/investments/strategy/). As has been true since the DA launch, the organization promotes loosely linked center-left priorities, each of which resonates with the concerns of subsets of DA partners and approved organizations. Unlike the Koch seminars, the DA does not proclaim any unified political strategy.

Procedurally, membership in the Koch seminars was, at the start, vaguely defined, apparently based on little more than taking part in one of the gatherings hosted by Charles and his associates. For some years, the Koch seminars have had a family-oriented rhetorical framing, with “guests” urged to attend as husband-wife couples. Nevertheless, after Freedom Partners took over managing the seminars in 2012, membership became more formally specified, as DA membership always has been. Just as DA partners must pay yearly dues and contribute $200,000 to recommended organizations, so too must Koch participants pledge $100,000 or more each year to network undertakings (whether there are obligations to pay other fees, we do not know).

Following standard fund-raising techniques, recent Koch seminars have also encouraged giving well above the minimum by setting aside special “invitation only” sessions for “top donors.” Although DA partners vary enormously in the amounts they donate through their consortium, DA documents and meeting agendas never indicate that certain events or meetings are open only to top donors.

As for membership benefits, DA partners have access to the organization's professional staff based in Washington, DC, and Koch seminar participants have similar access at the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce based in Arlington, Virginia. These offices dispense information and help members structure donations, no doubt with an eye to tax consequences and public disclosures. However, invitations to consortium meetings are the chief membership perk. As long as members meet annual dues and pledge requirements, they can cover their own travel and hotel expenses to attend either the DA's “investment conferences,” held each spring and fall, or the Koch seminars, convened each winter (usually in January) and again in the late spring or summer. Attended by hundreds of honchos, these conclaves are where the action is—where like-minded wealthy people mingle and conference organizers try to steer “investments” in concerted directions. In addition, to reinforce ties and reach out to potential new recruits between biannual conferences, both consortia encourage social and informational gatherings in major cities, often convened at members’ homes.

How Consortium Meetings Focus Donor Attention

We have a virtually complete run of DA conference programs, but we have found full Koch programs only for the late June 2010 Aspen, Colorado, seminar, entitled “Understanding and Addressing Threats to American Free Enterprise and Prosperity,” and the mid-June 2014 Dana Point, California, seminar, “American Courage: Our Commitment to a Free Society.” For comparison purposes, we use the DA's “Progress 360” conference held in in late April 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?” conference held in late April 2014 in Chicago, Illinois. Fortuitously, these paired sets of meetings happened just before momentous midterm U.S. elections. Furthermore, the 2010 meetings fell at roughly the midpoint in the life spans of these consortia, and the 2014 meetings exemplify recent developments.Footnote ⁴⁸

Both the Koch seminars and the DA sponsor several-day meetings that mix plenary sessions with breakout groups and intersperse serious sessions with meals, cocktail parties, and recreational opportunities. At both conclaves, some sessions feature media celebrities, top political officeholders, and the occasional author or even university-based academic. But a closer look makes it clear that the Koch seminars and DA conferences bring together quite different segments of the right and left political worlds and choreograph activities in distinctive ways. At typical Koch seminars, hundreds of wealthy, mostly white-male business leaders, many joined by their wives, hear from a modest number of invited speakers and a couple dozen top leaders of Koch organizations, themselves mostly white men. In contrast, at typical DA conferences, about a hundred mostly white-male and some white-female “partners” are joined by more diverse leaders of DA-affiliated labor unions and foundations. Both sets of DA donors interact with several dozen professionals (many of them women or persons of color) who lead the many think tanks, advocacy groups, and grassroots-focused organizations that receive (or aspire to receive) contributions from DA partners.

At DA conferences, furious networking is the order of the day—as invited professional leaders of liberal endeavors do their best to attract attention and impress potential donors about their respective organizations. The DA's basic structure encourages this pattern, because it raises money primarily by exposing donor members to “recommended” progressive organizations whose goals, resources, staffing, and achievements are vetted by the DA each year. Getting (and remaining) on the regularly updated core list of DA-recommended organizations is a big deal, because it ensures attention from DA donors and a chance to attend the conferences and hobnob with donors in person. Even if most approved organizations do not get high percentages of their budgets funded through DA-encouraged donations—and most have not since the very earliest years—their leaders still value the visibility and connections that invitations to attend DA conferences can bring. For their part, many DA partners strive to get visibility for their favorite causes, issues, and organizations.

Given the multiple DA constituencies—individual partners, institutional partners, foundation allies, and leaders of DA-approved organizations—DA staffers face quite a challenge as they assemble panels and sessions. To appear inclusive and hold partners in the fold, DA staff let many individual partners or sets of partners take ownership of particular conference sessions, especially breakout groups, meal-time meetings, or workshops focused on particular issues or groups those partners consider vitally important. (At the Koch seminars, as far as we can gather, donor “guests” almost never take formal charge of parts of the biannual programs.) In addition to allowing donors to set parts of the agenda, DA conference organizers set up sessions and panels to allow as many DA-supported progressive organizations as possible to tout what they are doing or promising to do. Big-picture plenaries address overarching topics such as current political challenges or strategies for fighting economic inequality—and presentations on those panels feature leaders or representatives of multiple DA-supported organizations such as the Center for American Progress or Media Matters for America.

The resulting DA confabs are, quite literally, stuffed with speaking slots for as many progressive organizational leaders as possible—above all for leaders of longtime DA-supported organizations. For example, the spring 2010 Progress 360 conference was spread over three and a half days and featured ten general plenaries, five partner plenaries, and nineteen breakout sessions (offered in four periods). Setting aside dinnertime talks and the last half-day when groups of partners ran a number of workshops, most conference panels had four to six speakers. One plenary session, remarkably, had ten speakers—including six heads of that year's core DA-funded organizations: the Center for American Progress, the Center for Community Change, Media Matters for America, Third Way, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the Center for Social Inclusion. Indeed, the leaders from fully three-quarters of the core organizations recommended for DA funding that year appeared on spring 2010 conference panels. Most other speaking slots went to leaders from other progressive organizations, including groups working on current issues like health reform and organizations that would in the future win inclusion on the core DA-recommended list. Overall, the spring 2010 conference had more than three dozen speakers from assorted progressive political organizations. Some conference sessions focused on broad themes such as an overview of the 2010 election and “The Progressive Narrative and Lessons Learned in 2009,” while others considered specific policy challenges like immigration or money in politics, or reviewed ways to mobilize key constituencies such as Latinos and millennials. The politicians present that spring were mostly officials from the Obama White House.

Four years later, in the spring of 2014, the DA conference again followed a similar script, so much so that we need not dwell on all the details. Once again, sets of four to six speakers from about three dozen progressive organizations populated thirteen general plenaries and sixteen breakouts (organized in six periods)—with sessions spread, this time, over just two and a half days. Two partner-only sessions were also held. Once again, 2014 was a midterm election year, and some sessions focused on the upcoming November contests. Other sessions dealt with hot topics like gun control and criminal-justice reform, while a number of plenaries focused on economic challenges. Presidents from DA-member unions were more prominent on the spring 2014 program than they had been four years earlier, yet the heads of most major DA-supported organizations still claimed much of the limelight—including the heads of longtime DA partner favorites like the Center for American Progress, Media Matters, and the Center for Community Change. Also featured was one aspiring Democratic Senatorial candidate, Alison Lundergan Grimes of Kentucky.

The 2014 conference marked the beginning of Gara LaMarche's DA presidency, which would soon propel the consortium in new directions—placing a reinvigorated emphasis on state-level and grassroots organizing and focusing initiatives around core themes of fighting economic inequality, slowing climate change, and reforming U.S. democracy. Some panels, accordingly, included fresh faces from organizations like the New York Working Families Party, NextGen Action, Color of Change, and the Restaurant Opportunities Center. Also prominently featured were leaders from Demos and the Roosevelt Institute, soon to be recommended for partner support in yet another revamp of the list of core DA organizations.

By the time DA partners leave DA fall or spring investment conferences, they have heard about dozens of possible groups and priorities to which they might donate. Wrap-up sessions sometimes urge partners to make specific commitments. But no matter when partners finalize their contributions, they usually do not write checks to the DA itself. Instead, DA partners choose which among dozens of liberal or progressive groups they want to support and then make donations directly to them (perhaps with some DA staff advice and help). In some periods, the DA has set ideal annual targets for partner support to each core recommended group and has tried to persuade donors to make choices that fulfill those targets. Recently, the DA has set up a number of special “funds” supervised by committees of partners and staffers, entities meant to disperse grants to smaller progressive groups doing grassroots outreach or working in specific 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 millions of dollars to deploy as they see strategically fit. Instead, the DA staff and board manage a kind of progressive investment marketplace, which selects and certifies dozens of worthy groups and funds, so partners can scan the possibilities and make their own choices.

Koch seminars are much more focused affairs than the DA organizational bazaars. While DA conferences are crowded with speakers from separate organizations and issue networks, the Koch gatherings expose conservative wealth holders and their spouses to libertarian and free-market ideas and outline the latest version of a regularly updated coherent strategy for shifting U.S. political culture, politics, and policies toward the far economic right. As we discuss below, the seminars and their agendas generally set aside social policies, like those involving abortion, gay marriage, or religion, even though many Koch donors themselves care intensely about these issues and often support groups espousing them with donations delivered apart from the Koch network. This downplaying of social issues sets the Koch seminars apart from the DA, which features sessions on social issues like women's reproductive freedom and gay marriage, as well as sessions on economic topics. Notably, sessions at the Koch seminars feature leaders of a small set of interrelated political organizations run by leaders designated by the Kochs and their close associates. This game plan is apparent from the types and sequences of sessions listed in Koch seminar programs.

At the very start of the June 2010 Aspen seminar, for example, the Koch's political-strategist-in-chief, Richard Fink, led “An Introduction to these Meetings for First-Time Participants” to enable them “to learn about the strategic framework that has guided past success and that guides future action.” Four years later at the June 2014 Koch seminar in Dana Point, two such orientation sessions happened—one led by David Koch and Richard Fink on “Saving America: Our Fight to Advance Freedom and Reverse the Country's Decline” and another on “Understanding the Network: A Discussion with Capability Leaders.” At the second orientation session, five major heads of core Koch organizations—Freedom Partners, AFP, the Libre Initiative, Generation Opportunity, and the Charles G. Koch Foundation—explained their interrelated efforts to redirect U.S. politics. DA conferences, in contrast, always have welcome receptions for new partners, but not special orientation sessions. The DA newbies are deemed up to speed just by being there, whereas the Koch first-timers are considered in need of careful instruction about the purposes and organizational arms of the overall Koch network.

More broadly, Koch seminars have a standard choreography, featuring a logical sequence of plenary sessions through which attendees are herded (pleasantly, of course, with meals and breaks for socializing in between). At the 2010 seminar, twelve of fifteen sessions (80 percent) were plenaries and three were breakout sessions (two periods offering alternative workshops plus the one breakout restricted to first-time attendees). At the 2014 seminar, the proportion of plenaries dropped to two-thirds (15 out of 23), and there were eight breakout periods. But only some of those 2014 breakout periods involved alternative sessions any donor could attend, because many segregated first-time versus repeat participants and, at times, drew “top donors” into specialized breakout sessions such as meetings with important GOP politicians. During both the 2010 and 2014 Koch seminars, plenaries followed a coherent pattern, starting with an opening speech by Charles Koch—who in 2010 outlined “The Threats to American Freedom and Prosperity” and in 2014 spoke about “American Courage: Our Commitment to a Free Society.” In both gatherings, subsequent plenary sessions explained threats to liberty and strategies for responding. Then strategy sessions outlined immediate and longer-term efforts: to deploy resources for the next election and to shift ideas and policy agendas in American society overall. In 2014, for instance, panels about election “opportunities” introduced promising GOP candidates for the upcoming November contests, while equally prominent panels informed donors about the Koch strategy to transform U.S. higher education in the years ahead.

As Koch seminars convey the master narrative in sequenced plenaries, the high-dollar donors in attendance are exposed to the leaders of two sets of Koch organizations that stand ready to counter perceived threats to American liberty. On the one hand, donors hear from officials at the Charles G. Koch Foundation and the Mercatus Center, both of which support libertarian scholars, policy research, and educational efforts. On the other hand, donors hear from strategists directing policy and electoral campaigns at AFP, the Libre Initiative and Concerned Veterans for America, as well as from experts at the Koch data operation Themis/i360. (Brief descriptions of core Koch organizations appear in Appendix A.) Only occasionally do people from independently led outside organizations appear on Koch seminar panels, and the tendency to feature insiders seems to be getting more pronounced as the Koch network matures. In 2010, certain plenary panels included, side by side with inner Koch honchos, the president of the American Enterprise Institute and the head of the National Right to Work advocacy organization. But by 2014, organizational representatives on seminar panels were almost entirely core Koch leaders. (The chief exception was the head of the United Negro College Fund, which had just received a $25 million grant from the Charles G. Koch Foundation.)

In addition to organizational leaders, spring 2014 Koch seminar sessions also featured leading GOP politicians, including Senate leader Mitch McConnell and three aspiring Senate candidates: Cory Gardner of Colorado, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, and Joni Ernst of Iowa. Gardner and Ernst were at the time little-known politicians, and our research shows that both got bump-ups in contributions from Koch donors after their appearances at the spring 2014 meeting.Footnote ⁴⁹

Beyond hearing Koch leaders and favored GOP officials or candidates speak, selected donor guests also get one-on-one briefings. Following the winter 2014 Koch seminar, someone left behind in a hotel room a crumpled sheet detailing dozens of small meetings between forty named donors (individuals or family sets) and subsets of leaders from twenty-nine Koch organizations.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Koch leaders involved in those sessions included ten national officials and state directors from AFP, the head of the Libre Initiative and the president of i360, three officials from the Charles G. Koch Foundation and one from the Mercatus Center, and a dozen top Koch managers affiliated with Freedom Partners, Koch Industries, and Koch Industries Public Sector. Some intimate sessions involving the wealthiest donors were held off-site, including at a nearby Koch personal residence.

The tight choreography of the Koch seminar programs and encounters has a purpose. By the time the gatherings wrap up and donors are thinking about where to direct their contributions, they have had plenty of chances to hear about strategy and tactics from people in charge of most of the core organizations in the integrated Koch network that will receive the bulk of their donations (as we will soon show). Unlike partners in the DA, Koch seminar guests contribute directly to and through Koch-controlled organizations, with most of their donations going to the core network entities listed above in Figure 1. Seminar members may donate through Freedom Partners, the conduit now used by the Koch network to disperse general-support grants to political organizations. They can donate to the recently established Freedom Partners PAC.Footnote ⁵¹ Or they can give directly to Koch entities—including by directing anonymous, tax-deductible contributions to support educational missions pursued by the Mercatus Center, the Charles G. Koch Foundation, or foundations affiliated with AFP. Whichever of these routes they choose, however, Koch seminar participants fulfill their membership obligation in a very different way than DA partners meet theirs. Each individual DA partner chooses from long lists of recommended or permitted groups to fashion his or her own menu of progressive organizations to support in fulfillment of the annual membership pledge, but Koch seminar guests concentrate their giving on interrelated groups directed by the Koch inner cadre.

How Much Money Is Raised?

Big-money donor consortia have remarkable capacities to aggregate and direct political funding, as both the Koch seminars and the DA do on their respective ends of the U.S. political spectrum. But available evidence suggests that fund-raising by the Koch operation for its affiliated organizations substantially outpaces resource mobilization by its leftist counterpart. This is apparent in Figure 5, which juxtaposes reported two-year totals for Koch donor pledges to two-year aggregations of donations to recommended groups made by DA partners.Footnote ⁵² The DA totals in Figure 5 include reported partner donations to both core recommended groups and to other groups approved for partner donations (dozens of which are listed on a larger DA “progressive infrastructure map” included in each conference program). These totals come from reports of the Koch seminar pledges made to the media or leaked by investigative reporters, along with internal DA records.

Fig. 5.

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

Earlier we noted that while membership in the Koch seminars has increased sharply in recent years, the ranks of DA partners have grown only modestly. To be sure, the DA has recently broadened its resource capacities by adding more institutional partners and affiliates—including such major labor organizations as the Service Employees International Union, Communications Workers of America, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, the National Education Association, and the American Federation of Teachers. Such institutional partners owe higher dues than individuals ($60,000 per year) and pledge higher annual contributions (at least $1 million per year). In addition, up to twenty-three affiliated foundations can now send representatives to DA conferences and make use of DA services, with the understanding that they will make grants to DA-listed organizations of about $200,000 per year (see Appendix C). Nevertheless, recent DA increases in both individual/family partnerships and institutional partnerships or affiliations have not matched the growth of Koch seminar memberships. And there are reasons to believe that many Koch donors give at much higher levels than most DA partners do, since the total Koch seminar pledges each year exceed what we would expect given the minimum contributions required of Koch seminar participants.Footnote ⁵³ Accordingly, it should come as no surprise that the overall resources raised through these two consortia have diverged.

As tracked in Figure 2, since 2009–10, membership in the Koch seminars has overtaken DA partners, and more recently, the hundreds of millions generated by the Koch seminars exceed DA giving by two- to threefold (see Figure 5). For the Koch side of the equation, Figure 5 includes a conservative estimate of pledged spending in the 2015–16 cycle. That funding was originally planned for up to $889 million—and Charles Koch told the Wichita Eagle that about $500 million of this two-year target was actually raised and spent in 2015.Footnote ⁵⁴ In 2016, the Koch network ended up redirecting funding from presidential to Congressional races, after Donald Trump, not a Koch brothers favorite, won the GOP nomination. But there is every indication that hundreds of millions were still spent on 2016 elections.Footnote ⁵⁵

Where Does Koch and DA Money Go?

The divergent money-raising trajectories we see for the Koch seminars versus the DA would be significant even if the two consortia were allocating the donations they amass or coordinate in analogous ways. But that is not at all the case. Simply stated, the Koch seminars are not only raising greater sums than the DA, they are channeling those heftier resources to a more compact set of organizations directly controlled by the Koch network itself. By contrast, DA partners are spreading more limited funding across a much larger number of center-left organizations and funds, most of which the DA itself does not manage.

Data assembled from internal reports for Table 2 tell the basic DA story. Even in its earliest years, the DA expanded its core list of groups recommended for partner support faster than it added to the ranks of donating partners—although the tens of millions of dollars raised to beef up the center-left infrastructure did grow through 2008. By 2011, however, aggregate DA donations were declining even though the number of groups on the core recommended list rose to a high point. From 2011 to 2012, the recommended list of core organizations was pruned significantly, but at that same juncture, a longer secondary list of groups was placed on a “Progressive Infrastructure Map.” Partner donations to those dozens of additional groups counted toward meeting their yearly minimum required contributions of $200,000. In recent years, total partner donations to the additional approved groups have regularly exceeded donations to core recommended groups.

Table 2.

Democracy Alliance Trends, 2005–2016

In very recent years, the DA's approach of supplementing individual with institutional memberships has allowed it to orchestrate more funding for both core recommended groups and additional approved entities. At the same time, however, the core recommended list of groups has seen many changes and has expanded through the addition of new organizations, as well as many new DA-managed special funds focused on supporting state-level political groups.Footnote ⁵⁶ By late 2016, the full array of highly recommended core DA organizations and funds stood at forty-three, a longer list than ever before—and dozens more groups appeared on the 2016 version of the DA's Progressive Infrastructure Map, any of them fair game for DA partners looking to fulfill their annual pledge commitment. “There are so many worthy groups,” a DA board member exclaimed to one of the authors—and clearly there are not enough donated millions to meet the demand for organizational sustenance on the left.

Meanwhile, Koch seminar dollars have followed quite a different trajectory. In Figure 5 we note that, since 2009–10, Koch seminar pledge targets have ballooned and now reach the hundreds of millions. As far as we can tell, pledge targets have been met, but public documentation about where all the funds have gone is incomplete. In particular, we do not know much about donations made directly by Koch seminar members to the Charles G. Koch Foundation, the Mercatus Center, and other think tanks and educational entities. We know from Koch seminar programs that these organizations and their projects are touted to donors, and interviews given by Charles Koch indicate that roughly 40 percent of pledge monies may go to support network efforts to shape ideas, research, and policy debates.

Beyond educational contributions, Koch seminar members also channel major funding directly or indirectly to political organizations engaged in citizen mobilization, policy campaigns, and election-related activities or spending. But which organizations benefit? Obviously, Koch-orchestrated donations could go to a wide variety of organizations on the U.S. right. A well-known portrayal of the Koch network in 2012—the “Maze of Money” map issued by OpenSecrets and the Washington Post—suggested that the Kochs and their donors routinely spread grants to a wide array of independently run conservative organizations.Footnote ⁵⁷ That OpenSecrets chart suggested that Koch money is used to bankroll a vast tangle of conservative organizations from business groups to pro-gun and right-to-life efforts. We find, however, that the 2012 juncture was unusual; in other years, especially since 2012, contributions from seminar donors have been used primarily to support other organizations inside the Koch network.

Before 2012, possibilities for donating to political organizations inside the Koch network were somewhat limited. The Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce was not set up until late 2011; before then, well-established Koch groups that engaged in electioneering and public campaigns were limited to AFP plus a trio of policy advocacy groups: the 60 Plus Association, the American Energy Alliance, and the Center to Protect Patient Rights (CPPR, also known as American Encore). During the Koch network's fierce fight against President Obama's Affordable Care Act and the conservative crusade to defeat Obama in 2012, CPPR served as a major conduit to fund political ads.Footnote ⁵⁸ Reportedly, Koch donors also used additional political funding conduits during the early Obama years, including a group favored by many conservatives called Donors Trust and another Koch-tied group called the TC4 Trust.Footnote ⁵⁹ However, from 2012 on, the Koch's own “political bank,” Freedom Partners, took over as the major political funding conduit, displacing CPPR.Footnote ⁶⁰ By then, there were many more Koch-run political groups for donors to support—including the Libre Initiative, Generation Opportunity, Concerned Veterans for America, Themis/i360, and Aegis Strategic (see Appendix A). In 2014, Freedom Partners also launched its own super PAC.Footnote ⁶¹

Empirically, we have no way to trace the specific destinations for any Koch seminar-inspired donations that flowed some years ago through Donors Trust. But for recent years, we can use IRS 990 reports that list donations for “general support” that went to various political groups through Koch conduits, including the TC4 Trust, CPPR, and Freedom Partners. Figure 6 sums up the grant totals from these conduits in recent years—and also indicates the percentages of total funding that went to the Koch network's own political organizations during each period.Footnote ⁶²

Fig. 6.

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

From these data, we can see that more than $350 million in political funding channeled through Koch conduits was widely distributed during the 2011–12 election cycle—the juncture at which OpenSecrets prepared its Maze of Money chart. At that moment, about half of funding through these conduits went to Koch-run political operations like AFP, but the other half funded grants scattered to several dozen other conservative and business organizations engaged in constituency mobilization, advocacy, and political messaging in the 2012 election cycle. In that election cycle, the Koch network still lacked many political capabilities of its own, so the network channeled grants to many other conservative groups—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 leaders delayed the winter 2013 Koch seminar from January to April, so that the results of their network's autopsy and strategic reevaluations could be presented to donors.Footnote ⁶³ From that point, as Figure 6 suggests, donations to political organizations flowed overwhelmingly through Freedom Partners, now the central conduit for Koch political funding. Equally important, no longer were grants spread around to business associations and independent conservative groups outside the Koch orbit. Instead, Freedom Partners channeled large amounts in general-support grants to core Koch groups—including $23 million to AFP, $5 million to Generation Opportunity, and another $14 million to Concerned Veterans of America.

For a final comparison between the political funding strategies of the DA and the Koch seminars, we have pulled together the pie charts in Figure 7 to dramatize their respective 2013–14 patterns of organizational funding. We use this time point because it is one where, thanks to leaked documents as well as IRS records, we have relatively full information on allocations by the two consortia. (However, the Koch funding allocations explored here are only about half of all the monies that network deploys. As noted earlier, these data only show the explicitly political donations channeled from Koch donors through Freedom Partners and then regranted to other organizations disclosed on tax returns; additional hundreds of millions have also gone in untraceable ways to the Charles G. Koch Foundation and other educational entities in the larger network.)

Fig. 7.

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

In the DA pie chart, we classify organizations to which partners donated into three categories: longtime core recommended groups that had been on the main DA funding list continuously since 2007–09, all other core groups on the 2013–14 recommended list, and the remaining groups on the DA's very large Progressive Infrastructure Map listing dozens of organizations to which partners may donate in fulfillment of their membership pledges. In the much simpler Koch pie chart, recipients of Freedom Partners grants are sorted into two categories: political organizations controlled directly by the Koch organization versus all others (see Figure 1 for this classification; unlike with the DA, we do not know if the Koch seminars use an “extended” approved list to classify groups).

The bottom line contrast is clear. Even in a two-year period where roughly similar amounts of donor money were given by DA partners and to explicitly political groups through the Koch seminars/Freedom Partners conduit, the patterns of deployment were quite different. The DA encouraged (and allowed) relatively small gifts to many dozens of organizations, while Koch seminar members who channeled donations through Freedom Partners ended up concentrating their support on eight core Koch political organizations.

The Big Right Tilt

At the start of our work on donor consortia and other organizations two years ago, we worked with existing literatures and experts to draw up lists of all of the major think tanks, issue advocacy groups, constituency-mobilizing associations, national political party committees, and donor organizations (apart from individual candidate PACs) as of 2002 and 2014. We also gathered data on groups’ annual budgets at those junctures. Detailed in Appendices D and E, these left and right universe lists are not the only ones that might be drawn up, but we are confident that they reflect the most important left and right political organizations operating at two nonpresidential years before and after the establishment of the two wealthy donor consortia examined here. By examining changes in the shares of the total budgetary pies from 2002 to 2004, we can see that especially telling shifts occurred in the U.S. conservative universe over this short period.

On the right, there were startling shifts away from party control, as documented in Figure 8. Especially telling is the shrinking share of total right resources controlled by Republican Party committees—a share that plummeted from 53 percent in 2002 to 30 percent by 2014—and the correlative expansion in shares controlled by nonparty entities, and especially by right-wing donor groups and, above all, the Koch seminars. Although various old and new groups were involved in the growth of the extra-party shares on the right from 2002 to 2014, the expanding Koch network was crucial, as we can see from the groups listed in blue boldface in Appendix D. The Koch seminars, the Freedom Partners Koch funding conduit, and AFP all played big roles in shifting funding flows and reconfiguring the organizational universe toward the ultra-free-market right. The Kochs and their donors say they want to push and pull Republican officeholders and candidates in order to move the center of gravity in U.S. politics and policymaking toward the antigovernment, ultra-free-market right. Shifting organizational patterns and resource shares suggest that they have done just that.

Fig. 8.

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

In contrast, Democratic Party committees did not lose ground compared to nonparty organizations. The DA may have played a small role in boosting shares for some sectors but, overall, Democratic Party committees and long-standing major liberal organizations like the labor unions, the NAACP, and Planned Parenthood continued to hold sway in 2014 just as they had in 2002—and the overall shares of party versus nonparty resources remained remarkably stable. Clearly, the DA did not displace the Democratic Party in the same way as the Koch seminars have done for the GOP.

A second way to look at the impact of America's wealthy donor consortia is to consider whether—and how effectively—they have targeted cross-state infrastructure development. Because the United States is a federated political system, “national” political clout in Congress and the Electoral College is grounded in widespread leverage across political geography, not just in money and staffers deployed in big metropolises and Washington, DC.

Well before the Koch seminars and the DA were launched in the early 2000s, cross-state organizational networks grew on both the left and right (beyond the two major political parties themselves). On the left, labor union federations were crucial—especially the public-sector unions, including teacher unions, that had a presence and clout in many states and often took the lead in fights about taxes and social programs generally. In addition, from the late 1980s, two cross-state networks, the State Priorities Partnership (earlier called the State Fiscal Analysis Initiative) and the Economic Analysis and Research Network, linked liberal policy research organizations spread across the states.

Meanwhile, the right built its own state-level think tank 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 linking businesses seeking state-level policy changes to draft “model bills” for Republicans to introduce in state legislatures.Footnote ⁸⁶ Over several decades, these cross-state organizational networks were supported by the Koch brothers and donors who would eventually join their seminars. Tellingly, however, when the Koch donor consortium was established in the 2000s, it did not just keep doing more of the same. Instead, it added to conservative cross-state capacities by building up AFP as a federated organization able to deploy money, paid staffers, and volunteer activists in state-level elections and public policy battles.

As Figure 9 displays, the spread of AFP was steady after its launch in 2004—and notably, the organization quickly expanded into long-standing liberal and Democratic Party strongholds. By 2005 AFP had already installed a paid director in the state of Wisconsin and started to build capacities the Koch network and right-wing allies would use to help defeat labor unions and reshape that state's politics and public policies. North Carolina was an early AFP target, too. In 2008–10, even as Democrats controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress in Washington, DC, the right-wing “troika” (as we label the combination of SPN, ALEC, and AFP) was positioned to shape policy agendas and legislative outcomes in dozens of states as soon as Republicans gained new governorships and legislative majorities starting in 2010.

Fig. 9.

The Growth of Americans for Prosperity.

Sources: IRS reports, AFP prospectuses; media reports.

On the other end of the partisan spectrum, the DA from its inception has recurrently tried to build capacities at the state level. Key staff leaders and groups of donors have repeatedly focused on particular states, especially those that are home to many partners. And the DA's lists of core recommended organizations have always included the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which coordinates liberal research organizations across many states through the State Priorities Partnership.

Furthermore, since Gara LaMarche took the DA helm in 2014—and especially after Hillary Clinton lost her bid for the White House in November 2016—the DA has ramped up efforts to build infrastructure and coordinate donor work in the states. New state-focused DA funds have been added to the core investment menus, and starting in 2014, the DA also began recommending support for the newly launched State Innovation Exchange, or SiX for short. This organization seeks to counter ALEC by supporting self-identified “progressive” officeholders in state legislatures across the country. In 2017, SiX announced the creation of a new political arm called SiX Action to channel contributions to the campaigns of progressive candidates in the states.

Despite such long-standing and recently intensified DA efforts, however, the progressive consortium clearly remains far behind the Koch network in nurturing cross-state capacities. Not only do left-leaning cross-state organizations receive much less largesse from DA donors and work with much smaller budgets than the conservative troika powerhouses, the overall reach of the left efforts falls far short of the reach of conservative cross-state networks. Unlike the Koch network's AFP, even recently ramped-up DA efforts mostly focus on friendly territories. So far, for example, SiX and assorted DA-encouraged state donor groups principally hold sway in liberal states like California, Minnesota, Washington, and Oregon, and do not reach into GOP or conservative strongholds.

Why It Matters—Donor Consortia and Pivotal Policy Battles

America's recently established wealthy donor consortia, as we outlined at the beginning of this article, set out to reshape the overall organizational terrain of politics and governance—above all because their donor members hope to further very different public policy agendas. Koch seminar members want to shrink taxes, social spending, and government's regulatory footprint in the market economy, while DA donors favor government steps to promote social inclusion and socioeconomic equality. The bottom line for both consortia, therefore, lies in reshaping public policy debates and government activities at all levels of the U.S. federal system—and the available evidence (which we can only briefly indicate here) suggests that the Koch seminars and Koch network have had a much greater impact than the DA and its aligned organizations.

With the Koch seminars providing big money, the Koch network has very rapidly built virtually a third political party machine in the United States—a machine that is intertwined with the GOP but not directly under the control of official party leaders or committees. With AFP and the Koch seminars at its heart, this new machine both helps fund election campaigns for free-market-oriented Republicans and, once such GOPers win office, effectively pushes them to legislate free-market policy goals in the states and U.S. Congress, even when the policies at issue are not popular. Elsewhere we have described some of the key Koch policy accomplishments in recent years: persuading most Republicans in Congress to obstruct carbon taxes and other steps to deal with global warming, supporting state-level curbs of labor union rights, and rolling back pro-labor measures like minimum wage increases.Footnote ⁸⁷

On the left edge of the Democratic Party, meanwhile, DA donors have contributed to groups that advocate for progressive policy stands such as a $15 minimum wage, single-payer health insurance, and stronger regulations to fight global warming. Nevertheless, such progressive regulatory gains and urban ordinances stand at risk of being undone by GOP-dominated state legislatures and by the post-2016 Trump administration. For example, although some twenty-six states have recently increased their minimum wage levels and more than thirty cities have followed suit, the right-wing troika of ALEC, the SPN think tanks, and AFP state organizations has been quite successful in persuading GOP legislatures to block or undo pro-labor laws and have also used state legislative clout to preempt or roll back urban ordinances. As of 2016, nearly six in ten Americans lived in a state that had preempted local-level minimum wage hikes.Footnote ⁸⁸

The battles that have raged over comprehensive health reform since 2008 in Washington, DC, and across the U.S. states are especially telling for understanding the contrasting accomplishments of the Koch versus DA consortia. As David Leonhardt of the New York Times pointed out, the Affordable Care Act enacted by Congress in March 2010—following years of fierce partisan warfare—was the single most economic-equality-enhancing U.S. federal legislation enacted in half a century.Footnote ⁸⁹ What is more, when the Supreme Court upheld this law in June 2012, it also ruled that each state could decide whether or not to implement the new federally funded expansion of Medicaid coverage—setting off new partisan and ideological battles that have raged across the U.S. states ever since.

Through all phases of the enactment and implementation of health reform, the wealthy donor consortia and their affiliated organizations played predictable partisan roles—but operated in tellingly different ways to quite different effects.

From the start, the Koch network spearheaded unremitting opposition to health reform. At the January 2009 Koch seminar meeting in Palm Springs, California, wealthy donors sounded the alarm about Democratic plans for health reform, prodding the network to launch comprehensive efforts to block, undercut, and delay.Footnote ⁹⁰ This coincided with floods of new wealthy conservatives clamoring to join the Koch seminars and channel resources to further Koch-led efforts. As Congress deliberated over health reform legislation in 2009 and 2010, AFP helped organize “kill the bill” protests outside the U.S. capitol plus some 300 rallies across the country. Most visibly, AFP coordinated 2009 town hall protests targeting lawmakers. As one Koch operative explained, “We packed these town halls with people who were just screaming about this thing. …We knew we had to make that summer absolute hell.”Footnote ⁹¹

AFP again moved front and center after the 2012 Supreme Court decision tossed Medicaid expansion choices back to the states, because Koch network leaders quickly realized that this ruling offered a second 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's head Tim Phillips explained to a journalist, “Medicaid expansion and Obamacare has been the issue we've worked on more than any other single issue.”Footnote ⁹² In 2015 and 2017, AFP donor prospectuses (found by journalists) featured blocking implementation of the Affordable Care Act as one of AFP's top priorities.Footnote ⁹³ Fueled by burgeoning flows of Koch donor money, AFP and other Koch network groups ran ads against state-level GOP lawmakers who so much as contemplated acquiescing to pressures from many business associations to accept federal money to expand Medicaid; AFP also organized opposition rallies on the steps of statehouses and flooded legislators’ inboxes and voicemails with messages from activists. Such efforts were not always successful, but research we have published elsewhere shows that they contributed significantly to blocking Medicaid expansion in many of the nineteen holdout states between 2013 and 2016.Footnote ⁹⁴

In contrast to the often successful contributions Koch donors made to oppositional efforts, the DA has been only a minor and temporary player in Affordable Care enactment and implementation. During the policy planning and grassroots mobilization efforts that happened from 2006 through early 2010, the DA was just taking shape, building from eighty-two partners in 2005 to eighty-seven in 2010. DA donors certainly cheered on Democratic and Obama administration efforts to enact health reform, and DA-connected organizations were involved in the overall drama. But the DA itself was not central, because the lead role was taken by an umbrella group called Health Care for America Now (HCAN).Footnote ⁹⁵ Launched in 2007, HCAN knit together some 900 local, state, and national organizations, including labor unions, community groups, and advocacy groups, and at its height, HCAN deployed forty-five state directors.

This multiyear, nationally federated HCAN coalition was funded not by the DA but by dues from participating groups and grants from private foundations—buoyed above all by tens of millions of dollars from Atlantic Philanthropies, whose president at the time was Gara LaMarche. It was fortunate for the DA that it was not called upon to support HCAN or an effort like it, because the fledgling progressive consortium could not have met this challenge at a time when DA donors were spreading about $50 million per year across some twenty-five to thirty progressive groups (see Table 2). Some of the DA's beneficiary organizations were certainly involved in HCAN, so the DA helped indirectly. But DA donor contributions were small in relation to overall needs. Furthermore, the DA in its first years was contending with strong pushes and pulls from wealthy members or recruits pressing many particular liberal organizations and causes for DA support. In the DA world, there could be nothing comparable to the strategic recognition that dawned on top Koch network leaders in 2009 that America's next big battle over redistributive social spending, the health reform wars, was worth pushing to the top of the agenda. DA leaders lacked the financial and strategic capacities it would have taken to spearhead reform enactment.

Major reform legislation is, however, never accomplished simply in the enactment phase. Implementation battles rage for years, as happened for Social Security in the past and has certainly proven true for the Affordable Care Act now.Footnote ⁹⁶ So the DA had later opportunities, beyond the enactment phase, to get involved—especially when HCAN folded its tents. HCAN celebrated victory when the Affordable Care Act passed Congress in 2010, yet also kept its doors open, in reduced form, through the early judicial battles, initial administrative rulings, and Obama reelection campaign, before deciding to wind down most of their substantive operations at the end of 2013. Founder Richard Kirsch explained that “HCAN had done its job of winning and securing the law. It's leaving to other organizations the job of defending and improving the law.”Footnote ⁹⁷

For all of its comprehensive and impressive qualities, HCAN was a one-time coalition-building effort, a larger example of the sorts of ad hoc, temporary cooperation that liberal groups engage in constantly to fight one or another legislative battle.

HCAN was not, and could not be, the equivalent of the kind of sustained federated organization building that the Koch network of the 2000s was engaged in by marrying the Koch seminar donors to a steadily expanding political machine centered in AFP. However, by the time HCAN disbanded at the end of 2013, why couldn't the DA consortium fund sustained and nationally federated efforts to fully carry through health reform? In hindsight, it would have been an ideal moment for the DA to step in—either to fund a new iteration of HCAN or to construct some kind of continuing replacement—especially since HCAN had already involved many DA allies and funded organizations in creating a meaningful grassroots presence in so many of the Medicaid expansion holdout states. By 2014, in fact, the DA recruited as its new president none other than Gara LaMarche, who had funded HCAN when he was the director at Atlantic Philanthropies, so it can hardly be said that DA lacked leaders who understood what HCAN had done and how crucial it had been to pushing Democrats in Congress to enact health reform in the first place.

But it was not to be. Considerable evidence supports the conclusion that the DA has done little to draw attention to or support cross-state efforts on behalf of Medicaid expansion. Since 2014, as we have recounted, the DA-endorsed SiX has never made Medicaid expansion one of its priorities. And, more broadly, Medicaid expansion barely registered on agendas of the DA as state battles raged. Reviewing the full run of DA conference agendas and programs from the spring of 2010, shortly after the Affordable Care Act was signed into law, through the fall 2015 meeting, we found only eight panels or events that mentioned the health reform law, most of them convened before the 2012 Supreme Court ruling that sparked the ongoing state-level Medicaid battles.

In short, both before and after Gara LaMarche became DA president in 2014, DA investment in sustained cross-state organizing around Medicaid expansion was never a top consortium priority. Why not? We can rule out the possibility that alternative liberal organizations were adequate to the challenge. The leading federated labor union active on behalf of health reform was the Service Employees International Union, but its memberships and resources were concentrated in Democratic states. National progressive advocates doing outreach into GOP states never had an amount of funding even close to conservative opponents, and pro-expansion coalitions mostly had to be assembled state by state without access to the cross-state support available on the right through AFP and the other existing conservative federated networks.Footnote ⁹⁸

Once again, we hypothesize that limitations imposed by the DA's structure may well explain the consortium's absence from this key struggle. Over its entire life span, the left consortium's marketplace design has made it difficult for the DA to prioritize any one specific issue or campaign, given all of the competing demands from partners. Unlike the Koch seminars, the DA is much more dependent on the varied passions of its partners to set agendas and priorities—and Medicaid expansion just never seemed to capture a lot of liberal donor imagination. This crucial redistributive battle was not constantly in the national spotlight, and it received only sporadic attention at DA meetings amid all of the other potential topics that concern partners—such as campaign finance reform, climate change, gender equality, and candidate recruitment. What is more, during the crucial years at issue, the DA's increasingly important institutional partners, the unions, were preoccupied with other concerns such as defending union rights and advancing minimum wages and worker protections.

Limited capacities for cross-state action are another reason for relative DA disinterest, we believe, because strategies and structures often evolve together. Even if certain DA leaders—like Gara LaMarche starting in 2014—understand how important Medicaid expansion battles are in the larger U.S. political economy, the DA and its panoply of supported organizations simply have not had much capacity to reach into and across most U.S. states. The Koch seminars, by comparison, could seize that moment to redirect AFP's already widely institutionalized capacities toward Medicaid battles in dozens of states. Investments in the cross-state capacities of AFP enabled Koch donors and their political network to make nimble and extensive contributions to dozens of state-level campaigns against Medicaid expansion, many of them successful. Meanwhile, the absent or underdeveloped cross-state presence of organizations supported by the DA may have weakened that consortium's willingness as well as ability to help supporters of Medicaid in lagging states get over the finish line in this pivotal battle over socioeconomic equality in the United States.