Rhode Island is the latest state where, with approval ratings falling for President Joe Biden and other national Democrats, progressive groups are mounting challenges to take over the state-level Democratic Party. With Biden failing to enact his agenda and Republicans stripping basic rights from people across the country, Rhode Island progressive candidates are pushing to build a majority with the power to govern in local and state-level politics. Similar slates are running progressive candidates in 11 other states this cycle, part of recent attempts among organizers to find smaller-scale wins despite the party’s national-scale failures.

The group, the Rhode Island Political Cooperative, is seeking to capitalize on the moment of weakness for conservative Democrats and backing 50 candidates in the state this cycle, for offices ranging from governor to state legislators. The group supports candidates who have committed to backing a Green New Deal, a $15 minimum wage, single-payer health care, and not taking money from lobbyists, fossil fuel companies, or corporate PACs.

“The left has been losing in states for 50 years.”

“The left has been losing in states for 50 years,” organizer and Rhode Island Democratic gubernatorial candidate Matt Brown, of the cooperative, told The Intercept. “There are a lot of people on the left who have been resigned to that state for a while and are so used to the role of the left being pushing and pulling and pleading and pressuring bad governments to throw some crumbs to the people.”

The Co-op, as it is known, was formed in 2019 by state Senate candidate Jennifer Rourke — whose Republican opponent punched her last month at a protest following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade — along with Brown and state Sen. Jeanine Calkin; the goal was to oust the state’s conservative Democratic leaders. In the 2020 cycle, the group elected 10 of its candidates and has since gained additional momentum following the assault against Rourke and several high-profile resignations within the state Democratic Party.

The Co-op is an outgrowth of work by Renew U.S., a progressive group that seeks to build local multiracial, working-class coalitions and scale them to establish governing majorities in states across the country in the near term. “One or two cycles, not 20 years,” Brown told The Intercept.

Brown is one of five candidates running for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, including incumbent Gov. Dan McKee. Brown ran for the nomination in 2018 against then-governor and now-Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, and got just under 40,000 votes to Raimondo’s 67,370. Two years later, Brown helped launch Renew, which backed more than 200 candidates in six states that cycle. The 129 Renew candidates who won across the country have since gone on to help pass legislation, like a bill passed last month in Massachusetts that allows undocumented immigrants to obtain a driver’s license and a modest Rhode Island climate justice bill that was signed into law last April.

This year, Brown is running again for the governor’s seat. And Renew is recruiting and backing 400 state and local candidates in Arizona, Connecticut, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Vermont.

In Rhode Island, the Co-op has mounted the challenge at a time when the state Democratic Party, like the national party, is undergoing a major upheaval. Top officials, including the Democratic state Senate president and state Senate Judiciary Committee chair, have announced their retirement in recent weeks. The party’s chief strategist, whom the Providence Journal has described as its de facto executive director, resigned late last month, less than three months before the upcoming September 13 primaries. Elections for governor and the state legislature could dramatically change the political balance in an election cycle where issues like abortion, guns, and the climate crisis are at their most urgent, and some of the party’s most conservative Democrats are being pushed to clarify their positions.

Democrat Matt Brown, a gubernatorial hopeful and former Rhode Island secretary of state, speaks to a group of people at a nomination papers training event in North Kingstown, R.I., on July 3, 2018.

Photo: Steven Senne/AP

And while Democrats control both the White House and Congress, Biden has abandoned several of his campaign promises on oil and gas drilling, student debt, and gun control, with conservative Democrats in the Senate blocking the bulk of his agenda. Republicans are poised to make major gains in the upcoming midterm elections.

Organizers like those involved in the Co-op see these problems as linked. With no compelling local message, Democrats lose state-level elections. Then with no powerbase or bench in the states, they are unable to win in national elections — or unable to get things done when they do win.

“This will build the pipeline for federal power. The way I put it is, members of Congress don’t go home and run for the state legislature, it’s the other way around,” Brown said. “So if we build multiracial, progressive power in 25, 30, 40 states over the course of this decade, we’re gonna have a pipeline of federal candidates for decades to come.”

Rhode Island, where conservative Democrats dominate the party’s majority and block popular legislation, is a microcosm of the problem — and it isn’t unique, said Dálida Rocha, the executive director of Renew. “We see that that is the case in a lot of states, where the Democrats are the majority and we’re still not getting the legislation that we need to get done to meet this urgent moment.”

Insurgent, grassroots slates have reshaped recent elections in other states: a progressive slate took over the Nevada Democratic Party last March, ousting acolytes of the machine built there by former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. In 2020, progressives seeking to oust establishment Democrats up and down the ballot in New Jersey put up the first organized challenge in recent memory to the state’s notoriously corrupt Democratic Party. This year in West Virginia, a new slate of candidates put together after more than six years of organizing took control of the state Democratic Party to oust its leadership and weaken the grip that conservative Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin has held on politics in the state.

As with Manchin, conservative Democrats in Rhode Island are facing stronger opposition. Rourke, who had challenged the incumbent in her race twice before and slowly chipped away at his lead, losing by 31 percentage points in 2018, and 16 points last cycle.

This year, unexpected events cleared Rourke’s path to a victory. Rourke’s Republican opponent, Jeann Lugo, a Providence police officer, dropped out of the race after video surfaced of him punching Rourke during a protest against the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Two days later, Rourke’s Democratic opponent, Senate Majority Leader Michael McCaffrey, announced he would not seek reelection after 28 years in office. McCaffrey and other Democratic leaders in the state, which has been solidly blue since 2014 but is home to some of the country’s most staunchly conservative and anti-abortion Democrats, had faced criticism in the past for failing to codify Roe and again more recently by their opponents in the wake of the decision to end protections for abortions.

Rourke will face Michael Carreiro, the president of the Warwick firefighters local union, in the September Democratic primary. Carreiro announced his campaign late last month and filed paperwork on Tuesday with the state board of elections. Until recently, his Facebook page featured a photo of him in blackface, dressed, per the caption, as James Brown. Some time since last month, the photo was longer publicly viewable on the page. (Carreiro did not respond to a request for comment.) Before Carreiro joined the race, Rourke was running unopposed and set to face Lugo, the former Republican candidate, in November.

The Co-op hopes to build this year on its success last cycle, when it won eight seats in the state legislature and two on the city council, and ousted several top Democrats including the powerful chair of the state Senate Finance Committee, former state Sen. William Conley Jr. The legislature has since passed bills that raised the minimum wage to $19 and legalized recreational marijuana with automatic expungement of past convictions.

“They immediately had to cave on things that they had been white-knuckling for a while,” said state Sen. Cynthia Mendes, who ousted Conley Jr. in 2020 by 23 points as part of the Co-op’s slate. “If this can happen with 10 people on the first try, [who] never did this before, what can happen now?”

“We have to do federal politics, and we finally have to do what we should have done a long time ago, which is deep state politics.”

Last Friday, the Co-op announced that three new candidates had joined its slate: Senate candidate Jenny Bui, a mother and first-generation Vietnamese American; House candidate and nurse Jackie Anderson; and Pawtucket City Council candidate and homeless outreach worker Nicole LeBoeuf. Bui is challenging an anti-abortion Republican; Anderson is challenging the Democratic state House Speaker; and LeBoeuf is running for one of three at-large seats on the city council, alongside two incumbents and at least one other candidate.

The model slates aren’t just concerned about winning seats in local and state elections; they’re testing theories of change that could help rebuild a Democratic Party that has struggled to define itself for the last seven years. They hope to chart a path forward for the left.

“Democrats, the left are kind of in a panic death spiral, politically,” Brown said, remarking on the party’s failure to field an adequate response to the rise of Donald Trump and the rightward lurch of the Republican Party.

“People are just panicked. And so, in that panic, are just consumed only with Washington,” he said. “What we’re saying is, yes, we have to fight it out as best we can to win power in Washington. But given the level of crises, given that our democracy is at risk, given that the planet is at risk, given the suffering that people are going through in this country, we have to be able to do two things at once now. We have to do federal politics, and we finally have to do what we should have done a long time ago, which is deep state politics.”

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In a hotly contested 2020 primary, progressive Marie Newman, the Justice Democrats candidate for Illinois’s 3rd Congressional District, ousted eight-term Rep. Dan Lipinski, one of the last anti-abortion Democrats in Congress. Many House Democrats countered party norms by backing Newman, choosing to stand up for reproductive rights rather than exhibit loyalty to the incumbent. “I think that an anti-choice position is a relic of our past and it is firmly in the Republican ideology, and I do not think that is what our party should be standing for,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the time.

But on Tuesday night, in the nation’s first primary elections since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the first-term representative was voted out of Congress by a large margin. Illinois redistricting forced Newman into a member-on-member primary, and she opted to run against Rep. Sean Casten, who was elected in 2018 and beat a six-term Republican. During her first primary as an incumbent, Newman faced challenges from outside Congress and within: outside groups that spent just under half a million dollars against her, and a congressional ethics probe that ultimately hurt her candidacy. Hers is the first loss of an incumbent backed by Justice Democrats.

“Unfortunately, we did not get the result we were looking for this evening,” Newman said in a statement conceding the race. “Win or lose, we have achieved something truly historic, and done so much good for this community.”

Elsewhere in Illinois, an anti-abortion Democrat backed by Lipinski came in fifth in the 1st Congressional District’s crowded field of 17 candidates. Progressives other than Newman saw mixed results in the state Tuesday night, offering some hope for the left while a Republican takeover of Congress looms.

In an open primary in Illinois’s newly drawn 3rd District, Working Families Party-backed state Rep. Delia Ramirez overcame a flood of outside spending to defeat Chicago Alderman Gil Villegas, who had the support of conservative Democrats in the local machine and in Congress. In November, Ramirez will face Republican candidate Justin Burau, who ran in an uncontested primary on Tuesday.

BREAKING: Working Families champion @Delia4Congress has won the fiercely contested Democratic primary in the Illinois 3rd congressional district.

She is the 6th Working Families Party congressional candidate to win their primary in the 2022 election cycle. pic.twitter.com/bqDIlttIUP

— Working Families Party ? (@WorkingFamilies) June 29, 2022

In Illinois’s 7th District, 13-term Rep. Danny Davis is facing a close race in his second challenge from anti-gun violence advocate Kina Collins, who also ran against Davis in 2020 and lost by 46 points. And in the 1st District, where 15-term Rep. Bobby Rush announced he would retire in January, civil rights activist Jonathan Jackson — son of Rev. Jesse Jackson — led in a field of 17 candidates. Lipinski’s pick, Chris Butler, got just 5.7 percent of the vote.

Outside groups that have spent millions targeting progressives in competitive primaries this cycle poured money into Tuesday’s races to back Villegas, Casten, and Davis. VoteVets Action Fund, a committee linked to political action committees for Senate and House Democrats, and Mainstream Democrats PAC, a new committee backing conservative Democrats founded by tech billionaire Reid Hoffman, spent more than $1 million on the race to fight Ramirez and support Villegas. Democratic Majority for Israel spent just under $160,000 since late May on ads attacking Ramirez or backing Villegas, and bought ads attacking Newman earlier this month. Opportunity for All Action Fund, a dark-money group aligned with powerful Democrats, poured another $300,000 into the 7th District race on Thursday to back Davis.

Ramirez’s campaign was boosted by more than $1 million in outside spending from progressive groups including the Working Families Party and the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC; WOMEN VOTE!, a project of EMILY’s List; and J Street Action Fund, along with several local unions. Ramirez was also endorsed by Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Reps. Jesús “Chuy” García, D-Ill., Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and CPC Chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash.

Earlier this month, Sanders held a joint rally in Chicago to support Ramirez and Jackson. Villegas, who was previously the City Council floor leader for Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, was backed by the Chicago Tribune, conservative members of the Chicago City Council, the clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County, and unions including the Chicago Police Sergeants’ Association. Capitalizing on salient tough-on-crime narratives, Villegas had claimed that Ramirez would “defund the police.”

In the 7th District contest, the Chicago Tribune endorsed Collins on June 13 and wrote that while Davis’s long tenure and record of public service had earned the respect of the editorial board, “we think the time has come for new blood, and we endorse Collins.” His campaign started running ads in the final weeks before the primary, including one bizarre clip that showed him speaking in front of a virtual image of the Capitol on Zoom.

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Like several members of the Illinois Democratic Party Central Committee, Rep. Danny Davis pulls from two campaign coffers: a state committee and a federal one. But Davis’s state committee has far outspent those of his peers, including on itemized spending for “campaign work” as recently as last quarter.

Some of that work falls under Davis’s role as a member of the state central committee, where he works alongside Reps. Bobby Rush, Chuy Garcia, and Robin Kelly, who chairs the state party. Some is less clear cut: An ad buy from Davis’s state committee touted his federal work, and some of the same staff run Davis’s state and federal offices.

This year, Davis is up for reelection to both the state committee and his federal office, which he has held since 1997. At the federal level, the 13-term representative faces two challengers in a June 28 primary fueled by criticism over a perceived lack of urgency. While the Illinois Democrat has voted with his party on major issues and racked up progressive bona fides, his long tenure has eroded the pressure many other officials face to push for more aggressive action on the biggest issues facing Chicago, from gun violence to poverty. Some have criticized him for what they view as an out-of-touch perspective on social issues. At a forum last month hosted by a local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Davis waded into the debate over transgender people’s participation in sports, saying, “I think that women who say they’re women should play in women’s sports, women leagues; men who say they’re men should play in men’s leagues. I don’t think that women should be trying to play football with the Bears.”

Beyond concerns about the general malaise of a long incumbency, Davis must now contend with scrutiny over his use of state and federal campaign resources. As the Chicago Tribune noted earlier this month, Davis uses both his federal and state committees to fundraise, “raising questions about whether he has used his local campaign fund to augment his federal reelection bids.”

Part of Davis’s job as a state party central committee member is to recruit candidates and help them run for office, which provides an entirely legitimate reason for “campaign work” spending from Davis’s state committee.

Federal campaign finance regulations prohibit the transfer of assets between federal and nonfederal committees, and there is no evidence the two Davis committees have engaged in such transfers. Some spending from both committees goes toward shared causes: Davis’s state committee appears to have paid for ads promoting his federal office, and both committees pay for some of the same staff and shared office space, according to disclosures filed with the state board of elections.

An ad paid for by the state committee in September did not specify Davis’s role on the state committee but rather highlighted his work in Congress to assist in expungement for nonviolent offenders. While the ad contained a passing reference to state law, its focus was on constituent services carried out by his federal office.

Davis’s chief of staff, Tumia Romero, did not respond to specific questions about why the state and federal committees simultaneously paid the same staffers, how they distinguished which work was for which campaign, or why the state committee purchased ads promoting Davis’s federal office.

As a Davis staffer since 1998, and his chief of staff since last June, Romero fields press inquiries for his congressional campaign, which is permitted as part of her role as senior congressional staff so long as it’s not on the same time or in the same space as congressional work. She said she was speaking to The Intercept from her car in order to be able to conduct campaign work outside of the congressional and state committee office.

“As you know, federal campaigns are not allowed to support local efforts, but local efforts can support federal,” Romero said. She then corrected herself, acknowledging that “it’s the reverse.”

Candidates seeking more than one possible office at the same time face the additional burdens to “be very careful in their allocations,” said Beth Rotman, money in politics and ethics program director at Common Cause. “Here, that would be demonstrating in Illinois, and also federally, that the candidate is complying with two sets of rules at the same time. … You have a higher burden, because you can essentially make a mistake in either direction.”

Davis’s state committee has raised significant funds via direct contributions from corporations and LLCs, which Illinois law allows but federal campaign finance regulations prohibit. Such contributions to Davis’s state committee including the GEO Group, a major for-profit prison company, along with medical, construction, and consulting firms.

“Some agencies are better than others at actually taking a look at whether campaigns are complying,” Rotman said. “Campaigns have to be very vigilant. It’s not necessarily the case that anyone is doing anything wrong.”

A 25-year incumbent, Davis is facing challenges from Kina Collins, an anti-gun violence advocate and organizer who ran unsuccessfully against him in the 2020 Democratic primary, and Denarvis Mendenhall, a veteran of the U.S. Air Force who has worked for the Food and Drug Administration. In 2020, Collins raised just $100,000 and received 14 percent of the vote. This cycle, she’s raised more than quadruple that and has backing from Justice Democrats, Indivisible, and the Sunrise Movement. Last quarter, she out-raised Davis by almost 2-to-1.

Last week, the Federal Election Commission issued a request for additional information to the Davis campaign after it missed the June 16 filing deadline for Illinois pre-primary reports. The campaign received a similar request in May after missing the April deadline for its quarterly report. Mendenhall, who filed to run in March, has not filed FEC financial disclosures and has not received such a request.

Davis has backing from top Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.; Illinois Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth; Gov. JB Pritzker; and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Also on Davis’s side is a relatively new dark-money group spending to back several incumbents facing primary challenges from their left, aligned with House leadership and run by longtime Democratic operatives. Davis’s upcoming primary election is one of several this cycle in which the party and its major donors, joining forces with outside groups, have devoted significant resources to fighting progressive candidates.

His colleagues in the state party — Rush, Garcia, and Kelly — all have active state committees for their upcoming reelections. But so far this cycle, Davis’s state committee has listed far more contributions and expenditures than those of his colleagues. The committee offices for Kelly, Rush, and Garcia do not appear to share space with their congressional offices, as Davis’s does, nor pay staff who are also working on their current congressional campaigns. (Rush’s son, Jeffrey, has worked on Rush’s past congressional campaigns. He has been paid this cycle by Rush’s state committee for campaign work, but not his federal committee.)

Since 2018, Davis’s state committee has disclosed $370,000 in expenses, while Rush’s has listed $24,800, and Kelly’s state committee has listed just over $40,000, none of which included “campaign work.” Garcia’s state committee has been inactive for several years, and reactivated in May.

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A new political action committee “dedicated to empowering urban communities to narrow the wealth gap between Black and White Americans” has picked its most prominent and first incumbent target this cycle: Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.

Launched in October by more than 40 Black business and civic leaders, the group, Urban Empowerment Action PAC, has labeled the challenge against Tlaib its “premier race” and plans to spend at least $1 million to unseat her, arguing that Detroit, a city that is majority Black, should be represented by a Black member in Congress. The PAC is primarily funded by billionaire hedge fund investor and philanthropist Daniel Loeb, though its initial founder remains unknown.

The slew in planned spending comes as top Democrats continue to fight against the party’s progressive wing with help from Republican donors and outside groups backing conservative candidates in both parties. Democratic leaders and outside groups aligned with them have spent millions so far to defeat progressives in several competitive primaries this cycle.

Tlaib is facing her second primary as an incumbent in August, having fended off a 2020 challenge from fellow Michigan Democrat Brenda Jones, who replaced former Democratic Rep. John Conyers after a special election in 2018. Tlaib’s supporters point to her wins for her Detroit constituents, including $15 million she secured for local community projects in this year’s House budget bill, her efforts to extend the child tax credit, and the pandemic aid funding she obtained for her district in 2020, when Detroit received the fifth-largest appropriation among major cities.

UEA PAC spokesperson Henry Greenidge told The Intercept that the group is targeting Tlaib because its “aim is to get Black candidates in office who will champion common-sense solutions that uplift Black people.” Greenidge said that because of Michigan’s recent redistricting, Tlaib “is running for a newly drawn seat where she is not an incumbent in the largest majority-Black city in America, a seat we believe should be represented by a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.” The group is backing candidate Janice Winfrey, Detroit’s city clerk, who has slammed Tlaib’s vote against last year’s bipartisan infrastructure package and her criticism of U.S. military funding to Israel, which Winfrey supports.

Tlaib was first elected in 2018 on a wave that brought several progressives into the House, including Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; the two became the first Muslim women elected to Congress. Loeb, the first and single largest donor to UEA PAC, has supported several conservative Democrats, including Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and Rep. Shontel Brown, D-Ohio. A registered Democrat, he has given more than $1 million to Republicans so far this cycle and gave UEA PAC $150,000 in October.

In addition to Loeb, UEA PAC is backed by political pundit and former South Carolina state Rep. Bakari Sellers, who is also helping it raise funds. The group has spent $115,000 since late May backing Rep. Nikema Williams, D-Ga., who won her primary last month with more than 86 percent of the vote, and Democratic California state Sen. Sydney Kamlager, who led in Tuesday’s nonpartisan primary. In both races, the group has paid for direct-mail and digital ads from Tusk Strategies, the consulting firm started by venture capitalist Bradley Tusk, who supported Mike Bloomberg’s and Andrew Yang’s New York City mayoral campaigns.

The PAC also plans to support candidates Nykea Pippion McGriff in Illinois’s 1st District and Florida state Sen. Randolph Bracy in his state’s 10th District, but so far Tlaib is UEA PAC’s only incumbent target. Sellers told Politico last month that he didn’t have a particular “beef” with Tlaib but criticized her for voting against last year’s infrastructure package. Tlaib and several other progressive Democrats opposed the bill in protest of congressional leadership’s abandonment of their strategy to simultaneously pass President Joe Biden’s massive social spending package — which included the expanded child tax credit that Tlaib sought for Detroit families. Sellers told Politico that “somebody else can do the job better.” Sellers did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

Tlaib has also long clashed with more conservative members of her party over her vocal criticisms of U.S. military support for Israel and human rights abuses in Palestine. Her public scrutiny of unchecked U.S. funding for Israeli occupation forces has made her a target of pro-Israel groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, of which Sellers is a close ally, and Pro-Israel America, which endorsed Winfrey in March. Tlaib is also facing a challenge from former Michigan state Rep. Shanelle Jackson, who has similarly criticized her stance on Israel.

Loeb has also contributed to AIPAC, giving $5,000 to the group in April alone. AIPAC’s new PAC, United Democracy Project, has also spent millions to defeat progressives this cycle and endorsed more than 100 Republican candidates who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Loeb also gave $125,000 in June to its counterpart, Democratic Majority for Israel PAC, which has also spent similar figures fighting progressives this cycle.

In March, Loeb gave $250,000 to the GOP–aligned Congressional Leadership Fund, another $250,000 to the similarly aligned Senate Leadership Fund, and, since August, more than $340,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He has given more than $255,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee since January and contributed this cycle to the campaigns for Sen. John Thune, R-S.D.; Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker; and Ohio Senate candidate Jane Timken, who ran as a pro-Donald Trump Republican and lost in last month’s primary race.

Other major donors to UEA PAC include the Benoit Group, a real estate developer based in Georgia, and Striving for a Better New York, a PAC linked to New York City Mayor Eric Adams that backs conservative candidates and is funded by real estate moguls and Republicans. In April, UEA PAC received a $10,000 contribution from New Jersey attorney Calvin Souder, a partner at the firm Souder, Shabazz, & Woolridge Law Group, as well as $5,000 each from from Google Vice President of Government Affairs and Public Policy Wilson White, Google Vice President of Trust and Safety David Graff, and Ron Redwing, CEO of the Redwing group, a consulting firm based in Tennessee.

It’s not clear who actually started the PAC, and the only person listed on its filing documents with the Federal Election Commission is Treasurer Diane Evans, the CEO and founder of the compliance consulting firm Evans & Katz Campaign Finance Professionals.

Greenidge, the UEA PAC spokesperson, told The Intercept that the group is “proud to have the support of our numerous donors, including Dan Loeb, who are all committed to fighting for issues that are important to Black communities, such as voter empowerment, access to high-quality education, and creating greater economic opportunity.”

If they manage to unseat Tlaib, conservative Democrats would score a monumental win. The party’s conservative flank has railed against the growing number of progressives who have tried to push the party left, on issues from providing families with direct cash assistance to foreign policy in Israel.

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A dark-money group formed by longtime Democratic operatives has spent more than half a million dollars since May to back conservative Democrats in safe blue seats in three upcoming primaries, according to its most recent disclosures — and is boosting another by spending to attack their main Republican opponent. Opportunity for All Action Fund, which incorporated in August, represents yet another incursion into dark money and outside spending from mainstream Democrats desperate to defend against progressive challengers.

Each incumbent backed by Opportunity for All Action Fund is facing a primary challenge from their left: Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., is facing Kina Collins, an organizer and anti-gun violence activist who first challenged him in 2020; Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., is facing Amy Vilela, who ran unsuccessfully in a Nevada Democratic congressional primary in 2018; on Tuesday, Rep. Donald Payne Jr., D-N.J., beat organizer Imani Oakley and Akil Khalfani, a professor who ran against him in the 2020 primary as an independent. Justice Democrats is backing Collins’s campaign this cycle, and on Wednesday, she will campaign virtually alongside Justice Democrats-endorsed primary candidates Jessica Cisneros, whose Texas campaign is awaiting a recount, and Summer Lee, who won the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania’s 12th District last month.

Opportunity for All Action Fund started running digital ads on Facebook backing the three incumbents last month.

The cutout has not revealed who ultimately decided to launch the operation or who is funding it, but several public details give clues about its origins. For one, each of the incumbents is also backed by Team Blue PAC, launched last June by House Democratic Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries of New York, New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer, and Alabama Rep. Terri Sewell to protect caucus members facing primary challenges. Team Blue PAC endorsed five incumbents in February and has given $5,000 to each of their campaigns, including Davis, Titus, Payne, and Reps. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and Shontel Brown, D-Ohio, who beat former state Sen. Nina Turner last month. Jeffries campaigned alongside Davis in Chicago last week, and also campaigned for Payne and Brown.

Opportunity for All Action Fund also spent in an effort to defeat Frank Pallotta, the winner of the Republican primary who will face Gottheimer, one of the Democratic caucus’s most conservative members and Team Blue PAC’s co-founder, in November. The group spent more than $150,000 to oppose candidate Pallotta, a Trump Republican who won the GOP race on Tuesday. Pallotta came within 8 points of unseating Gottheimer in 2020. The group also sent mailers in the race attacking Pallotta.

The slew of spending comes as Jeffries and Gottheimer escalate an ongoing battle with the progressive wing of the party and Jeffries pursues a path toward becoming House speaker or minority leader, replacing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi when she eventually retires. Neither office responded to a request for comment.

Opportunity for All Action Fund’s bare-bones website and “OFA” logo led a local New Jersey site writing about the fund to wonder whether it was “a misleading bid to implicate Obama for America.” The group is indeed run by Patti Solis Doyle, a partner at the Brunswick Group and a former adviser to President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign who also managed Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid; Darrel Thompson, a partner with theGROUP who was previously a top staffer for former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, chief of staff for Obama’s 2004 Senate campaign, and financial services director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; and Mike McKay, founding and managing partner at the Miami-based Empire Consulting Group and a former staffer for Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y. Empire Consulting Group’s co-managing partner, Chaka Burgess, is on the board of the Congressional Black Caucus PAC along with Jeffries, who is also a CBC member alongside Sewell, Payne, and Meeks. Opportunity for All Action Fund lists as its incorporator Emma Olson Sharkey, an associate at Elias Law Group, a firm founded in August by lawyer Marc Elias, who was general counsel for Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Top House Democrats and outside groups have backed embattled incumbents facing progressive candidates in several competitive primaries this year, including the caucus’s last member to oppose abortion rights, conservative Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar. Another group called Mainstream Democrats PAC, backed by LinkedIn founder and major Democratic donor Reid Hoffman, is also boosting those efforts and has spent more than $1 million since April to fight progressives in three competitive races, including Cuellar’s opponent, Cisneros, as well as Turner and Jamie McLeod-Skinner, who beat Rep. Kurt Schrader in Oregon.

Update: June 8, 2022, 12:02 p.m.
This article has been updated to reflect that Rep. Donald Payne Jr. won his primary election on Tuesday.

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Do you know the name of the district attorney in Sacramento, California? “A career prosecutor with 31 years of law enforcement experience,” her website boasts, Anne Marie Schubert is known for “prosecuting some of the area’s most notorious and dangerous criminals — murderers, rapists and child molesters.”

In 2018, her office helped secure a plea deal and reduced charges in a case of assault and kidnapping. Earlier this year, the man went on to become a suspect in a mass shooting that left six people dead. A former Republican running for California attorney general as an independent, Schubert blamed criminal justice reforms for a decision her office made, and the case has not dogged her tough-on-crime campaign.

What about the name of the chief of the San Francisco Police Department? The infamously expensive city has been the focus of national media for months, as a population priced out of a comfortable life struggles with homelessness, an epidemic of drug addiction, and takes blame from the rich for an uptick in some violent and petty crimes. Fox News plays clips of shoplifting sprees at San Francisco drug stores on loop, yet the police and its chief – who last year solved fewer crimes in every category they track  – barely warrant a mention, even though crime fighting is literally their job.

But you have heard of that district attorney. His name is Chesa Boudin, and on Tuesday, he’ll face a recall attempt.

“When crimes occur, and when crimes capture the public imagination or attention through viral videos or news reporting in San Francisco and other jurisdictions led by reform-minded prosecutors, the DAs get dragged into those cases and named in the headlines, and pictured in the news stories over and over and over again, even if no arrest has ever been made, even if there’s no case for us to prosecute, even if our office is in no way, shape or form involved,” the embattled San Francisco district attorney told The Intercept. “That never happens in traditional tough-on-crime jurisdictions.”

With the recall election looming on June 7, Boudin’s notoriety is far from accidental. In late April, at a meeting of the country’s largest group of conservative lawmakers, Virginia Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares shared lessons that, he said, vaulted him to success. Regarding progressive prosecutors, Miyares’s advice was simple: “Make them famous.”

Boudin is perhaps the most famous of a slate of progressive prosecutors elected since 2016 in major cities across the country. There’s Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Rachael Rollins in Boston, and George Gascón in Los Angeles, who previously held the San Francisco office that Boudin has now. All have faced fierce resistance from their respective state governments: While Pennsylvania lawmakers tried to strip Krasner of his authority, the Massachusetts governor battled Rollins, and Gascón, in office since 2020, is already facing his second recall attempt.

As the public spent two years largely in their homes, fearfully consuming news of crimes from shoplifting to domestic violence to mass shootings, Republicans, conservative Democrats, and law enforcement officials have seized an opportunity to launder tough-on-crime narratives that have waned in popularity since the public became more concerned with mass incarceration and police brutality. The approach includes attempting to undermine growing support for criminal justice reform by blaming reformist prosecutors for crime and homelessness. Facing losses at the ballot, conservative groups targeting democratically elected officials have increasingly turned to recall elections as their preferred tool.

A world where crimes occur provides an unending supply of fodder for critics of reform.

This comes despite data showing that even with the recent spike in gun violence and property crime, overall crime has been sharply declining since the 1990s. Critics blamed Boudin when a man who had recently been arrested several times, driving while intoxicated, hit and killed two pedestrians on New Year’s Eve in 2020. The San Francisco Chronicle published an editorial titled, “A horrific crime undercuts progressive goals of S.F. D.A. Chesa Boudin.” His office had declined to charge the man and referred the case to state parole officials, and later said it was a mistake to think parole supervision would be adequate.

A world where crimes occur provides an unending supply of fodder for critics of reform, even as tough-on-crime policies have continuously failed to rein in some of the most dangerous periods in history. The recall trend raises a question for the movement that has helped elect Krasner, Rollins, Gascón, and Boudin: Can reform-minded prosecutors ever really win?

Boudin’s loudest critics claim that he is to blame for unprecedented levels of crime in San Francisco. But the city’s rates of robbery, rape, and larceny theft are below pre-pandemic levels and decreased between 2020 and 2021. The number of reported crimes in San Francisco dropped by 28,000 during Boudin’s first two years in office, while arrest and clearance rates also dropped in several categories.

Last year, the city saw an increase of eight homicides, as well as bigger spikes in larceny theft and assault — for a total overall, according to San Francisco Police Department data, of a 1 percent increase in violent crime and a 15 percent increase in property crime. Burglary, rape, robbery, motor vehicle theft, and arson all declined.

In March, Boudin’s office released new data on prosecutions and arrests during his tenure which showed that he has filed charges on cases presented by police at an overall higher rate than his predecessors over the last decade. He has also diverted a higher portion of cases than his predecessors, in line with his campaign promise. While Boudin’s critics have claimed that he does not prosecute certain crimes like car burglaries or shoplifting, his office launched initiatives to target both offenses.

Boudin acknowledged that crime is a major concern for people across the country. But the role of police needs to be given more scrutiny, he said. “A recall, or replacing me with another DA, is irrelevant when police are only arresting less than 3 percent of people in reported thefts.”

While clearance rates for rape, robbery, assault, burglary, arson, and larceny and motor vehicle theft have declined overall during his time in office, some have begun to tick up again this year compared to 2021. Arrest rates by the SFPD, which has a budget of just over $700 million, have also declined during Boudin’s tenure. San Francisco Police Officers Association spokesperson Dustin DeRollo told The Intercept that the DA “is quick to distract away from his record and policies of being pro-criminal by using statistics when they suit him,” and that Boudin points to drops in arrests “for categories like petty thefts, which he knows are incredibly difficult to solve because of our resources.”

“To the extent that there is frustration among voters and residents and tourists around auto-burglary or shoplifting, or other lower-level property crime that has led to so much criticism of San Francisco, there is a 97 percent chance that somebody who commits one of those crimes and has it reported to the police will never get caught,” Boudin said. “We will never be able to prosecute.”

Unsurprisingly, the SFPD is among Boudin’s most vocal opponents. Their animosity is not necessarily unwarranted: Boudin’s office — like Krasner’s in Philadelphia — has prioritized cases of police misconduct. Boudin is the first DA in the city’s history to bring homicide charges against a cop.

The San Francisco Police Officers Association has not officially endorsed the recall campaign, but the union began targeting Boudin before he was elected. When he ran in 2019, SFPOA spent at least $650,000 to defeat his campaign and ran Facebook ads attacking him from February 2021 through August. In February 2022, SFPD pulled out of an agreement, put in place under Gascón, that allowed his office to investigate police shootings.

DeRollo said that Boudin’s use of diversion means “many of those criminals are released and are reoffending again,” and claimed that Boudin “hides the fact that his office regularly sends cases back to detectives for more ‘information’ despite there being sufficient probable cause. That way he doesn’t have to count it as a dismissal. Crime is up in San Francisco across the board and thanks to Chesa Boudin the word is out that you can commit crimes in our city and not have to pay for it.”

Boudin countered that diversion programs were created by the state, and prior to his administration, more than half of people released from jail pending trial were rearrested. “That’s not a new problem,” he told The Intercept. “That’s not a result of reforms. That’s a defining feature of a failed tough-on-crime approach that we’re doing the work to try to change.”

Law enforcement isn’t the only group that’s been fighting Boudin since before he was elected. Just three days after Boudin took office in January 2020, someone purchased the domain name “RecallChesa.org” and launched a website at that address later that year that directed people to sign a Change.org petition calling on him to resign. The petition was circulated by political blogger and former Republican San Francisco mayoral candidate Richie Greenberg, who also launched the first effort to recall Boudin last March but failed to gather the required number of signatures to get the measure on the ballot. Greenberg is now a paid spokesperson for the recall campaign.

Speaking to The Guardian, Greenberg said the recall campaign tries “not to get involved with actual policy or analysis. But we need to hold criminals accountable, regardless of their age, whatever is the appropriate accountability method.”

Shortly after Boudin was sworn in, angel investor Jason Calacanis launched a GoFundMe that raised $60,000 with the stated goal to investigate Boudin’s office and “hold him accountable.” Calacanis announced in September that he would use the cash to fund a Substack column by writer Susan Dyer Reynolds, titled “Gotham,” which has published two dozen posts since it started last August. Most of them employ tough-on-crime talking points to attack Boudin, including one post that blamed Boudin’s office for not bringing new charges against a man whom the FBI charged with kidnap and rape of a minor — after Boudin’s predecessor had released him on the same charges. Another is titled: “Yes, sir, it’s time for you to go.”

The single largest donor to the recall is a group called Neighbors for a Better San Francisco Advocacy, which is funded by major Republican donor William Oberndorf and has spent at least $4.8 million on the recall since last year, according to filings with the San Francisco Ethics Commission. It funds several other organizations behind the recall effort, including San Franciscans for Public Safety, which had spent at least $6.5 million by the end of May. Former local Democratic Party Chair Mary Jung is the group’s treasurer and a principal officer, as well as a former lobbyist for the local chapter of the California Association of Realtors, another top contributor to the recall effort. Since 2016, Oberndorf has given at least $5.5 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

The campaign against the recall, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, and two local chapters of SEIU have altogether spent just over $3.2 million so far to oppose the effort. Groups fighting the recall say it’s an example of successful fearmongering by police and a select circle of wealthy outsiders. “Less than two years after massive nationwide protests over George Floyd’s murder sparked a long overdue reckoning with racism in the American legal system, police unions and their wealthy allies are exploiting our fears and the social disruption caused by the pandemic in an effort to reinstate failed policies that devastated the Black community,” read an ACLU of Northern California statement from March.

“It’s basically an opportunity for one side to just spend endless amounts of money attacking a particular person.”

“It’s basically an opportunity for one side to just spend endless amounts of money attacking a particular person,” said Julie Edwards, spokesperson for Friends of Chesa Boudin Opposing the Recall, the campaign against the effort in San Francisco. “And that’s always going to be a difficult situation for any elected official to be in. It doesn’t matter who you are when you’re essentially saying, let’s just tear a person down for a year leading up to the election and ask voters what they think.”

Recent polls predict a tight contest for Boudin next week. One, commissioned by the effort against the recall, found that 48 percent of voters plan to vote to recall Boudin, 38 percent plan to vote “no,” and 14 percent are undecided. Other polls since March have shown that a majority of voters said they planned to vote “yes” and had an unfavorable opinion of Boudin.

If the state’s most recent high-profile recall election is any indication, turnout for Boudin’s test should be high. California Gov. Gavin Newsom faced a recall attempt last year, and more voters turned out for the contest than they did for the 2014 midterms. (The high turnout likely helped Newsom, who survived the recall by more than 20 points.) Boudin’s recall attempt will be a local, not statewide, contest, but high levels of public attention will presumably drive turnout as well.

Boudin, for his part, said he expects to win, and that his campaign has the benefit of a grassroots base of volunteers who are knocking doors and talking to undecided voters.

He also said his coalition has broadened since he first ran in 2019, bringing in the current and former presidents of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and several local papers, including some that had previously backed his opponent. He claimed that even undecided and under-informed voters “immediately recognize that this is a Republican-funded con, that it won’t make us safer, that it’s dishonest, that it’s undermining their democratic right to choose their own district attorney.”

The recall strategy has “really clearly become part of a national conservative playbook,” Boudin said. “It’s a very clear signal that the success of the progressive prosecutor movement in traditional elections has become so broad and so sustained that they’ve largely given up at trying to beat us in head-to-head races and are now trying to do it in contexts like this one, where there’s not even an opponent who has to say what policies they would implement, who they would be accountable to, or expose their track record in history to scrutiny of voters.

The post What’s Stopping Chesa Boudin? appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

“Kindness takes courage!” read rainbow letters written by Alithia Ramirez, a fourth grader at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. In the corner of her contest-winning poster, a round yellow sun looks on, cross-eyed, over a cloud of forbidden words: “Fat! Loser. Ugly. Dumb.” Each is circled and eliminated with a slash. At the top of the poster, Ramirez wrote a hashtag embellished with an extra smile: “#End Bullying.”

Ramirez has been identified as one of the students killed in the mass shooting at her school on Tuesday. Her father told local station KSAT that she wanted to be an artist.

The Uvalde City School District has its own police department — staffed with a chief, five cops, and a security guard — which participates in anti-bullying initiatives, including the poster contest Ramirez won. Absent meaningful gun reform, advocates and lawmakers often call for changes that seem more attainable: less bullying and more cops.

This is Alithia Ramirez, 10. She was a 4th grader at #RobbElementary.

Her dad says she loved to draw and wanted to be an artist, and even submitted a drawing to Doodle for Google.

I met him yesterday when he was waiting for answers. I was really hoping he'd get a different one. pic.twitter.com/xEaJe0obxR

— Garrett Brnger (@BrngerReports) May 25, 2022

Despite the school and the police’s best efforts, an 18-year-old high school student was able to purchase an AR-15 firearm —  as soon as he became of age, in a state that does not require a license to carry — and use it to massacre 19 elementary school children and two of their teachers in Uvalde. And although the shooter had crashed his car and been “engaged by law enforcement,” before entering the school, he still made it inside.

As the number of school resource officers has ballooned over the last two decades, so has the number of school shootings. There is no evidence that police have the ability to stop shootings from happening. “The idea that a standard armed school police officer is gonna stop someone in that situation has proven not to be true, time and time again,” said Alex Vitale, a sociologist at the City University of New York and the author of “The End of Policing,” who noted that police and security guards are often the first casualties in mass shooting events.

Nevertheless, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said “it is a fact” that due to the quick response of law enforcement officials, “they were able to save lives. Unfortunately, not enough,” in a press conference Wednesday. Abbott went on to list more than 20 state and federal agencies, including more than two dozen law enforcement agencies, involved in responding to the shooting. (These included immigration enforcement agencies housed under the Department of Homeland Security, which promised to refrain from deporting and arresting people in the area “to the fullest extent possible” for the time being.)

A flurry of early coverage quickly identified the shooter as a “victim of bullying” and speculated about mental health issues, even though he had no publicly known diagnosis. “Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge,” Abbott said Wednesday, though he soon contradicted himself by adding that in this case, “there was no known mental health history.”

Lawmakers concerned about bullying leading to violence in schools might consider that members of law enforcement themselves are often the ones bullying students. “Cops are authorized to use force in a way that teachers and school administrators are not,” Radley Balko wrote for the Washington Post in 2018, in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. “If administrators increasingly turn to on-site police officers to discipline students, that means more kids will be handcuffed, Tased and beaten.”

Though school shootings are both incredibly traumatic and increasing — there have been more than two dozen in the U.S. this year — they are still statistically rare, Vitale pointed out. “So what are those [school] police officers actually doing all day every day? Since they’re not preventing school shootings? They’re harassing kids, searching kids, waging a war on drugs, engaged in criminalizing disciplinary problems. And the burden of that falls most heavily on disabled kids, kids of color, and LGBTQ kids in the form of harassment arrest. That’s what actual everyday school police do.”

“Law enforcement cannot react quick enough to stop these things every time. So we’re gonna need people on the ground, whether they’re trained police officers or whether they are people that are trained in the school,” Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton said Tuesday night on Fox News, urging viewers to support the arming of schoolteachers.

“The idea that a teacher with a gun is going to stop someone with a semi-automatic or automatic weapon wearing body armor is ludicrous,” Vitale said.

In January, Uvalde City police received a half-million-dollar grant from the state’s controversial Operation Lone Star program, which Abbott launched last March, deploying thousands of soldiers to the state’s southern border. The grant came on top of the department’s existing $4 million budget — just under 40 percent of the total city budget. Federal funding for school resource officers comes from the Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS, program under the Department of Justice, which provides more than half a billion dollars each year for state and local law enforcement, including more than $50 million to a school violence prevention program.

After officers from the Uvalde City Independent School District Police Department engaged the shooter, Texas Department of Public Safety Sgt. Erick Estrada told CNN, “Unfortunately he was able to enter the premises and then from there, that’s when he went on and entered several classrooms and started shooting his firearm.”

Members of the community gather at the City of Uvalde Town Square for a prayer vigil in the wake of a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., on May 24, 2022.

Photo: Jordan Vonderhaar/Getty Images

As mass shootings in the U.S. continue to rise, both Democratic and Republican federal and local officials have prioritized additional police presence instead of stricter gun laws, which have become increasingly permissive. And at the same time, efforts to arm teachers have caused additional violence. After the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, the state passed a law allowing teachers to be armed in the classroom. Shortly afterward, there were several incidents — including in California, Virginia, and Florida — of armed teachers and school resource officers accidentally firing their weapons or injuring students.

“Police are really in schools because they are the most effective tool for the state at controlling young Black and brown people.”

If anti-bullying and mental health initiatives are to be taken seriously as a solution, they should be pursued outside a law enforcement context, according to civil and human rights groups like the Dignity in Schools Campaign, a national coalition focused on stopping the school-to-prison pipeline. Putting more cops in schools won’t make kids safer but will further criminalize them, says Kesi Foster, co-executive director at Partners for Dignity and Rights, an organization that works to advance economic and social rights in housing, education and labor.

Police have been used in schools for more than half a century, at least since the 1950s. When schools became a place for students to struggle over their rights during the civil rights movement, Foster said, “that’s when we really saw the large influx of police and police programs in schools. … Police are really in schools because they are the most effective tool for the state at controlling young Black and brown people.”

“There’s no evidence that we’re aware of, would love to see it if it exists, of having police in schools as a way to make schools safer or prevent school shootings,” said Marc Schindler, co-author of an April 2021 Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute report on school policing. Schindler is also executive director of the Justice Policy Institute, a nonprofit criminal justice group. In schools with police, kids are more likely to be suspended and expelled, Schindler said, “and more likely to be referred to the justice system, the so-called school to prison pipeline, for behavior that is not necessarily appropriate to be referred to the justice system. We’re talking about behavior that years ago, when I was in school, would be more likely to be handled in the principal’s office.”

“What does keep schools safe is having more well trained mental health counselors, social workers, and alternative resolution dispute programs.”

“What does keep schools safe is having more well trained mental health counselors, social workers, and alternative resolution dispute programs,” Schindler said. But schools already lack the resources for necessary mental health services and social supports, and education budgets have been slashed while police funding continues to climb. Police officers usually cost more than counselors and social workers, Schindler added, so “you’re paying people more to do this job.”

And while school shootings have historically been perpetrated by young white males in majority-white schools, he added, the negative consequences of increased policing in schools disproportionately fall on Black and brown students.

Reports have noted that the Uvalde shooter was socially isolated, bullied, and had exhibited violent behavior, but the assumption that mental strife leads to gun violence is a dangerous scapegoat. “Blaming mental illness for mass shootings inflicts a damaging stigma on the millions of people who suffer from clinical afflictions, the vast majority of whom are not violent,” wrote Mark Follman, a Mother Jones editor and the author of “Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America,” in the Los Angeles Times last week. “Extensive research shows the link between mental illness and violent behavior is small and not useful for predicting violent acts.”

“Instead of marshaling a robust preventative intervention, we wait until the problem expresses itself as a mass killing, and then we microanalyze the police response,” said Vitale. “This is a completely backwards way to approach the problem. Because policing is an inherently inadequate response to these things. By the time the shooting starts, the police intervention is going to be reactive. People will already be dead.”

The post Cops Didn’t Stop the Uvalde School Shooting appeared first on The Intercept.

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In early May, as aggrieved civilians mourned the impending end of Roe v. Wade at the hands of a court determined by lifetime appointments, President Joe Biden issued an urging that struck many as hollow: “[I]t will fall on voters to elect pro-choice officials this November,” he said in a statement, which used the word “abortion” only once. But Democratic voters, at the federal level, had for the most part already done that. In the U.S. House of Representatives, only one anti-abortion Democrat remained: Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas.

But despite Biden’s urging, abortion defenders in Texas’s 28th District may have fallen short Tuesday night. The final vote count is not yet in, but Cuellar is well positioned to win the nomination for a 10th term in a congressional career for which he long enjoyed an A rating from the NRA. Those who associate the Democratic Party with reproductive rights and gun control efforts could be forgiven for being confused: Despite his stances, top Democratic House leaders lined up to protect the incumbent.

“On the day of a mass shooting and weeks after news of Roe, Democratic Party leadership rallied for a pro-NRA, anti-choice incumbent under investigation in a close primary. Robocalls, fundraisers, all of it,” tweeted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Tuesday night. “Accountability isn’t partisan. This was an utter failure of leadership.”

TX28 is an extremely close race. If Cuellar wins, leadership’s decision to go to the mat for a pro-NRA incumbent will be the reason why. If Cisneros pulls it out, they will have mobilized against a badly needed grassroots for Nov & fought against a historic victory. And for what?

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 25, 2022

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., played both sides. While she pledged her continued support for an embattled Cuellar in March after he was forced into a runoff and reportedly recorded a robocall backing him in the district, she also sent a last-minute fundraising plea Tuesday to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee email list to help elect pro-choice Democrats. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., however, was firmly in Cuellar’s corner. In a robocall on Tuesday, he described Cuellar as “a staunch advocate for the people’s health care,” the Texas Tribune reported. Two days after the draft Roe v. Wade opinion came out, Clyburn, who says he supports abortion rights, stumped alongside Cuellar at a get-out-the-vote rally event in San Antonio.

Cuellar’s campaign raised more than $3 million to Cisneros’s $4.5 million. He also got a boost from outside groups including the political action committee for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has spent millions so far this cycle against progressive candidates in at least five competitive Democratic primaries.

In Texas, election rules stipulate that in a primary where no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two candidates compete in a runoff. Cisneros came within 1 percentage point of that margin in March. The next month, AIPAC’s PAC, United Democracy Project, poured more than $330,000 into the race to oppose her. The PAC spent another $1.5 million in May, bringing its total expenditure on the race to just under $2 million.

The race could represent the “pro-Israel” lobby’s second major win this cycle, after PACs for AIPAC and its offshoot, Democratic Majority for Israel, spent $1.3 million to reelect Rep. Shontel Brown over Nina Turner in Ohio.

Another group aligned with the pro-Israel lobby and fighting to protect conservative Democrats, Mainstream Democrats PAC, stepped in to support Cuellar. As the National Journal reported, after the draft Roe opinion leaked, Cuellar’s support dipped in several Democratic surveys. But the fledgling Mainstream Democrats PAC made its first independent expenditure in the race to support Cuellar on the day of the leak.

Dmitri Mehlhorn, a top adviser to Mainstream Democrats PAC founder Reid Hoffman, recently told The Intercept that the decision to back Cuellar was informed in part by advice from DMFI head Mark Mellman. According to federal campaign disclosure records, Mainstream Democrats PAC and DMFI share an office.

Spending more than $750,000 to back the incumbent, the PAC ran an ad earlier this month claiming that Cuellar was “under attack by extremists” and had “made it clear that he opposes a ban on abortion.” Cuellar has said he supports abortion access in a few extreme cases, like rape and incest but generally opposes it otherwise. He was the only House Democrat to vote against codifying Roe in September.

Voters who lean more to the center still don’t support overturning Roe or imposing widespread restrictions on abortion, and groups canvassing on behalf of Cisneros sought to peel off those voters in Cuellar strongholds like Webb County, where they started knocking on doors of women under the age of 50. Cuellar won Webb County by more than 37 points, while Cisneros carried Bexar County, and Cuellar’s share of the vote there slipped. Primary turnout in Texas has been historically low, and turnout for Tuesday’s was much lower than that for the March primary.

new Cuellar ad funded by Mainstream Democrats PAC in #TX28 — his first ad that mentions women's rights as "under attack by extremists" and that he "opposes a ban on abortion." Cuellar was sole House D to vote against codifying Roe in 2021 (bill failed in Senate). pic.twitter.com/sqCS8CwvsD

— marissa martinez (@mar1ssamart1nez) May 12, 2022

Team Blue PAC, another committee to protect incumbent Democrats launched last June by House Democratic Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries and Reps. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., and Terri Sewell, D-Ala., listed the TX-28 primary as one of its “races to watch,” along with Reps. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., and Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif. Schrader is poised to lose his primary by just under 20 points, with less than 80 percent of precincts reporting from the May 17 primary.

Cisneros’s campaign earlier this month called on party leaders to withdraw their support for Cuellar, and told The Intercept that refusal to do so showed “cognitive dissonance” in the party’s stated values and its actions with respect to the right to abortion. The Working Families Party helped convene progressive groups to coordinate independent expenditures in support of Cisneros. Groups including the PACs for WFP, Justice Democrats, Communications Workers of America, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and J Street spent just under $2 million in support of Cisneros and against Cuellar, who came within 4 points of losing his seat to Cisneros in the 2020 Democratic primary.

Ads in the final weeks of the race from an anonymous sender falsely claimed that Cuellar had been cleared by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a probe that included a January raid of his home in Laredo. Cuellar has not been cleared, and the probe is reportedly related to an investigation into business interests in Azerbaijan, where Cuellar has ties with prominent oil executives. Other billboard ads that called Cisneros a “homewrecker” were bought by a firm called Big River Media, which Cuellar’s campaign has used in the past and is run by a major Cuellar donor. His campaign issued a statement and said it did not condone the billboard. The campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The ultimate winner will face Republican candidate Cassy Garcia in the November 8 general election. In early March, the University of Virginia Center for Politics changed its 28th District’s rating from “leans Democratic” to “toss-up,” and said of the change: “[W]e believe the GOP trend in this region is real; because the Democratic runoff is likely to be nasty; and because the overall political environment looks good for Republicans.”

Historically, the region has been heavily Democratic, and Biden carried it by 7 points over Donald Trump in 2020.

Top Democrats have blamed the party’s left wing for stifling Biden’s agenda while allowing conservative members to usher its demise. Party leadership’s fear of backlash is protecting a member who could very well be the deciding vote on federal abortion legislation.

The post Abortion Opponent Henry Cuellar Was Buoyed by Democratic Leaders to a Narrow Lead in Texas Runoff appeared first on The Intercept.

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At the end of March, EMILY’s List, the Democratic organization that backs women candidates who support abortion rights, commissioned a poll to test the state of the U.S. House race in Pennsylvania’s 12th District. What they found heartened them: The group’s pick, state Rep. Summer Lee, enjoyed a commanding 25-point lead over her closest competitor, attorney Steve Irwin, drawing 38 to his 13 percent. When voters were presented with more information about the candidates, Lee drew 49 percent of respondents’ support to Irwin’s 21, and a third contender, University of Pittsburgh law professor Jerry Dickinson, got 15. The poll, conducted by GQR, also found Lee holding a comfortable +29 approval rating among likely primary voters.

For Irwin, a former Republican U.S. Senate staffer, it would take something of a miracle to turn numbers like that around in the six weeks that remained. But ahead of Tuesday’s contest, Irwin’s backers have attempted to close the gap with something else: a tsunami of outside spending, funneled through two major pro-Israel organizations that have made it their mission to undermine progressive Democrats in contested primaries.

In less than a month, the United Democracy Project — the political action committee for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC — poured more than $1 million into ads in Pennsylvania’s 12th District. The bulk of the messaging attacked Lee, though just over $100,000 went to materials supporting Irwin. In total, United Democracy Project has spent more than $2.3 million on the race so far.

Lee is one of several progressive House candidates who have come into the crosshairs of AIPAC and its counterpart Democratic Majority for Israel, which AIPAC’s operatives launched in 2019. The groups justify their spending with a hard-line stance opposing any criticism of the Israeli state — even as the Israel Defense Forces relentlessly attack Palestinian civilians, journalists, and mourners. In reality, this stance enables the pro-Israel lobby to attack progressives on any number of fronts.

“When you look at who DMFI has spent money attacking,” says a new video released Monday by Organize for Justice, a sister organization of Justice Democrats, which recruited Lee to run, “they [also] just so happen to want to hold Israel, the biggest recipient of U.S. aid, accountable for how they spend billions of American tax dollars.”

WATCH: Why have Republican-funded groups like DMFI and AIPAC spent millions of dollars to try to beat progressives like @SummerForPA, @JCisnerosTX, @BernieSanders, @ninaturner, and @JamaalBowmanNY in primaries? pic.twitter.com/pz9iIhaABt

— Justice Democrats (@justicedems) May 16, 2022

Lee tweeted last May that the indiscriminate use of the phrase “‘Israel has the right to defend itself” is standard fare for the justification of atrocities committed against marginalized people. At the time, Israeli police had recently attacked worshippers at the Al Aqsa Mosque. “As we fight against injustice here in the mvmnt for Blk lives, we must stand against injustice everywhere,” Lee wrote. “Inhumanities against the Palestinian ppl cannot be tolerated or justified.”

When I hear American pols use the refrain "Israel has the right to defend itself" in response to undeniable atrocities on a marginalized pop, I can't help but think of how the west has always justified indiscriminate& disproportionate force &power on weakened & marginalized ppl

— Summer Lee (@SummerForPA) May 14, 2021

While the Jewish Chronicle questioned Irwin about his challenger’s tweets six months later, claiming that they had been “understood by some as anti-Zionist and antisemitic,” Pittsburgh’s WESA noted that the Chronicle did not identify anyone who had made that claim. “Even some Irwin supporters seem wary of accusing Lee of antisemitism,” the news station pointed out.

AIPAC’s United Democracy Project ran an April 22 ad that suggested that Lee isn’t really a Democrat. Two days prior, the group had released a slate of endorsements including more than 100 Republican candidates who voted to overturn the 2020 election results. “Groups like AIPAC and DMFI don’t have much name recognition even amongst Democratic primary voters, and even amongst high-level operatives and journalists,” Justice Democrats spokesperson Waleed Shahid told The Intercept. “Some of the people at the highest levels of Democratic Party politics have no idea what these groups are, what their political goals are.”

Bipartisan criticism had been mounting for over a month, when some of the endorsements were released. In a March letter to its members, AIPAC defended its growing slate, writing: “This is no moment for the pro-Israel movement to become selective about its friends.”

Rep. Mike Doyle, the longtime Pennsylvania Democrat who Lee and Irwin are competing to replace, wasn’t shy to pick sides in the contest that quickly pitted progressives against the local party machine. Doyle and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., weighed in on the same day: While Doyle announced his support for Irwin, Sanders endorsed Lee.

“You don’t get anything done being Bernie Sanders or the Squad,” the congressman said last week.

Mike Doyle: “You don’t get anything done being Bernie Sanders or the Squad. If you point to anything they’ve done resulting in law, I would love to know what it is. That just hasn’t happened.”

— Julian Routh (@julianrouth) May 12, 2022

Irwin, who led a division at his Pittsburgh law firm offering services in “union avoidance,” has been buoyed by almost $3 million in outside spending — most of it from political action committees associated with DMFI and AIPAC. Progressive groups including Justice Democrats, Working Families Party PAC, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC have spent just over $1.7 million to support Lee’s campaign. The PAC for J Street, a nonprofit that advocates for progressive foreign policy toward Israel, made a joint endorsement of Lee and Dickinson in April.

Last month, AIPAC sent a fundraising email with the subject line “Act Now: Anti-Israel Forces Want to Silence You” that attacked Lee and two other congressional candidates in North Carolina, Erica Smith and Nida Allam — both also progressive women of color — as “anti-Israel candidates.” Mark Mellman, the head of DMFI, claimed to The Intercept last month that criticism from the U.S. left emboldens the Israeli right. “The anti-Israel far left has propped up the Israeli right and done tremendous damage to the prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians,” he said.

After AIPAC’s United Democracy Project released its April ad scorning the notion that Lee “calls herself a Democrat,” several party members backing Lee’s campaign, including State House Democratic Minority Leader Joanna McClinton and Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, condemned the messaging and called on Irwin to denounce it, Pittsburgh’s TribLive reported. “As Democrats from across the commonwealth, we find it shameful that you would team up with a corporate super PAC that has endorsed over 100+ pro-insurrectionist Republicans to attack and smear our Democratic colleague, state Rep. Summer Lee, as not a Democrat,” the group wrote. “When you are literally on the same side as insurrectionists, I guess the only way to defend yourself is to attack the lone Black woman in the race that has done more to expand and turn out our electorate for Democrats than anyone in this race.”

Irwin’s campaign told the outlet that while the candidate cannot control super PAC spending or messaging, the ads “appear to be true.” A spokesperson pointed to Lee’s criticism of Joe Biden during the 2020 presidential primary, including an observation of the then-candidate’s “casual racism,” and said, “In the scheme of things, Rep. Lee has far more explaining to do.” (Like many of the president’s left-leaning critics, Lee later went on to campaign for Biden.)

Irwin’s campaign did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., speaks at the 2019 American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference in Washington, D.C., on March 26, 2019.

Photo: Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty Images

If she wins on Tuesday and again in November, Lee will be the first Black woman elected to Congress from Pennsylvania. She has led efforts to end cash bail at the state level, and she is running for federal office on a platform that includes the Green New Deal, Medicare For All, and the promotion of labor unions. Beyond Sanders and Justice Democrats, she has earned endorsements from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash.; and the sitting members of the House Squad.

The idea of having “a Black woman as a congressperson, on its face, is very attractive,” Irwin said in March at a town hall held by the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh. Though he “supported [Lee] when we first met,” Irwin said, “I know how she’s worked with other people in the community, I know how she’s worked with people in business, I know how she’s worked with people in the House and government, and I can tell you that it does not indicate that it would be as conducive to getting things done.”

Responding in a tweet, Lee said the comments were evidence of “misogynoir” facing “COUNTLESS qualified Blk women who threaten white male hegemony. And as we see it doesnt just come from Republicans.” Irwin’s campaign did not respond publicly to the criticism.

“Almost $3 million was spent trying to stop Pennsylvanians from electing their first Black Congresswoman — imagine if that money was instead being used to protect Democrats’ majority in November.”

“We are once again seeing what happens when Republican-backed corporate power is threatened by a working class Black woman fighting to bring people-powered leadership to her community,” Justice Democrats candidate communications manager Usamah Andrabi said in a statement to The Intercept. “Almost $3 million was spent trying to stop Pennsylvanians from electing their first Black Congresswoman — imagine if that money was instead being used to protect Democrats’ majority in November.”

Dickinson, meanwhile, has called on Irwin to drop out of the race for unrelated reasons: TribLive reported in March that one of the people who circulated petitions for his campaign forged several hundred signatures, though he likely would have qualified for the ballot anyway. Lee criticized the campaign for approving the forged petitions but did not call on him to drop out. The same month, the AFL-CIO declined to endorse his campaign after learning of his “labor avoidance” role, leaving union support split in the race.

The money, however, is with Irwin. Lee’s campaign has raised just over $700,000, Dickinson’s almost $700,000, and Irwin’s $1.2 million. The influx of outside spending from DMFI and AIPAC on Irwin’s side, and from Justice Democrats and WFP on Lee’s, comes on top of that reserve.

“Every single member of the Democratic leadership in Congress, as well as President Obama, the head of the Congressional Black Caucus and 20 members of the House Progressive Caucus have been endorsed by AIPAC,” Irwin’s spokesperson reminded TribLive. “Steve Irwin is proud to stand up for the Jewish state of Israel and America’s strongest ally in the Middle East.”

The post Summer Lee Faces AIPAC Spending Onslaught in Final Days of Pennsylvania Primary appeared first on The Intercept.

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In August 2021, when the parent company of NGP VAN, a privately owned database that hosts Democrats’ most sensitive data, was sold to Apax Partners, a British private equity firm, a major vulnerability in the party infrastructure was exposed. NGP VAN, which is part of the fundraising management software company EveryAction, is one of two major organizations that run the coveted organizing, voter file, and compliance tools that the Democratic Party relies on to build power. Clients and observers worried that private equity, with its reputation for decimating companies in industries from health care to food to local news, would risk NGP VAN’s integrity — and that of its precious data.

Private equity already had its hands in NGP VAN. In 2018, Insight Partners, another venture capital and private equity firm, invested in EveryAction and appointed a new chair to its board. But the Apax acquisition raised fresh concerns for several strategists, progressive fundraisers, and campaign tech workers, including some of the firm’s own clients, that its new ownership might put the mission of NGP VAN — to support Democratic candidates — at odds with Apax’s goal of making money by cutting costs and maximizing profits. A group of more than 50 operatives expressed concerns that the Apax acquisition would exacerbate some of the worst ills of Democratic and progressive campaign tech space, like exploiting valuable voter file data to spam clients and target vulnerable voters, or using voter information for commercial purposes or fringe and right-wing causes.

“Private equity literally can only do one thing,” said Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, whose PAC is an NGP VAN client. Last August, Lawson and dozens of other nonprofit, tech, and campaign workers signed an open letter addressed to the heads of EveryAction and Apax, which is worth $51 billion and has acquired more than 100 companies, expressing skepticism over the merger. Lawson told The Intercept that global investment and venture capital firms like Apax “wring every drop of revenue out of something by cutting costs, which means firing people, hollowing it out. Then exit.”

Three of NGP VAN’s top executives quit, two of them shifting to roles on the company’s advisory board. In March, the firm released a plan to revamp its services ahead of the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential election. With it came a new leadership announcement: Chelsea Peterson, then the firm’s senior vice president of sales and formerly a regional field director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, became NGP’s general manager. The strategic document that touted her role seemed rather innocuous, but it hinted at bigger changes to come — including the coming launch of a “larger parent brand.”

Firms like Apax “wring every drop of revenue out of something by cutting costs, which means firing people, hollowing it out.”

The next week, the firm introduced its new corporate name: Bonterra. An umbrella that covers what were once four companies — EveryAction; another fundraising software for nonprofits called Network for Good; and two nonprofit and philanthropic tech companies that Apax combined with EveryAction in the August merger, Social Solutions and CyberGrants — Bonterra’s stated goal is to connect nonprofits to donors. While the four companies adopted the Bonterra name, NGP VAN, though functionally in the same position, remained a stand-alone brand. It will continue to operate its suite of campaign tools, including VoteBuilder, its database of highly valued — and targeted — Democratic National Committee voter file information. In 2019, EveryAction acquired ActionKit, a service that The Intercept uses for its email newsletters and fundraising.

Though the move may have signaled growth and prosperity on the corporate board, for some strategists and NGP VAN clients, it seemed to confirm their worst fears: that the company’s new structure meant a dilution of the political mission in favor of scale, no matter what the issue. EveryAction had largely maximized its reach in the campaign tech space, but Bonterra serves more than 15,000 nonprofits and more than half of the Fortune 100 companies.

“Even under the previous private equity ownership, Stu [Trevelyan, EveryAction’s former CEO] had been talking about the intent to really go into the nonprofit space in a bigger and bigger way,” said Josh Nelson, who organized the open letter last year; Nelson is the CEO of Civic Shout and a co-founder of the Juggernaut Project, two email and text acquisition firms that help Democratic campaigns and progressive groups expand their email lists.

Fears about dilution of the company’s political mission are unfounded, Peterson said in a statement to The Intercept. “Bonterra is investing in NGP VAN. There is a clear strategy, investment initiatives, and a long-term roadmap that will allow NGP VAN to continue scaling its impact and innovation; moreover, there continues to be a clear plan for deeper investment in supporting our valued political customers,” Peterson said. “As such, to suggest that the NGP VAN is deemphasizing its traditional mission and shifting its focus to more business in the non-profit space is inaccurate.”

But if EveryAction and NGP VAN were eroded, Democratic fundraisers would not have many comparable places to turn. “If you’re a Democrat running for office, you have two options” — NGP VAN and Action Network — “for technology to contact supporters through email,” progressive fundraiser Michael Whitney told The Intercept. (Whitney previously worked in fundraising for The Intercept.) That structure sets up “a single point of failure for running different parts of Democratic campaigns.”

Progressive operatives have long been critical of NGP VAN’s effective duopoly over software for Democratic campaigns. Action Network, built to protect voter data from being used outside an organizing purpose, is its major nonprofit competitor. ActBlue, a major Democratic fundraising firm, integrated its services with NGP in 2018. Several other groups have tried to replicate the companies’ products in an effort to expand access and compete with Republican firms that have outmaneuvered Democratic operatives — especially in 2016, when they helped Donald Trump win the presidential election. Billionaire Democratic donor Reid Hoffman’s Alloy, which “rose from the ashes” of Hillary Clinton’s defeat to Trump, according to Fast Company, lasted less than a year. (In February, Hoffman gave half a million dollars to Mainstream Democrats, a new PAC targeting progressives in several Democratic primaries.) Other smaller outfits have had more success, like Civitech, a progressive tech firm that acquired several of Alloy’s tools last year, and the Movement Cooperative, a New York City-based vendor that’s partnered with entities like MoveOn, Forward Majority Action, and Real Justice PAC.

But over the last decade, EveryAction and NGP VAN’s dominance has only expanded: The firm has acquired campaign tech outfits that tried to compete in the space, including ActionKit, Mobilize, Salsa Labs, and Blue State Digital.

“The concentration of such a tremendous customer base and user base gives your company unprecedented power to shape the future of Democratic and nonprofit fundraising, email, advocacy, supporter engagement, and more,” read the August letter to the firm’s leadership.

When Apax combined EveryAction, Social Solutions, and CyberGrants, it created the “second largest and fastest-growing social good software company in the world,” according to EveryAction’s release at the time. The transaction, “several times larger than any [merger & acquisition] in the history of the social good software sector,” was billed as a much-needed injection of capital into the political infrastructure behind the bulk of Democratic campaigns in the country.

Recognizing this influence, the 50 concerned strategists and clients wrote that the company’s role comes with “a profound responsibility to play a leadership role in pushing the digital fundraising industry in more ethical and sustainable directions.” But “as it stands today, EveryAction is not playing that role. In fact, while a vast majority of your company’s customers use your tools responsibly, your customers also include prolific political spammers and some of the most egregious senders of deceptive political emails in the industry.”

The letter cited a New York Times article on how campaign fundraising tools trap older Americans with misleading tactics and automatic recurring donations. EveryAction clients “have continued engaging in many of the other tactics outlined … to take advantage of senior citizens and other potential donors.”

“That is how you squeeze money out of data. You rip off old people. And you rip off people who are the least able to fight against it.”

In order to maximize profits from data, companies can purchase lists of people in memory care facilities and target them for contributions, Lawson said, or buy lists of people who have used credit-repair services after falling victim to scams. “That is how you squeeze money out of data,” Lawson said. “You rip off old people. And you rip off people who are the least able to fight against it.”

The company has acknowledged in the past that its clients sometimes use its tools to spam voters with unsolicited emails or opt them in to emails they haven’t signed up for without letting them unsubscribe. But Peterson told The Intercept in her statement that speculation “regarding the use of client data to ‘spam clients, target vulnerable voters’, etc. is unfounded. Importantly, any such activity would run counter to NGP VAN’s terms of service.”

Mike Liddell, EveryAction’s general manager for digital, wrote in a blog post last summer that the company had “declined, and will continue to decline, to work with organizations that focus on being anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ rights, anti-action on climate change, anti-racial justice, etc.” He stressed that “we never sell, rent, or otherwise provide any email addresses to anyone.”

“NGP still has a huge spam problem,” said Nelson. The problem has been noted in perennial public complaints from Democratic donors. “And it’s still the only entity that could single-handedly make a huge dent in the Democratic Party’s spam problem if it chose to do so.”

To strategists who raised alarms about the merger last year, prospects for improving this dynamic under Apax ownership don’t look promising. Private equity ownership can also have practical impacts, like saddling companies with debt or cutting additional staff. And the continued circuit of acquisitions by and of EveryAction doesn’t necessarily give the firm an incentive to improve its existing services, even if it says it’s committed to doing so.

“That there’s a thought that maybe this time it’ll be different is just ridiculous,” said Lawson.

Democratic strategist Ben Tribbett, who also signed the letter, told The Intercept that his main concern is making sure that NGP VAN’s tools remain democratic. State parties contract with the Democratic National Committee to access NGP VAN tools, and every state has its own rules for whether it charges for NGP VAN or offers it for free, which can make its software inaccessible to smaller campaigns, like those for school board or local elections. NGP VAN offers its tools to local, state, and federal campaigns.

“Putting them at such a disadvantage is part of why we’re seeing the party do as poorly as they are in these smaller localities,” he said. “The idea of a private company being able to access that information for purposes of profit is really, really troubling. … I don’t think that when most of these laws were written, they ever envisioned a private company owning this on behalf of the party.”

“The idea of a private company being able to access that information for purposes of profit is really, really troubling.”

They’ve also seen private equity erode political tools before. Hustle, founded in 2014, provided peer-to-peer text messaging for progressive and Democratic campaigns. It helped boost Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential primary campaign and integrated its services with NGP VAN later that year. In 2018, Hustle received a major growth investment from Insight Partners, Google Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures, expanded rapidly, and then laid off 35 percent of its staff the next year. In 2020, it was acquired by Social Capital, a billionaire-founded technology holding company, and has since continued to operate in the campaign tech space, albeit at a different scale. While Hustle has continued to work for Democratic campaigns at the state and national level, last year it launched an initiative called “Hustle for Good” to boost its support for mission-driven nonprofits. Though EveryAction isn’t currently laying off staff, some progressive strategists think a similar evolution in core focus could be on the horizon.

Salsa Labs, an early email fundraising firm that EveryAction acquired last year, had been taken up by a new client as early as April 2020: Children’s Health Defense, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine group, which continues to use the company’s forms and email tools.

“It’s correct that we are still working to move Children’s Health Defense from our platform,” Peterson told The Intercept. “They had an existing contract that our team is working to address.”

The acquisition of EveryAction is just one piece of a larger trend in the Democratic and progressive campaign tech world, said Murshed Zaheed, a former aide to the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who now runs the public affairs firm Pacifica Strategies. Overall, Zaheed said, “the tech is at a very complacent space. There hasn’t been any innovation that’s a game-changing innovation.” Such acquisitions, Zaheed said, are “stifling desperately needed innovation in our space at a time when there’s so much stagnation.”

Apax Partners was co-founded by millionaire, venture capitalist, and major Democratic donor Alan Patricof and Egyptian-born British businessperson Ronald Cohen. The firm owns more than 100 companies and works in industries from health care to online auctions. Its investment arm, Apax Funds, is registered in the Channel Island of Guernsey, a tax haven with a standard zero percent corporate tax. Apax board member Ian Davis is the former managing director of global consulting giant McKinsey. An Apax partner was part of the group of inaugural advisers to Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, among executives from several other major private equity firms including Blackstone, TPG, and Apollo Global Management. China’s sovereign wealth fund invested $956 million to acquire a 2.3 percent stake in Apax Partners in 2010. In 2009, Apax sold stakes to investors from GIC, part of Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, and Australia’s sovereign wealth fund, which sold its stake in the company last year.

Apax partner Jason Wright, who is a director on Bonterra’s board, gave near-maximum contributions to Republican Senate candidates David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in November 2020, several weeks after they both lost their elections. That month, he also gave $5,600 to WinRed, the GOP fundraising platform. Wright previously contributed to committees for Democratic and Republican presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney. In a statement after the 2021 merger, Wright and Apax principal Adam Garson, another Bonterra director, said that the “resulting scale and connectivity between donors and non-profits will help reshape philanthropic giving.” A spokesperson for Apax, who declined to comment on the record, said Wright’s role at Bonterra was in oversight and that he had no operating control.

“If progressives want to build power, they have to take really seriously protecting the tools that we have that allow us to even play with concentrated and organized money,” Lawson said. “They have money, we have people. But if the tools that we use to reach people are acquired by money, then they have money, and they have people.”

The post Democrats’ Major Campaign Tech Firm Shifts Under New Private Equity Owner appeared first on The Intercept.

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When Politico published the draft Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, top Democratic leaders were quick to condemn it. In a joint statement released Monday night, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called the draft “an abomination, one of the worst and most damaging decisions in modern history.” On Tuesday morning, President Joe Biden called on states to protect the right to abortion and on voters to elect pro-choice Democrats in upcoming contests. Later that day, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., tweeted: “For 49 years, women have had the constitutional right to make choices about their body. The whole notion of politicians controlling those decisions is beyond the pale. It ought to be alarming to us.”

But on Wednesday, Clyburn hosted a get-out-the-vote rally with the party’s last remaining House member to oppose abortion rights, Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas. On May 24, Cuellar will face a runoff in his second primary challenge from progressive candidate Jessica Cisneros, who supports reproductive rights and lost to Cuellar by less than 4 percentage points in the 2020 primary for Texas’s 28th Congressional District. Cisneros came within 2 points of Cuellar’s votes in the March Democratic primary, forcing the runoff.

“We’re watching the erosion of our fundamental freedoms in this country. This isn’t a drill,” Cisneros told The Intercept. “Urgency is important, and Democrats need to pull out all the stops to fight for us.”

“I do not agree with Henry Cuellar on everything,” Clyburn said at Wednesday’s rally, according to Texas Monthly’s Jack Herrera. “We need to sit down with people who we do not agree with and try to find common ground, to do what is necessary to move this country forward.”

“When people tell you you need to agree on everything, I do not agree with Henry Cuellar on everything…we need to sit down with people who we do not agree with and try to find common ground, to do what is necessary to move this country forward,” say @WhipClyburn pic.twitter.com/E0e8nzg0dT

— Jack Herrera (@jherrerx) May 4, 2022

Clyburn is not alone among party leadership in endorsing the anti-abortion incumbent. Pelosi; Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md.; and Democratic Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y. — all of whom profess support for abortion access — are backing Cuellar. Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-V.T., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and New York Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman, for their part, back Cisneros.

Party leadership’s support for Cuellar “points out the cognitive dissonance that’s going on right now,” Cisneros said. “Democratic leadership is saying one thing, the actions are showing another by supporting the last anti-choice Democrat in Congress, which is Henry Cuellar.” Cuellar did not provide comment by the time of publication.

In September, Cuellar was the only Democrat to vote against the Women’s Health Protection Act, a bill that would strengthen access to abortion and prohibit states from singling out or impeding access to abortion services. Despite his opposition, it passed the House by seven votes before failing by two in the Senate. Sens. Warren; Sanders; Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis.; and Ed Markey, D-Mass., called Tuesday to abolish the filibuster in order to pass the bill or another measure to codify the right to abortion in federal law.

“With the House majority on the line,” Cisneros said, “Henry Cuellar could be the deciding vote on the future of our reproductive rights and so many other fundamental freedoms in this country. And we just can’t afford to take that risk.”

While Cisneros had outraised Cuellar by half a million dollars as of the end of March — with $3.2 million in contributions to Cuellar’s $2.7 million — Cuellar’s campaign has also gotten a major boost from two political action committees for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC. The group’s affiliated PAC United Democracy Project spent more than $330,000 last month on ads attacking Cisneros. And the fledgling AIPAC PAC, which endorsed Cuellar in March, has spent more than $165,000 in support of his campaign since January. Along with the group Democratic Majority for Israel, AIPAC has been behind millions more in spending to attack several progressive candidates.

The progressive Israel foreign policy group J Street, which is backing Cisneros, has spent $100,000 on the race so far. Justice Democrats, Emily’s List, NARAL, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, and Working Families Party all endorsed Cisneros. Groups including WFP, Justice Democrats, NARAL, the Communication Workers of America, Texas Organizing Project, and Service Employees International Union have spent at least $2 million in support of Cisneros and opposing Cuellar. At the end of last quarter, Cuellar’s campaign had $1.4 million cash on hand to Cisneros’s $1 million.

Cisneros said her team was used to outside spending and was focused on continuing to build grassroots power. “He doesn’t have people where we do. We’ve been up against this fight before and we’ve shown that we can go toe-to-toe with any outside spending.”

Cisneros’s campaign called on Democratic Party leaders Wednesday to withdraw support for Cuellar in light of their denunciation of the draft opinion and his opposition to abortion rights. “At every turn, my Congressman has stood in opposition to the Democratic Party agenda from being anti-union to being anti-choice,” Cisneros said in a press release. Pelosi and Clyburn did not respond to a request for comment.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which backs incumbent members, has not made an endorsement in the race. On Tuesday, the DCCC released statements calling the draft opinion “a devastating blow” to safe and legal abortion and denouncing Republicans in Virginia, Florida, Arizona, New Hampshire, Michigan, and North Carolina as “complicit in this all out assault on women’s freedoms.” None of the statements mentioned Cuellar.

While DCCC hasn’t explicitly weighed in, several of its approved vendors are working to reelect Cuellar, The American Prospect reported Wednesday. Last month, as Cuellar faced scrutiny after an FBI raid reportedly connected to his Azerbaijani business interests, DCCC Chair Sean Patrick Maloney told The Hill that Democrats would maintain control of the district. He did not specify which candidate would hold it.

In 2020, former DCCC Chair Cheri Bustos supported Cuellar’s 2020 primary campaign. That cycle, he also became the first-ever Democrat to receive the Koch network’s endorsement in a federal race.

“Losing the right to choose is imminent,” Cisneros wrote in a tweet on Monday about the draft option. “Yet, Cuellar voted with Republicans against codifying #Roe.” She called for contributions to Texas abortion funds and wrote, “We have the last word on May 24.”

“I’m more than ready to start working with them to deliver on the Democratic agenda,” Cisneros told The Intercept. “I hope that Democratic Party leadership won’t stand in the way of delivering for the people here.”

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Justice Democrats, the group that has launched several progressive members of Congress, said it’s being “massively outgunned” by Republican donors giving millions to attack progressive candidates in several competitive races. One of those was Tuesday’s Democratic primary in Ohio’s 11th District, which incumbent Democratic Rep. Shontel Brown is now poised to win. The defeat of Nina Turner, the former Bernie Sanders campaign co-chair, deals a repetitive blow to progressives who backed her run — the second Turner waged against Brown in nine months.

“Nina is a giant in the progressive movement and we’re proud to have gone all in for her campaign last year,” Justice Democrats said in a statement. “The reality is our organization has to be strategic about our priorities as we are getting massively outgunned by Republican donors funneling millions to SuperPACs like AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] and DMFI [Democratic Majority for Israel] against our existing candidates.”

Last August, Turner lost to Brown by six points in a special primary election. In the wake of that race, Turner told The Intercept the result was heavily influenced by money from DMFI pouring in, especially after Israeli air strikes in Gaza in May 2021. “I even have emails right now, to this day of local, primarily business leaders in the Jewish community where they were encouraging Republicans to vote in this primary, and were saying things like: We must support Shontel Brown, in no way can we let Nina Turner win this race,” she said.

In the 2021 cycle, DMFI PAC spent just under $2 million on ads supporting Brown and attacking Turner. The AIPAC-aligned Pro-Israel America PAC gave Brown’s campaign more than half a million dollars. Last year, Justice Democrats helped to raise more than $100,000 for Turner and supported a half-a million dollar independent expenditure backing her.

This year, Brown’s campaign was again propelled by outside pro-Israel groups that claimed Turner “stokes division” and painted her as an “anti-Israel” candidate. And Brown’s reelection campaign is again backed by AIPAC, and DMFI, which is funded by $2 million from an oil and gas heir, along with a super PAC funded by a crypto billionaire. AIPAC’s PAC, United Democracy Project, spent more than $280,000 on the race last month, including more than $198,800 on ads attacking Turner. DMFI PAC spent more than $1 million on the race last month, including more than $312,000 on ads against Turner.

A spokesperson for Justice Democrats told The Intercept that the group didn’t have resources to get involved in every primary — particularly in light of major spending from Republicans and pro-Israel groups. “Each candidate we recruit requires massive staff and financial resources especially since many of our candidates have little-to-no name recognition or existing fundraising networks. If we had twice the budget we could likely get involved in twice the number of primaries. When we endorse a candidate, we’re typically going all-in for them with significant staff and financial investment which isn’t possible for us to do in every primary right now.”

Many progressives who backed Turner last year stayed out of the race this cycle, which picked up after many groups had already drawn up their electoral strategies and top priorities for the 2022 midterms. Another major diversion came from the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, which endorsed Turner last year, spent $104,000 on an independent expenditure supporting her, and, last month, endorsed Brown. After her first election to Congress, the incumbent became a simultaneous member of the CPC and the centrist New Democrat Coalition, raising eyebrows.

Rep. Shontel Brown, D-Ohio, is seen in the U.S. Capitols Rayburn Room after a group photo with the Congressional Black Caucus, on April 6, 2022.

Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Several prominent CPC members who backed Turner’s race last cycle —, including chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., Whip Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Deputy Whip Cori Bush, D-Mo., and Reps. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., and Mondaire Jones, D-N.Y. — did not make endorsements in the race this year. The caucus, which has endorsed more than 20 incumbents so far, is reportedly reviewing its endorsement process after backlash over its endorsement of Brown. Reached for comment by The Intercept, CPC PAC spokesperson Evan Brown said the committee doesn’t share information on endorsement votes. The PAC has become more active in contested primaries since it launched its first independent expenditure in 2020, when it helped Jones win his primary election against a field of better-funded candidates.

The race has been characterized by relative inaction by national figures on the left — either in spite, or because of, the coalescing of power and resources behind Brown by the Democratic establishment.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and President Joe Biden backed Brown, while Turner’s former boss, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-V.T., endorsed Turner. On Monday, just hours before polls would open, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., backed Turner.

Team Blue PAC, a committee that Reps. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., and Terri Sewell, D-Ala., launched last June to protect incumbents facing primary challengers, endorsed Brown and a slate of four other incumbents in February, and contributed $5,000 to support each of their campaigns. Other Team Blue PAC endorsees include Reps. Danny Davis, D-Ill., Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., Donald Payne Jr., D-N.J., and Dina Titus, D-Nev. Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb endorsed Brown in February. In 2021, while he stayed out of the race for the open House seat, Turner backed his mayoral campaign.

The Cleveland Democratic Socialists of America, which stayed out of the 2021 race, backed Turner’s campaign last month. Her campaign is also endorsed by the editorial board of Cleveland.com and the Plain Dealer, which also backed her 2021 campaign.

Congressional Democrats are bracing for a tough upcoming midterm election cycle. Last month, the Cook Political report released new ratings that show Democrats slipping in eight House districts. Party leaders and several of the caucus’s moderate members have blamed progressives for alienating critical midterm voters and putting vulnerable frontline Democrats at risk, but those same moderates have also stymied action on the biggest chances for reform, frustrating organizers and voters and sending Biden’s approval numbers plummeting. In its endorsement last month, the editorial board of Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer hinted at that dynamic and wrote that Turner was Cleveland’s best choice in light of “the strong possibility of a GOP takeover of the House.”

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On Monday night, Missouri Democratic congressional candidate and state Sen. Steven Roberts Jr. publicly denied allegations of rape and sexual assault in two separate incidents in an interview with a local CBS affiliate. “If I could have done things differently that night, I would have just gone home by myself,” Roberts said of August 26, 2016: the night Cora Faith Walker, at the time a fellow candidate for the Missouri House of Representatives, alleged that he raped her.

Walker’s allegation has received renewed attention in the past month: She died at 37 of unidentified causes on March 11, and Roberts filed his candidacy for the U.S. House of Representatives on March 28 — becoming the most formidable challenger in the Democratic primary against Rep. Cori Bush. Comparatively little attention, however, has been paid to a separate allegation made the previous year by Amy Harms, a lawyer in St. Louis, who says that on April 16, 2015, Roberts groped her at a bar.

“I feel immense guilt,” said Harms, who reported the incident to the police on April 22 that year, in an interview with The Intercept. Then a student at Saint Louis University School of Law, Harms accused Roberts of touching her genital area over her clothing and putting his hand inside her waistband, attempting to enter her pants, after she rebuffed his advances. (In an ensuing civil suit, a letter to the state legislature, and comments to The Intercept, Harms stated that Roberts managed to put his hand into her underwear and touch her genitals, though the police report does not make this clear.) After Harms filed her report — more than a year before Walker’s accusation — Roberts was arrested and became the subject of a criminal case, which was eventually dismissed after the office of the St. Charles County attorney, overseeing the case, decided to defer prosecution. He was fired from his job in the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office for “performance issues” and never faced trial.

“The whole reason that I reported what happened to me — it was not for me. It did not make it better for me,” Harms told The Intercept. “It was to try to make sure that he didn’t hurt anybody else.”

“I’ve continued to tell the truth that the allegations against me are not true,” Roberts said in the Monday interview with TV station KMOV. Roberts’s spokesperson Ryan Hawkins has previously denied both allegations to The Intercept.

The TV interview focused mainly on Walker’s allegation, detailing a settlement between the two parties that forbade either from discussing the case and did not include any financial damages. But Roberts also settled Harms’s case out of court, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept, reaching a 2019 agreement for $100,000. The settlement concluded a 2017 civil suit that Harms filed after the criminal case was deferred and stipulates the release of all claims, a full denial of Roberts’s liability, and an agreement of confidentiality. Both parties are prohibited from discussing the allegations. But as Roberts’s star has risen in the House primary, Harms has decided to speak out anyway.

“The local coverage has been generally very supportive of him. Not a lot of mentions of what happened and the allegations against him. And in fact, particularly leaving me out,” Harms told The Intercept. Early Tuesday morning, she posted a Twitter thread detailing her allegations against Roberts and included some police documents, which The Intercept has obtained and reviewed in full.

“Cori Bush and her supporters keep trying to perpetuate and recycle these false lies, these old stories that have been proven to be false, to distract from an indefensible voting record,” Roberts told KMOV’s Lauren Trager. In a statement to the station, Bush campaign senior adviser Lynese Wallace said, “Steve Roberts is pulling from the usual playbook for abusers, but the fact remains that he has been credibly accused of sexual assault on multiple occasions by multiple women in our community. … We don’t believe anyone is served by Steve Roberts running a campaign built around the idea that every person who has accused him of wrongdoing is a liar.” The Bush campaign declined to comment to The Intercept on Roberts’s claim that they had surfaced the allegations as a tactic.

“We sincerely encourage you to report facts and not what ‘you’ve heard,’” Roberts campaign spokesperson Simonne Kimble wrote in response to The Intercept’s questions about the case and the settlement. “Nothing you have reported has been factual or balanced. We have no interest in working with an organization that borders on libel in their ‘reporting’ and is dangerously close to tortuous interference. We strongly encourage you to check your facts and sources.”

Of the seven witnesses at the bar who gave statements in the police report, one said she had personally seen Roberts grope Harms in April 2015. Pamela Johnson, also a law student at the time, told police that May that she saw Roberts “rub Harms’s thigh and her vagina on top of her clothing with his hand,” according to a copy of her police report obtained by The Intercept, and “aggressively pursuing” other women in the group that night. Johnson and another witness said they saw Roberts and Harms talking to each other, and later that night, Harms told the six witnesses other than Johnson that Roberts had touched her.

In March 2017, Harms filed an ethics complaint against Jillian Anderson, the prosecutor who handled her criminal case, on the grounds that Anderson had misrepresented the testimony of a key eyewitness. According to Harms’s complaint, Anderson told her during the 2015 investigation that Johnson had denied witnessing the incident to the police, but the ethics committee “saw no evidence that Ms. Anderson knowingly misrepresented any facts in her communications” with Harms.

Anderson wrote in an email to The Intercept that no other evidence arose after the decision to defer prosecution, and the statute of limitations ran out after a year. “I cannot speak to the facts of the investigation that are not already in the public record,” Anderson wrote. She directed additional questions to the St. Charles County prosecutor’s office, which declined to comment.

Depositions in the civil suit are sealed, but a source with knowledge of the case provided a copy of Johnson’s March 2019 statement to The Intercept. According to the deposition, Johnson reiterated her former account, saying she saw Roberts “with his hand on and around [Harms’s] vagina thigh area” and had “no doubt” about what she had witnessed.

“I’m not surprised that this hasn’t come out and there have been no consequences for Steve Roberts,” Johnson told The Intercept, confirming that her statements were accurate. She said she had no contact with Anderson during the case and had not been aware of Harms’s charge of misrepresentation.

Scott Rosenblum, a well-known St. Louis attorney who represented Roberts in the criminal case, told The Intercept that in his understanding, Harms had been seated across the table from Roberts, making her allegations “physically impossible.” He claimed that Harms’s testimony was not credible and said of Roberts: “He doesn’t have 12-foot arms.” (In statements to the police, two witnesses said that Roberts had moved around while at the bar, and Harms said that at one point he sat directly in front of her.)

Harms’s civil attorney Matt Ghio declined to comment on the record due to ethical confidentiality requirements. Roberts’s civil attorney Jeremy Hollingshead did not respond to a request for comment. Rosenblum said he was not involved in the civil case or the settlement, “but people settle for all sorts of reasons. I don’t think there was any admission of liability, that’s for sure.”

“We have an ethical duty not to publicly comment or share private and sensitive information that is not already and necessarily in the public domain,” Anderson wrote in a subsequent email to The Intercept. “The individuals involved are, of course, free to speak to whomever they choose and equally free to maintain their privacy if they choose. I have worked on criminal case [sic] involving witnesses who go on to write books about their experience, and those who choose not even to tell their families, and I have respect for both decisions.”

In August 2020, Roberts won the Democratic state Senate primary for the office he currently holds. Shortly after the election, an interview with Roberts was broadcast on Facebook; Harms reacted to comments with a “crying face” emoji. Accusing her of violating the terms of the settlement, Hollingshead sent Harms a cease-and-desist letter.

In the fall of 2016, Rosenblum again represented Roberts in a criminal case, this time stemming from Cora Faith Walker’s rape allegation. Once again, according to an October 2016 decision by Prosecuting Attorney of St. Charles County Tim Lohmar, Roberts would not be tried.

A medical chart from Walker’s sexual assault kit collected at Mercy Hospital in St. Louis indicated that her pelvic exam showed “signs of injury,” according to a copy of her police report obtained by The Intercept, but the special prosecutor said there was not enough evidence to indicate that her encounter with Roberts was nonconsensual. Rosenblum told The Intercept the note on Walker’s pelvic exam was a “meaningless observation” and “doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not the encounter was forcible or consensual.” He said Roberts’s interaction with Walker was “obviously consensual,” as evidenced by a nude photograph of her in Roberts’s possession. According to the police file, Walker told the police that the photo was taken without her consent.

Roberts filed a civil suit against Walker for defamation in 2016, and Walker countersued. Like with Harms’s suit, both parties dismissed the case in 2019. Lawyers for Walker and Roberts said at the time that no money was paid in exchange for dismissal of the claims, which Roberts maintained in his interview on Monday.

Two weeks before Walker reported the alleged incident to law enforcement, on September 27, 2016, according to the police report, Rosenblum had been communicating with vendors at locations she and Roberts had visited to request that they “retain any surveillance footage for potential future litigation purposes.” Rosenblum provided police with evidence of those letters, dated as early as September 13, 2016, “indicating that Rosenblum’s law firm had been investigating this matter at least 14 days before it was reported to the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department.”

Asked why he would have been investigating the incident before Walker told police about it, Rosenblum said he didn’t think that timeline was “accurate,” but that “whether [or not] she notified the police, we may have had information that she was making those allegations. … Oftentimes we get information that those allegations are being made through other sources. And you want to start being proactive.”

Eugenia Gardner, a spokesperson for Walker’s family, said they had no comment and would not discuss matters related to Roberts. Walker’s cause of death has not been reported.

In the seven years since Harms made her allegations against Roberts, he has been elected as a Missouri House representative, state senator, chair of the Missouri Legislative Black Caucus, and minority whip for the state Senate Democratic Caucus. Last month, he launched his campaign to challenge Bush in Missouri’s Democratic primary, which will take place August 2. He is considered her most prominent challenger.

“I suppose it’s not entirely surprising given how much money and power his family holds in this area, but it’s still extremely disappointing,” said Harms of Roberts’s continued success. His family is well-known in St. Louis: In November 2021, it was announced that his father, a real estate developer and former alderman serving as chief of staff to St. Louis Sheriff Vernon Betts, was appointed to the Federal Communications Commission’s Equity and Diversity Council. In addition to his elected positions, Roberts Jr. is a member of the Missouri Air National Guard and a commissioned U.S. Air Force officer.

Several days before Roberts launched his Democratic congressional primary campaign last month, the St. Louis Business Journal published a column titled “A Steve Roberts challenge to Cori Bush may prove irresistible.” The piece did not mention either allegation. Roberts previously claimed that Bush was trying to distract voters with the allegations in an article about his campaign launch published late last month, which mentioned the allegation from Walker but not from Harms.

In the month leading up to Roberts’s announcement, someone using an IP address in a Missouri government office building located across the street from the state Capitol repeatedly deleted information about both assault allegations from Roberts’s Wikipedia page, The Intercept reported last month. A spokesperson for Roberts said they did not know who made the edits and declined to comment on either allegation.

“This type of shit is exactly why these crimes go unreported, why people don’t sue,” Harms said. “I may well be the only one who can speak, so I must. I just hope he’s never able to harm anyone else.”

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After a mass shooting on a subway train in Brooklyn, New York, last Tuesday, New York City Mayor Eric Adams vowed to double the number of subway cops. He had already sent an additional 1,000 officers belowground in February, in response to reports of crimes on the subway, to patrol platforms and expel homeless people from the transit system.

Adams’s deference to more policing as a salve for gun violence may stem from his own history in the New York Police Department, but it also fits him into a pattern now evident within the national Democratic Party. Where Democrats once reacted to gun violence — especially mass shootings — by calling for stricter firearms regulations, today they are increasingly turning to greater funding for the police.

Lawmakers have been able to come up with funding for the carceral system that takes taxpayer dollars away from other causes, said Kareem Henton, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Cleveland who is working with a coalition fighting the construction of a new multimillion dollar jail in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. “And yet, things that we’ve been begging for as far as providing better solutions for some of the issues that we’re plagued with like homelessness, houselessness, people with these addiction issues and mental health issues that go in and out of our system and it doesn’t get addressed. And it’s still a problem.”

The shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012; a Las Vegas music festival in 2017; Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018; and a spa in Atlanta last year were all followed by calls for more robust gun control at the state and federal levels. But in the wake of more recent spikes in gun violence, national and local lawmakers have prioritized additional funding for law enforcement. New York already has stricter gun laws than many other states in the country and has invested millions of dollars to trace illegal guns, creating a political environment where additional gun restrictions are less politically feasible. (The state Supreme Court is currently reviewing a challenge from the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association to make it easier to carry a concealed handgun.) But on the federal level, attempts at gun regulation remain lacking, and measures to amplify funding for law enforcement have a better chance of moving through Congress in a political environment where Democrats in power have struggled to pass major pieces of President Joe Biden’s agenda.

Amid a spike in gun violence, Democrats have blamed progressive members of the party who favor more substantive police reform for risking midterm chances and alienating voters. “With all the respect in the world for Cori Bush, that is not the position of the Democratic Party,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in February, referring to the Missouri Democrat in her role as one of the few members of Congress who has maintained calls to defund the police. The speaker instead lauded Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., for “saying that defund the police is dead.”

While nationwide calls to reform policing led lawmakers to kneel wearing Kente cloth in 2020 and spurred the failed George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, they haven’t substantively changed the national party’s policing agenda or made any major differences in policy. At the local level, cities that reallocated largely insignificant portions of their police budgets in 2020 have mostly added that funding back, and then some.

Despite their worth for political points, more police do not necessarily mean fewer homicides or gun crimes: Cities that maintained, cut, or reinstated police funding levels alike experienced spikes in gun crimes and homicides in 2020. And the party’s most prominent figures often fail to acknowledge the risk of alienating voters who support more radical police reforms, among other policies Biden ran on and has failed to deliver — like passing the Build Back Better social spending plan or eliminating student debt. Biden’s approval rating among young voters in particular has collapsed since he took office in January 2021, dropping 30 percentage points among young Black voters and 26 points among young Hispanic voters.

The White House 2023 budget includes $32 billion in new police spending, including putting more police officers “on the beat for accountable community policing,” efforts to stem gun trafficking, researching gun violence as a public health crisis, and expanding community violence intervention. Biden also called last month on Congress “to do its job by passing this Budget and other essential legislation to reduce gun crime.”

In the meantime, congressional Democrats are working on another bill that would increase funding to police. In January, Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., introduced the Invest to Protect Act, which would provide $200 million over five years to police departments with fewer than 200 officers: the bulk of the country’s police departments. The measure, which has 55 co-sponsors in the House, outlines investments in de-escalation training, body cameras, recruitment efforts, and mental health resources for officers. “We need to ensure our law enforcement agencies have the resources needed to recruit, train and retain police — especially as crime rates continue soaring across the country,” Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said last month in a statement applauding the introduction of the bill’s companion by Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., in the Senate. (Co-sponsors include Sens. Grassley; Raphael Warnock, D-Ga.; Bill Cassidy, R-La.; Susan Collins, R-Maine; and Jon Tester, D-Mont.) Both bills were referred to the judiciary committees in their respective chambers.

Warnock did not respond to questions about whether he was working on any additional bills to address demands from nationwide protests in 2020 to reform law enforcement. Cortez Masto’s office said she was supportive of former and ongoing bipartisan efforts to negotiate a police reform bill, and she was disappointed that those efforts had stalled last year.

Gottheimer told The Intercept he spent the last year and a half working closely with both parties on police reform. “One thing we discussed is that our smaller towns and departments, in particular, don’t often get all the resources they need to protect our communities and themselves,” he said. The talks hadn’t “landed on a final piece of legislation yet,” Gottheimer said, though “there are many areas where we have found strong agreement. Many of those policies are captured in this bipartisan bill.” His office declined to clarify if he was working on a separate package. Cortez Masto spokesperson Lauren Wodarski wrote in a statement to The Intercept that the bill would “provide critical resources to nearly every police department in Nevada.” A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer did not respond to a question about whether he would support the bill.

There have been 131 mass shootings so far this year in the United States, according to the independent research group Gun Violence Archive. At the same point in time last year, there had been 140 mass shootings; 83 in 2020; 82 in 2019; and 62 in 2018. Last Tuesday, just hours after the Brooklyn subway shooting, Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed a bill into law that allows people to carry guns without a license or background check, saying the bill was a public safety measure.

In November, Biden signed three policing bills that would provide additional resources for mental health, allow people who attempt to kill law enforcement overseas to be prosecuted in the U.S., and enhance benefits for first responders injured on duty. The Invest to Protect Act is far broader: If passed, it would be one of the most substantial police funding bills to move in Congress since the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act — which included additional funding for police along with mitigation efforts that were already in place in several cities, like a ban on chokeholds, requirements for implicit bias training, and body cameras — failed last year. Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., who sponsored the Justice in Policing Act in the House, is now running for mayor of Los Angeles with explicit calls to hire more police to the LAPD.

Eric Adams, who ran his mayoral campaign focused on fighting crime, has directed the New York City Police Department to expend significant efforts to target and remove unhoused people from around the city. Last month, the NYPD dispatched a new “business improvement team” to address concerns from Midtown Manhattan business owners about homelessness and crimes of poverty. NYPD officers have cleared hundreds of homeless encampments in recent weeks. The NYPD announced earlier this month that transit arrests were up 64 percent over the last year, and fare evasion arrests had increased by 51 percent.

“I support what Karen Bass is doing,” Pelosi told Stephanopoulos in February, referring to her LAPD hiring calls, “and Mayor Adams of New York.”

Aqeela Sherrills, director of the Community Based Public Safety Collective, told The Intercept that although his Newark, New Jersey-based group works closely with police there, the law enforcement lobby has a tendency to “push narratives that build the capacity of their respective work.” Sherrills, whose teenage son was shot and killed in 2004, said community-driven violence intervention programs have the power to change that.

“Our theory of change is that if you better serve victims, you prevent them from becoming perpetrators,” Sherrills said. Newark cut homicides by 50 percent over the past six years, after a federal consent decree ordered major changes to the police department and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka brought Sherrills to the city to start a community violence street team. But there hasn’t been enough federal or local investment in groups that do community violence intervention, and while the White House program has tried to fill that gap, “the system is slow to integrate new learning,” Sherrills said. “When we see a mass shooting, the conversation is not necessarily to me about gun control or more cops. It’s about how are we serving these victims. How are we helping these families and these communities heal from this traumatic event?”

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For the second cycle in a row, Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota is facing a serious primary challenger. Former Minneapolis City Council Member Don Samuels announced Thursday that his campaign had raised $350,000 in the month since its launch, with 75 percent in contributions under $100 and $320,000 cash on hand. Omar’s fundraising has been slower, pulling in $275,000 in the first quarter with an average donation of $13, with a total of $500,000 on hand.

The Minneapolis primary will focus heavily on the question of policing. Over the past two years, the first count in the party establishment’s indictment of its progressive wing has been the push to “defund the police,” with President Joe Biden explicitly targeting the slogan during his State of the Union address and following it up with an infusion of cash for cops. The debate entered the national spotlight again this week after a man shot 10 people on a subway train in New York City on Tuesday and police in Grand Rapids, Michigan, released video of an officer who shot and killed 26-year-old Patrick Lyoya in the back of the head during a traffic stop earlier this month. In the wake of the mass shooting in New York, Mayor Eric Adams swiftly called for more police to proliferate, while hundreds of protesters in Grand Rapids took to the streets to demand that they be kept in check.

Almost two years ago, amid calls to reform the Minneapolis Police Department after cops there killed George Floyd, Samuels, who also served on the city’s school board, and his wife, Sondra, took on a new cause: In August 2020, they sued the city to hire more than 100 additional cops. Along with six other Minneapolis residents, Samuels and his wife filed suit against Mayor Jacob Frey and the City Council for having “violated their duties to fund, employ, and manage a police force as required by the City Charter.”

But the lawsuit didn’t stop Samuels from hiring Frey’s campaign manager, Joe Radinovich, who helped the embattled mayor win reelection in 2021. Now Radinovich is running Samuels’s campaign in the August 9 primary for Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District. Samuels is Omar’s highest-profile Democratic challenger yet.

Omar faced her first primary as an incumbent in 2020, when Antone Melton-Meaux, a mediator, attorney, and a political newcomer at the time, spent millions to unseat her with help from billionaires and pro-Israel groups. First elected in 2018 — with Frey’s endorsement — along with several other progressive newcomers, Omar has been the target of Islamophobic death threats, as well as attacks from pro-Israel groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and lawmakers in both parties for her criticism of human rights violations, war crimes, and U.S. imperialism.

Her position on the House Foreign Affairs Committee is viewed as a threat to the bipartisan foreign policy establishment. In June, Republicans pushed to remove Omar from the committee, and 12 of her Democratic colleagues issued a statement rebuking her after she compared human rights atrocities committed by the U.S. and Israel with those committed by Hamas and the Taliban. She now occupies an influential position as the whip of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and attempts to weaken the party’s progressive wing have been trained on Omar and Reps. Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri. A loss by any of the three would undermine recent electoral gains that have pushed the Democratic party left, even as former Austin City Council Member Greg Casar’s win in his Texas Democratic primary is poised to expand the Squad’s numbers. And in 2020, despite outraising Omar’s second-quarter haul sevenfold, with $3.2 million, and beating her two-to-one in contributions over $200, Melton-Meaux lost by nearly 20 points.

Samuels is better known in Minneapolis than Melton-Meaux, having long advocated against gun violence in the city and serving as the chair of the City Council’s public safety committee. In 2013, when Samuels ran unsuccessfully for mayor, former Minneapolis Police Chief Tim Dolan co-chaired his campaign, and Samuels took responsibility for helping hire Dolan’s predecessor, former MPD Chief Janeé Harteau. But his relationship with policing reached a new level in 2020, giving him added public exposure as national attention turned toward Minneapolis’s protester-led ballot initiative last year to replace the city’s police department with a Department of Public Safety.

That fall, Samuels and his wife were part of a group of local political and business leaders who worked with police and the mayor to persuade the City Council not to cut the police budget, the Minnesota Reformer reported. After the council voted unanimously that December to cut 4 percent of MPD’s budget, Sondra Samuels wrote an email to the group: “I read that the Mayor lauded the budget. Help?? I really don’t get how we are better off now or next year.”

“Rather than support Rep. Omar’s irresponsible call to defund the Minneapolis Police Department,” Samuels told The Intercept, “we lobbied City Council members for more resources and better training of police officers, so residents and visitors feel safe, secure, and respected in our city at all times.”

Last year, as Frey sought reelection while fighting the ballot measure, Samuels helped lead the public campaign against it — along with the police, the local chamber of commerce, and local Republicans. Several top Democrats opposed the measure but did not campaign publicly against it.

So far, Samuels has yet to release specific policy platforms of his own. In response to questions about his policy positions, Samuels told The Intercept that while he and Omar “share similar views on many issues … this moment calls for a different approach to leadership — one that seeks to build a united coalition able to achieve greater progress for everyone. Some politicians go to Washington to make a point. I want to go to D.C. to make a difference.” Samuels said he has “unwavering support for a woman’s right to choose” and would continue to support abortion rights and LGBTQ+ rights in Congress. Samuels did not say whether he supported continued U.S. funding of Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen but said he supports the Biden administration’s efforts to achieve a permanent cease-fire and negotiated settlement.

Sure enough, Samuels is a known and influential figure in various contexts throughout the city.

“Gone are the days where America can be the world’s sheriff,” Samuels said when asked about whether he supports increasing U.S. military funding to Israel. But he added that the U.S. should support “global partners” with both military and humanitarian relief when necessary, “including with our longtime friend and ally, Israel.”

On April 19, Samuels will hold a fundraiser in Minneapolis for his House campaign, headlined by developers, lobbyists, and business leaders, including at least one Republican operative and donor, Andy Brehm; Jonathan Weinhagen, the president and CEO of the Minneapolis Regional Chamber of Commerce; Steve Cramer, the president and CEO of the MPLS Downtown Council, an organization of more than 450 Minneapolis businesses; a former U.S. ambassador to Morocco; and a former City Council president.

“My wife and I are lifelong Democrats,” Samuels told The Intercept. “Thankfully, our work in North Minneapolis has inspired support across the political spectrum, and we’re proud to have it.” And sure enough, Samuels is a known and influential figure in various contexts throughout the city.

In October 2014, Minneapolis police received a call from someone who asked them to investigate a “Black male wearing a black hat” selling hot dogs outside the offices of Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, a local nonprofit. An officer said the call came from Samuels, who had served on the Minneapolis City Council since 2003 and was at the time a candidate for the school board. While Samuels later said he had been concerned about illegal food sales, police who responded asked representatives of the nonprofit if they were selling the dogs to “elicit a vote.” (The organization was holding a get-out-the-vote drive.)

This March, when a Facebook user asked Samuels about the “hotdog incident,” the candidate wrote:

there were multiple times when barbecue grills were set up on the sidewalk on West Broadway, selling barbecued meat. It’s a fire Hazzard and a safety Hazzard. I personally intervened several times to stop this dangerous and disorderly commerce. When I drove by and saw the smoke once again, I called the police. Once I discovered the mistake, I spun my car around from St. Paul, back to Broadway, to apologize and set things straight. But since it was campaign season, and certain leaders were aligned with my opponent, my apology was rejected and the incident was used to try to discredit me. It didn’t work.

An ordained minister and nonprofit CEO, Samuels ran an unsuccessful campaign for Minneapolis mayor in 2013 and was elected the following year to the Minneapolis school board; he served one four-year term. Dark-money groups linked to charter school advocates and funded by right-wing donors — including Michael Bloomberg and the late Purdue co-owner Jonathan Sackler — spent a quarter of a million dollars to attack an incumbent and boost Samuels and another candidate in the 2014 school board race. Samuels distanced himself from the groups at the time. When asked about the incident, he told The Intercept that “unfortunately, independent groups can spend unlimited amounts of money on our elections” without the consent or involvement of candidates. “I believe it is of paramount importance that we extensively reform the role of money in our election system and safeguard the sacred right to vote as we work to preserve our democracy.” In 2013, the Star Tribune reported that Samuels said he “got an envelope … with a couple grand” at a union fundraiser in honor of City Council members who had voted for a Vikings football stadium. Asked about the comment, Samuels said he was proud of his support from labor.

In 2012, Samuels wrote a Star Tribune op-ed in which he recounted a night that “switched from a gritty urban tragedy to a story of tech magic and reclamation” when police retrieved his iPhone after a young man he had reprimanded for urinating in public stole it.

In August 2020, Samuels and his wife supervised a bike ride for a group of children in their neighborhood. When they stopped at a nearby park and the children put their feet in the water, a 6-year-old was swept away and drowned. A year later, Sondra Samuels agreed to a $301,000 wrongful death settlement, which her insurance company paid to the child’s family.

On March 14, Samuels replied to a tweet by a woman who canvasses part time for Omar’s campaign about the incident, writing, “Can’t swim but can govern.” Later that night he deleted the tweet and apologized. Samuels wrote that he “became defensive about a remark from my opponent’s staffer about the most devastating day in our lives. Twitter isn’t the medium for that conversation & I capably showed why. I’m sorry.”

In the year after Samuels and his fellow petitioners sued the city, a judge ordered Minneapolis to hire 190 more cops by the end of the coming June. An appeals court reversed the decision on March 14, and now the petitioners have a pending appeal to the state Supreme Court. Late last month, the union for the Minneapolis Police Department filed a motion to submit an amicus brief in support of Samuels, his wife, and the six other petitioners.

On March 8, less than a week before the appeals court decision, Samuels launched his House campaign under the theme of “public safety” with endorsements from Brian Melendez, a former state Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party chair, and Medaria Arradondo, a former MPD chief who faced ethics complaints from 18 people last year — including the City Council president — after he held a news conference criticizing the MPD replacement ballot measure. The complaint alleged that Arradondo had violated department policies by campaigning while wearing a uniform, displaying the MPD logo, and streaming the conference on the MPD Facebook page. (The ethics board dismissed the complaint after Frey reprimanded him in a letter, saying employees can’t be disciplined twice for the same thing.)

While Samuels has framed his campaign as a referendum on policing and public safety in Minneapolis, federal legislators have little direct control over local policing. And although he has positioned himself to Omar’s right, he said he supports the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which Omar supported and which failed to advance last session, as well as her new bill to limit the use of no-knock warrants.

“Like last time, it’s clear that Republicans and corporate Democrats are heavily invested in removing one of the most principled, effective advocates of the working class from Congress. And like last time, they’ll spend a small fortune and fail,” Isaiah Baehr-Breen, a spokesperson for Omar, said in a statement to The Intercept. “The Congresswoman is focused on delivering real resources to her district, like the $17 million in community funding she recently secured   – not divisive rhetoric. And she’s focused on mobilizing the 5th to help re-elect statewide leaders like Keith Ellison – not on raising money from people who want to defeat them.”

At his campaign launch, Samuels criticized Omar’s support for the failed measure to replace the MPD, saying she “demonstrated she’s out of touch with the residents of Minneapolis in the last election.” He criticized Omar’s vote against Biden’s infrastructure bill and her support for calls to defund police. Samuels told MinnPost, “I find that our congresswoman is not really capable of dealing with nuanced realities.”

Update: April 15, 2022, 3:50 p.m. ET

This story has been updated to include a comment from a spokesperson for Rep. Ilhan Omar.

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Somewhere in the Missouri Office of Administration building, someone has been scrubbing a state senator’s Wikipedia page. Democrat Steven Roberts, who represents Missouri’s 5th Senate District, is a member of the Missouri Air National Guard, a commissioned U.S. Air Force officer, and the youngest Black state senator in state history. He has also been accused by at least two women of sexual assault. But if you looked at his Wikipedia page during February, you might not know that. An unidentified editor, logging on from an IP address located in the Office of Administration building, repeatedly stripped the allegations from Roberts’s page.

Roberts — who has reportedly been mulling a primary challenge against Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo. — was first elected to the state House of Representatives in November 2016. That September, Cora Faith Walker, another Democratic candidate for state House, wrote a letter to Missouri House Speaker Todd Richardson in which she accused Roberts of raping her. She told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the pair had met for drinks at a St. Louis apartment several weeks after winning their respective primary elections, and Walker woke up there the next morning, remembering nothing after her second glass of wine. In the letter to Richardson, Walker said she had reported the incident to the police. After an investigation based on Walker’s police report, a special prosecutor declined to charge Roberts, saying “there simply wasn’t enough credible evidence that sexual relations between these two people were anything but consensual.”

Roberts, who denied Walker’s allegation, filed a civil suit against her for defamation before the election but later dropped the case. On March 11, 2022, Walker died at age 37. The cause of her death has not been reported. Reached by The Intercept, Walker’s family declined to comment, and a spokesperson said they would not respond to matters related to the allegation.

“I specifically authorize you to name me and to tell people about this letter,” Walker wrote in her 2016 letter to Richardson. “As you are aware, I am not the first woman to accuse Mr. Roberts of sexual assault.”

In April 2015, a law school student had accused Roberts, then an assistant prosecutor at the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office, of touching her and trying to put his hands inside her pants and underwear after she rebuffed an advance from him at a bar. The woman reported the incident to police, and Roberts was arrested on “suspicion of second-degree sodomy” and suspended from his job, according to the Post-Dispatch, but he was never charged. That October, Roberts was fired from the circuit attorney’s office for “performance issues.” He filed to run for the state House in December 2015.

Less than a year later, after Walker accused him of rape, the first accuser spoke anonymously to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about her allegation and said what happened to Walker “was preventable” and “made me feel I should have done more.”

But all of that information was deleted from Roberts’s Wikipedia page on February 7. Edit history for the page shows that one user, identified only by an IP address at the Office of Administration building — on the grounds of the state Capitol, across the street from the Senate building — made four edits that day. The changes removed an entire section titled “Sexual Assault Allegations” and its subheadings, as well as a section on Robert’s firing from the circuit attorney’s office, all of which cited the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. One edit removed background information on Roberts’s family history that linked to his state Senate bio. The user tagged the cuts as “false allegations,” “libelous statements,” and “articles linked to partisan websites and false narratives.”

On February 28, another account, MOfacts, whose account information does not include an IP address, deleted the same sections. MOfacts explained the deletion by saying, “Sources behind paywall and unable to be verified. Please use public sources for verification.”

Another user questioned the deletions, noting that MOfacts added “a bunch of favorable information” to Roberts’s page on February 14 and later deleted “information on the Wiki page for Steve Roberts that was not favorable (multiple sexual assault allegations).” MOfacts and the other editor went back and forth, undoing and reinstating each other’s revisions. A third user who reversed an MOfacts edit categorized it as “unexplained content removal.” On March 4, a user wrote in a comment on the “Rape allegations” section: “MOFacts continues to edit this section and this section alone, creating their account a few weeks ago to fluff up this politician’s page, repeatedly delete the sexual assault allegation section without cause. … I am very concerned that they have a conflict of interest due to their behavior.”

On March 13, another user protected the page so that only users with a certain level of access could edit it, and the information has not been taken back down since. The user “MOfacts” appears to no longer exist.

Ryan Hawkins, a spokesperson for Roberts, said he had no knowledge of who made the changes to the state senator’s page. “As you are aware, Wikipedia is an unregulated, unedited, largely unsourced mass of information that is often inaccurate because anyone can post almost anything,” Hawkins wrote in a statement to The Intercept. He added that Roberts’s term at the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office “ended because individuals in a supervisory role objected to the establishment of a campaign committee set up to run for Circuit Attorney against the incumbent’s favored successor.” Hawkins did not address Walker’s allegations, writing only that the state senator “sends his condolences to her family on her tragic and untimely passing.”

Asked about whether Roberts plans to primary Bush, Hawkins said the state senator was focused on the current legislative session, “his leadership duties as the Democratic Whip and commitment to serving in the US armed forces during this time of crisis.”

The deadline to file in the Missouri primary is March 29. In the meantime, Roberts is pushing redistricting maps in the state Senate that would change the congressional district’s boundaries to move it further northwest and increase its minority population.

Roberts says the map would ensure a stronger majority-minority district. His critics, including the state GOP leader, have said the map would shift Bush voters out and that his position on redistricting in MO-1 is part of his plan to run for Congress. Roberts has denied this aim, and according to Hawkins, Roberts’s priorities “and that of the Black Caucus, are to pass a congressional redistricting bill that ensures a strong majority-minority district in MO-1” as well as to preserve women’s right to control health care decisions, freeze property tax rates for seniors, and defend the right to vote. “Senator Roberts is urging all of his colleagues, especially the GOP, to finally do their duty by passing a fair Map that protects the congressional representation for all Missouri voters, including African Americans.”

When Bush beat the two-decade incumbent Rep. William Lacy Clay in 2020, her election added a leader from 2014 protests in Ferguson to the House’s growing progressive Squad. Now she is facing at least two challengers in her first primary as an incumbent, and if Roberts files, she’ll face a third.

Roberts would be the highest-profile candidate yet to challenge Bush. His father, also named Steven Roberts, is a St. Louis developer and former alderman. Elected to the state Senate in 2020 after two terms in the state House, the younger Roberts is currently the minority whip for the Democratic caucus. Missouri state senators are limited to two four-year terms, and Roberts’s first term continues through 2025.

After Roberts was reelected to the state House in November 2018, his colleagues elected him as chair of the Missouri Black Legislative Caucus. Walker left the caucus, and eight months later, she resigned from the state House to work as director of policy for the St. Louis County Executive.

As of Monday, Roberts’s Wikipedia page does list the alleged assaults. Its most recent edit, made by a different user than the ones involved in the prior editing battle, says that the latest editor attempted to present the sections on the allegations against Roberts from a neutral point of view. This included removing “inappropriate headings and language,” updating sources, and removing unnecessary detail.

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When voters arrived at their polling place on March 1 in Azle, Texas, a small city outside of Fort Worth, they saw a framed, printed sign with standard voting instructions: no phones, printed materials allowed. Taped to it was another handwritten sign that read: “Sorry — No Democrat voting (not staffed).”

From my father’s precinct in Texas: pic.twitter.com/xuEnkd0lAD

— April Underwood (@aunder) March 1, 2022

More than 170 election workers in the county dropped out at the last minute, Tarrant County Democratic Party Chair Allison Campolo told The Intercept. The party did not know how many voters had been stopped from voting at the county’s Azle location that day. Across the state, Campolo said, both parties had trouble finding election workers on primary day. But Tarrant County experienced “an extreme number of last minute drop offs of available election judges.”

According to the Texas Tribune, more than a dozen polling locations in Tarrant County were closed for several hours due to staffing shortages among election judges. Texas is one of several states — also including Missouri, Maryland, and Colorado — to employ election judges to open and run poll locations, manage poll workers, and settle disputes. Other states call these officials “poll workers” or “election clerks,” but in Texas, where election judges have been used for decades, they’re partisan, and during primary elections, they are appointed by the chair of the county political party holding the primary. Numerous states had issues with recruiting poll workers at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the number of jurisdictions that reported difficulty in finding enough poll workers increased by 5 percent between the 2016 and 2018 elections. But the number of sudden dropouts in Tarrant County this month was unusual, according to Campolo.

Many of the difficulties with recruiting and retaining election workers for this month’s primary stemmed from Texas’s new voting law, known as S.B. 1, Parker County Democratic Party Chair Kay Parr told The Intercept. At least 19 states passed restrictive voting measures in the year after the 2020 election, which Republican officials continue to falsely claim was stolen, but S.B. 1 is one of the nation’s most restrictive. Enacted by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott late last year, the law bans drive-thru voting, implements new ID requirements for mail voting, ends 24-hour voting, and expands the power of poll watchers. It also puts election officials at risk of committing a felony while carrying out their job duties.

S.B. 1 prohibits officials from “soliciting” or distributing mail ballot applications to people who haven’t requested them, meaning that answering questions about filling out a mail ballot or helping voters submit them could now be considered crimes — punishable by up to two years in jail and $10,000 in fines. In the eyes of the election judges, Parr said, the law threatens “legal liability for human error.”

Beyond that, with the elimination of mask mandates in most of the United States — including Texas — working the polls can be hazardous for the temporary staffers, many of whom are elderly or retired, amid the ongoing pandemic. They are often required to work for more than 14 hours on election days, a taxing shift for any worker. The new law only compounds the difficulty, adding considerable risk to a job that requires long hours, entails tedious duties, and pays minimum wage.

Azle sits on the county line between Tarrant and Parker counties, and both counties have their own rules for designating election officials from either party to assist voters. Parker didn’t have issues on primary day, Parr said, but several voters who weren’t able to vote in Tarrant came to the Azle poll site, about a five-minute drive away, on the Parker County side to try to cast their ballots.

Joe Grizzard, an alternate Democratic election judge at the Parker County polling location in Azle, said he had seen a posting prior to primary day saying that the Tarrant County elections office still needed poll workers. And he was worried about the impact the new law would have on election workers.

The county elections office “knew they had problems and they were trying to fix them but they didn’t fix them in time,” said Grizzard, who has been an election judge for five years. “I still have concerns for legal liability for telling someone something wrong or helping someone do something that I’m not authorized to do because of the change in the laws.”

Other aspects of the new Texas law made it harder to vote even before primary day. Last month, Texas election officials reported that thousands of mail ballots across the state were rejected at unprecedented rates because many people did not include the correct ID number on their envelope, as required by the new law. The number had to match the one they used on their voter registration, whether that was a driver’s license number or a partial Social Security number. Harris County, the most populous in the state, rejected 35 percent of ballots received by the mail ballot deadline, Reuters reported, compared to a rejection rate between 5 and 10 percent in recent years. Applications for mail ballots were also rejected at similar rates due to missing or incorrect ID numbers.

The Department of Justice sued Texas over S.B. 1 in November, arguing that the law would “disenfranchise some eligible mail voters based on paperwork errors or omissions immaterial to their qualifications to vote.” The case is expected to conclude before the general election, but the timeline is still in flux. In December, Harris County Elections Administrator Isabel Longoria and Cathy Morgan, a volunteer deputy registrar, filed a complaint in federal court against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Both women — represented by the Harris County Attorney’s Office, outside counsel, and the Brennan Center — argued that the provision that criminalizes helping someone vote by mail criminalizes constitutionally protected speech.

Several weeks before the primary, an appeals court stayed an injunction against the portion of S.B. 1 that criminalizes solicitation of mail ballots. The matter is still pending in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Unless courts reinstate the injunction, the problems are likely to persist through the runoff and the general election in November, said Andrew Garber, a fellow with the Brennan Center’s voting rights and elections program. “We’re going to continue to see mail ballots rejected at high rates because it’s confusing,” he told The Intercept. “People are going to continue to be confused, fill out the wrong form, miss information on the form that could be resolved if the qualified election officials were able to print out public notices and preemptively help people do that.”

Texas’s law was designed “to create this exact disenfranchising outcome,” Garber said, and similar problems are likely to arise in at least 18 other states — including Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Iowa — that joined Texas in passing restrictive new voting laws. “It makes the process of voting harder so that the end result is fewer people can vote.”

The shortage of poll workers has “certainly been made worse in Texas by some of the laws that have been passed,” according to Parr. “Our poll workers have fear of being sued now because of all of the national attention that voting got with the last election and the lies about the voter fraud. It’s harder for us to get poll workers. And that, combined with the lies and Covid, it’s made it much more difficult for us to get the experienced judges that we need for our poll sites for both parties.”

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“I am so very excited to lend my support to my good friend, Congressman Conor Lamb,” Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said in a video endorsing the Pennsylvania Democrat four days before the 2020 midterm election.

“Thank you,” Lamb wrote in replies on Twitter and Facebook. “I learned a lot working with you on the coal miners’ benefits. Your commitment to bipartisanship is what got it done. This is an honor.”

Now, as a candidate in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, Lamb’s campaign is striking a different tone. Lamb distanced himself from the West Virginia senator during a campaign event earlier this month and told Democratic voters in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, that he voted for President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill and supports ending the filibuster but that the party is “two votes away on that long list of priorities.” He did not mention them by name, but the two votes he referenced are Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz.

I voted for Build Back Better once in the House, & would absolutely vote for it again in the Senate.

The only question in this #PASen primary is who you think can beat the Republicans to get there.

I’ve done that before, too. https://t.co/G2jd5b4QBE

— Conor Lamb (@ConorLambPA) December 19, 2021

In a January fundraising email, Lamb made a similar comment, blaming “Senate Republicans and two Democrats” for using the filibuster to block voting rights legislation, which he said he would work to advance in the Senate. On Tuesday, Lamb criticized Manchin for voting with Senate Republicans to block the Women’s Health Protection Act. “Yesterday the Senate GOP & Sen. Manchin blocked the Women’s Health Protection Act,” he tweeted. “I voted for it in the House & I’ll be one more vote in the Senate to make it law, guaranteeing the right to choose no matter what the court does.”

Lamb’s campaign said it has not sought Manchin’s endorsement this cycle and does not expect him to endorse. Manchin’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Last March, Lamb still considered Manchin a strong ally. Both are Democrats representing red areas; former President Donald Trump had won Lamb’s House district by 20 points in 2016. As Lamb was openly mulling a bid for Senate, he held a virtual fundraiser with Manchin as a special guest, with top-tier tickets selling for $2,900. And after he narrowly won reelection in 2020 and blamed a near loss on posturing by his progressive colleagues, Lamb praised Manchin’s work on an alternative Covid-19 relief bill that December, supported by the House Problem Solvers Caucus, that left out an additional round of stimulus checks. “Thanks @Sen_JoeManchin & others for not giving up on a bipartisan breakthrough,” Lamb wrote in a tweet. Lamb and Manchin worked together in 2018 on benefits for coal miners with United Mine Workers of America, and each received endorsements from the group that year. Their campaigns also use the same D.C.-based fundraising firm, Fulkerson Kennedy & Company, whose clients include the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Senate Majority PAC, and Sinema’s campaign.

Lamb’s campaign told The Intercept his “working relationship” with Manchin was based on similarities in their districts. “Conor built a working relationship with Senator Manchin while representing a district that bordered West Virginia, driven by the need to protect the pensions and health care of coal miners in both states,” campaign spokesperson Abby Nassif-Murphy said. “Conor voted for every round of checks that went out, and supported [Manchin’s 2020 Covid-19 bill] because it was the most he could get for his constituents while Democrats did not control the Senate. That’s what a real legislator does.”

Lamb’s competitors, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, are vying for support from more progressive voters in major cities and suburbs of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Pennsylvania’s Senate race is poised to be the most expensive in the country this year. Lamb’s new approach follows a poor showing in fundraising compared to his top competitor. Lamb’s campaign has raised just under $4 million so far; Fetterman has raised just under $12 million; and Kenyatta has raised $1.5 million. (Of the $4 million Lamb has raised, 17 percent is only available for the general election because it comes from maxed-out wealthy donors. Less than 1 percent of Fetterman’s funds are reserved for the general election, as are 2 percent of Kenyatta’s funds.)

When he launched his campaign last summer, Lamb set himself apart from Trump and the votes he took in line with the former president during his first session in Congress, on issues from the border wall to the war in Iraq. “The other side denies reality and worships Trump,” Lamb said in his campaign launch video. “They’re making it harder to vote, and lying about our elections.”

Nassif-Murphy said Lamb’s comments in Jenkintown were “nothing new.” “Conor has been clear throughout this race about his disagreements with Senators Manchin and Sinema on several major issues, including Build Back Better, voting rights, and the filibuster, among others. And by electing Conor to the Senate — the only candidate in this race who’s ever beaten a Republican — we can help replace those votes and get closer to eliminating the filibuster and passing our priorities.”

After Lamb won a 2018 special election in Trump country, in a district close in proximity and demographics to Manchin’s state of West Virginia, mainstream Democrats compared him to the senator and elevated both politicians as the kind the party needed to run if they wanted to survive.

“If you want to succeed in taking back the Congress, we have to understand that there’s got to be more than just outright, 100 percent, full-fledged progressives in the Democratic Party. We’ve got to have moderate Democrats. We even got to have room for some conservative Democrats,” former Pennsylvania governor and former Democratic National Committee Chair Ed Rendell told ABC the day after the 2018 election. “I would suggest to you that Conor campaigned like a conservative Democrat, like a [West Virginia Sen.] Joe Manchin or a [Indiana Sen.] Joe Donnelly or a [North Dakota Sen.] Heidi Heitkamp.”

Lamb has lauded Manchin’s style of “bipartisanship” and “not giving up” in the face of opposition from his Democratic colleagues. The two share corporate donors and a pattern of voting on legislation against the party’s interests. During his last two sessions in Congress, Manchin voted against the party more than a quarter of the time, according to data compiled by ProPublica. Last session, only Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., voted against the party more than Manchin did. From 2017 to 2019, Manchin voted against Democrats more than any other senator in the party.

After taking office, Lamb voted against the party the sixth most of any Democrat. Members who voted against the party more than Lamb did included then-Reps. Sinema; Henry Cuellar, D-Texas; Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J.; Collin Peterson, D-Minn.; and Jim Costa, D-Calif. During his second session in Congress, Lamb voted against the party the ninth most of any other Democratic representative.

Lamb was one of only three Democrats in the House who voted in 2018 to make parts of Trump tax cuts, including cuts for wealthy individuals, permanent. Manchin voted against the 2017 tax cuts and has urged Democrats to prioritize rolling them back as part of any social spending package, but opposed Biden’s proposal to raise the corporate tax rate after Trump lowered it. Both members opposed the HEROES Act that addressed economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

Earlier this month, James Carville, the pundit and Democratic strategist whose passion is battering the progressive wing of the party, promoted the launch of a new super PAC backing Lamb. The group, Penn Progress, so far has two contributions: $25,000 from the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers Political Action League; and $10,000 from Stephen Cozen, founder of the union-busting law firm Cozen O’Connor and a major supporter of Biden’s 2020 campaign.

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In 2020, New Hampshire Republicans took the state by surprise. Even as the majority of voters in New Hampshire cast their ballots for Joe Biden to become president, Republicans flipped both chambers in the statehouse, gaining a trifecta in the state. New Hampshire was the only state legislature that flipped party control — and the two chambers were the only chambers in the country that went from blue to red. Donald Trump was pushing the lie that the elections in New Hampshire — and elsewhere — were the subject of “massive Election Fraud.” And Republicans in the state were actually in a position to do something about it.

Over the past year, Republicans in New Hampshire passed two bills designed to suppress votes and sow doubt in elections, and introduced at least two dozen others. The first makes it easier to purge voters based on third-party information related to change of residence. (New Hampshire allows voters to register on Election Day, so voter purges are more likely to increase wait times at the polls than stop someone from voting altogether.) The other bill changes the process for people who want to register to vote on Election Day to have their picture taken if they don’t have a photo ID, but only slightly tweaks the process for taking the photo, which was already required.

While New Hampshire has same-day voter registration and passed another law last year that made it easier for incarcerated people to vote, it offers few of the expansive voting options offered in 35 states, like no-excuse absentee voting or all-mail elections. And it’s one of six states that are exempt from the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, a law that makes it easier for people to vote and limits parameters for purging voters. As a result, Republicans are coming up with more creative ways to make the process more difficult, and several bills have raised concerns among Democrats and voting rights advocates in the state.

Among those are measures that would eliminate ballot-counting machines and require election workers to count all ballots by hand; make it harder to register to vote on Election Day; and make it easier for citizens to sue election officials, according to the Brennan Center for Justice’s latest roundup of restrictive voting laws. Other Republican bills would allow for the recall of elected officials, make it easier for election observers to intimidate voters, and require audits of the 2020 election.

“New Hampshire in many ways has become sort of the Texas-lite,” said Democratic state Sen. Becky Whitley. “They’re weaponizing blatant lies about voter fraud to justify the bills. … The national narratives have just really invaded the statehouse.”

“New Hampshire in many ways has become sort of the Texas-lite.”

The laws have the potential to make a significant impact on the midterms later this year and continue to polarize what has become an increasingly partisan legislature. New Hampshire’s elections are notoriously tight, owing to the state’s unusual combination of a small statewide population, a large college population, and an affinity for libertarian ideals. Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., beat the incumbent, Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte, by just over 1,000 votes in 2016. Flipping just 300 votes in 2020 would have changed the makeup of the state Senate. Some of the most energized voters in the state — outside of its burgeoning population of liberal-leaning college students — believe that the 2020 election was rigged.

In the last 45 years, “New Hampshire has had 44 elections that ended in a tie or in a one-vote victory,” one of the proposed bills, S.B. 418, reads, pointing to the outsized influence that a small number of votes can have in New Hampshire. “On average, that is almost once per year. This clearly proves that just one improperly cast vote can adversely influence an election each year.”

What’s happening now is almost a replay of 2016, except Republicans in 2020 are more cavalier, trying whatever they can to chip away at voting rights. Just days before his election to the governor’s office in 2016, Chris Sununu claimed in a radio interview that Democrats were using the state’s Election Day registration law to commit voter fraud. “The Democrats are very sly. … [In New Hampshire] we have same-day voter registration, and to be honest, when Massachusetts elections are not very close, they’re busing them in all over the place,” Sununu said.

Less than a month later, after Sununu beat Democratic candidate Colin Van Ostern and Trump lost to Hillary Clinton by just under 3,000 votes, Trump repeated the claim on Twitter. “Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California – so why isn’t the media reporting on this? Serious bias – big problem!” He later claimed he and Ayotte would have won if Democrats had not bused people in from out of state to vote. Nevertheless, Sununu’s win that year gave the GOP a trifecta for the first time since 2004. When Trump launched his short-lived Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity the following year, New Hampshire was its second stop. New Hampshire’s attorney general investigated Trump’s claims and found no pattern of widespread voting fraud.

From 2017 to 2018, Republicans targeted the voting rights of college students. They passed a proof of residency law, S.B. 3, and another law required people to establish residency if they vote in New Hampshire — by getting a driver’s license or registering their car. Advocates unsuccessfully challenged the law in court, and Republicans tweaked it slightly after the state Supreme Court issued an advisory opinion that the bill was unconstitutional because it discouraged some people from voting.

Democrats briefly took back control of the state Senate and House in 2018. During much of that time, the state Democratic Party was fighting the 2017 proof of residency law in court. Lucas Meyer, director of the New Hampshire voting advocacy group 603 Forward, testified against the bill in 2018, when he was president of the New Hampshire Young Democrats and sat on the state party’s board. Meyer was also previously a voting rights lobbyist. His group fought the residency bill before it passed, and advocates have been actively fighting similar Republican proposals for years.

The state Supreme Court blocked S.B. 3 in July. New Hampshire spent $4.17 million in attorneys’ fees to defend two suits related to the 2017 law, a large amount of money for a small state. But the frenzy of obsession with Trump’s “big lie,” Meyer said, has made their work more difficult. Republican efforts to create more hurdles are “more in the spotlight in New Hampshire. But this has been an ongoing battle for a while.”

Former Vice President Mike Pence, right, waves as New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu introduces him at the annual Hillsborough County NH GOP Lincoln-Reagan Dinner in Manchester, N.H., on June 3, 2021.

Photo: Elise Amendola/AP

Some of the more extreme bills — like one that would require that the public be allowed to observe absentee ballot counts — aren’t expected to pass or have been marked as “inexpedient to legislate.” And Republicans in the state legislature let a number of voter suppression bills die last year, including a bill that would have stopped people from registering to vote on Election Day. The bill would have risked the state’s exemption to the National Voter Registration Act but didn’t get past committee and was voted earlier this month as inexpedient to legislate. Then Republicans introduced another bill that would make the process harder by forcing people who register on Election Day to fill out a provisional ballot, creating delays and extra work for election workers, and pose civil liberties concerns and a potential constitutional violation.

One bill that advocates are worried has a chance of passing, S.B. 418, would give voters whose identity or residence can’t be verified on Election Day an affidavit ballot, meaning they would get a ballot of another color at the polling place, receive a serial number, and have to return a packet of information by a certain date in order to submit their vote. Their names would be kept on a list of people who voted by affidavit ballot, Meyer said, and the bill could potentially impact thousands of voters if they don’t submit their information correctly.

“S.B. 418 is particularly dangerous,” Meyer said. “The bill is rooted in this conspiracy that there’s voter fraud and we need to do something about it. That’s not the case.” And the bill should be concerning to Republicans because it “weakens one of the most fundamental rights of the election process, which is the privacy of the ballot, by adding serial numbers and attaching names to ballots,” Meyer said. “If I’m a Republican or a libertarian, [you don’t want] big government over your shoulder while you’re casting your vote. … I think that makes people very uncomfortable in New Hampshire, and it should.”

The bill text cites the case of a woman who voted in two cities in the 2016 general election “and only paid a $500 fine; hardly a deterrent.” In the same election, the text continues, the attorney general’s office “was unable to verify the identity of 66 domicile affidavit voters and 164 qualified affidavit voters. To turn a blind eye to this level of uncertainty does a grave disservice to both the electoral process of the state of New Hampshire and its citizens. Something must be done, immediately.”

“These bills are building on the same narrative that led to the insurrection in the Capitol.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire testified against the bill in January and urged state senators to deem it inexpedient to legislate. “Election laws are becoming increasingly more partisan, and troublingly more partisan,” ACLU-NH Senior Staff Attorney Henry Klementowicz told The Intercept.

It’s also unlikely that Republicans will pass a Democratic bill to expand no-excuse absentee voting, which New Hampshire had in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic and helped produce record turnout — not just for Democrats, but for Republicans and Independents too. Democrats have tried, and failed so far, to build on that. “We’ve just been stymied at every turn,” Whitley, the state senator, said. And the idea that Republicans and Democrats can still agree on major issues in New Hampshire is moving further out of reach with each voter suppression bill.

“These bills are building on the same narrative that led to the insurrection in the Capitol,” Whitley said. “It’s this sort of win-at-all-costs view of politics that is incredibly corrosive to democracy. Trying to work across the aisle to get things done has really been eroded.”

Many of the Republican proposals center around adding hurdles to the same-day registration process, confusing voters about who is considered a New Hampshire resident, and eroding the base of college voters in the state.

One confusing Republican proposal could pose another risk to the state losing its exemption from the National Voter Registration Act or “motor voter” law, which registers people to vote when they interact with certain agencies like the Department of Motor Vehicles. New Hampshire got around that requirement by offering same-day voter registration.

Republicans “know when more people vote, it’s not necessarily good for them.”

“It’s possible that this would be enough to shift away from the intent of same-day voter registration [such] that the Department of Justice could rule to have us engage, and then we would become a motor voter state,” Meyer said. “The fact that Republicans are threatening that status is confusing to say the least.”

“It’s totally a solution in search of a problem,” Meyer said. Republicans’ concerns are “not actually about voter fraud. It’s about picking who gets to vote and who doesn’t get to vote. And they know when more people vote, it’s not necessarily good for them.”

Earlier efforts to suppress the vote in New Hampshire were more explicit, Meyer said, and targeted college students in particular. In 2011, then Republican House Speaker Bill O’Brien said he wanted to “tighten up the definition of a New Hampshire resident” and stem the number of college students who register to vote on Election Day. “They are kids voting liberal, voting their feelings, with no life experience,” O’Brien said.

“That was a little refreshing,” Meyer said. “Because at least they were admitting it. They weren’t trying to hide it” by creating bills that rely on confusing voters in order to work. “But that has been the playbook for New Hampshire Republicans for the past two decades, of how do they keep tinkering with our elections, moving the goal posts, make same-day registration more complicated.”

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While the Senate debated the filibuster Wednesday, Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., stood on the steps of the Capitol with a group of activists holding a banner that read “Hunger Strike 4 Democracy.” The changes at issue inside the building were the Democrats’ best shot at passing voting rights reform, which could only squeak by with a simple majority. Outside the building, Bowman and the activists read the text of 33 voter suppression bills that passed in 19 states over the last year. In the same period, the Democrat-controlled Congress took up the party’s voting rights proposals five times, failing to pass them with each attempt.

By Thursday morning, when Capitol Police arrested Bowman and at least 20 other protesters, the reform’s prospects were once again dead. While Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., said they supported passing voting rights legislation in theory, neither wanted to change filibuster rules to do so. The rules change failed Wednesday evening 52-48.

We’re standing outside the Senate to hold them accountable for our voting rights by reading all 33 bills that are restricting voting rights across the country https://t.co/JdTKmXIRE0

— Jamaal Bowman (@JamaalBowmanNY) January 19, 2022

The failure to pass the reform represented a victory for conservative lobby groups, which have spent at least $300,000 fighting efforts to change the filibuster since last January and millions more on general advocacy against legislation to expand voting rights.

Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation, led the fight against changing Senate filibuster rules while it helped write Republican voter suppression bills in numerous states, including Texas, which passed some of the nation’s strictest voting measures in September.

The Texas bill bans drive-through voting, applies new ID requirements for casting mail-in ballots, ends 24-hour voting, and expands the power of poll watchers. Heritage Action’s executive director, Jessica Anderson, told donors last year that the group wrote at least 19 provisions in the Texas law. The group has lobbied on similar legislation in at least seven other states and is poised to continue that work this year — it hired a new director for state lobbying earlier this month.

Heritage Action has worked on several such bills in at least seven other states, including Arizona, Michigan, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, and Wisconsin. (Democratic governors in Michigan and Wisconsin vetoed the bulk of Republican voter suppression bills passed last year.) Last March, the group launched a $10 million campaign targeting those states with the goal to “save our elections” and work closely with state legislators and governors “to help them adopt election law reform.”

Meanwhile, the Koch-aligned Americans for Prosperity lobbied against the “For the People Act,” which would make it easier to vote, and drove a campaign to pressure Manchin to block changes to the filibuster that would allow his party to pass voting rights reform. On Wednesday night, those efforts succeeded. Manchin’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Another coalition group, Conservatives for Property Rights, spent at least $100,000 since last April lobbying against filibuster reform.

Executive Director James Edwards told The Intercept that Conservatives for Property Rights “hasn’t done much more advocacy on protecting the filibuster than signing a coalition letter or two.” Heritage Action helped lead the creation of one such letter, signed by 26 groups in January 2021, which urged senators to “carefully consider the harmful impact that one-party rule in the Senate would have on your constituents” and “reject attempts to eliminate the legislative filibuster.” Conservatives for Property Rights’ “position is that procedural matters are an aspect of property rights,” Edwards said. “These include governmental procedures that ensure republican, due process, and similar guardrails that protect citizens. Separation of powers, essential differences between the two houses of Congress, etc. are part of that.” He said the group did not have any congressional meetings specifically focused on filibuster reform but that a Senate staffer may have raised the issue during another meeting.

A spokesperson for Heritage Action declined to comment on the record. Americans for Prosperity did not respond to a request for comment.

While conservative groups have invested millions in their anti-voting rights push, liberal and Democratic groups spent just under $2 million last year lobbying specifically for changes to the filibuster — and still came up short. Some individual donors are fed up with the lack of progress, and their frustration could jeopardize funding. On Wednesday, as Sinema turned down the rules change, more than 70 donors released a letter saying they would support a primary challenge against her. They asked her to refund their 2018 contributions if she continues to block the party’s agenda.

“Donors are frustrated at the slow action of the Democrats and the Biden-Harris administration to move when it comes to voting rights at the federal level,” said Lela Ali, Georgia state adviser for the Movement Voter Project. “And also [at] the lack of action while we’re witnessing attacks at the state level.”

“The White House needs to treat ending voter suppression, gerrymandering, dark money in politics, and election subversion as [a] top priority,” said Ning Mosberger-Tang, a major Democratic donor in Colorado. “Thirty-three laws have been passed in 19 states to restrict voting access this year. … If we don’t recognize the dire threats we face and protect the very foundation of our democracy, there will be no economic or climate future to speak of. I say that as an investor and an environmentalist.”

“You’re setting up a situation where the vast majority of outcomes involve failure. And the question is, how long do you make sure failure is the central part of our agenda?”

Democrats appear to be out of options. Any hopes that Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, the only Republican to support advancing a voting rights package last year, would vote to change the filibuster and support a compromise bill this session have dissolved. The compromise, backed by Murkowski and Manchin as well as Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., watered down several key provisions from the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and eliminated a requirement that courts consider photo ID laws when evaluating whether a voting practice is discriminatory. And even if the party could eventually get Murkowski on board, the compromise voting rights bill she supports might still not address the major damage already done by voter suppression bills at the state level in time for the 2022 midterms.

“It has been clear since about March of [last] year that we do not have the votes” to pass voting rights legislation, said Dmitri Mehlhorn, an adviser to major Democratic donor Reid Hoffman. “You’re setting up a situation where the vast majority of outcomes involve failure. And the question is, how long do you make sure failure is the central part of our agenda? And that failure is what everybody’s focused on?” If there are better chances for Democrats to address voting rights at the state level, that should be the party’s focus, Mehlhorn said.

With those issues in mind, the New Georgia Project — which mobilized voters last cycle on issues like voting rights, the $15 minimum wage, addressing climate change, and fighting police brutality — has encouraged major Democratic donors frustrated with the party to give instead to nonprofits working on the ground. And some groups focused on state legislative policy are pushing for renewed Democratic investment in state legislatures, where donor dollars can have a much greater impact than they do at the federal level. Democrats spent close to $40 million on the 2020 U.S. Senate race in Maine, for example, and Democratic candidate Sara Gideon still lost — with $14.8 million left over. In contrast, it cost significantly less to defend Democratic control of the state Senate after it flipped blue in 2019, said Simone Leiro, vice president of communications for Future Now, a strategy firm that focuses on state legislatures. The States Project, a Future Now initiative, “invested just $160,000 to be a top contributor to successfully defend the Maine Senate majority,” Leiro said. “We need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, investing everywhere it matters, instead of treating state legislatures as an afterthought.”

“We don’t have a demoralized or defeatist attitude,” said Nsé Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project. “What we’re saying is, why don’t you put that into this 501(c)(3)?” As frustration grows among the Democratic Party’s base, nonprofits that work with voters on the ground, support state legislative efforts to protect voters and expand their rights, and focus on less expensive statewide races could do a lot if donors gave them the opportunity, Ufot said. “If it’s every third dollar that you give to a candidate, you give a dollar to a movement organization, we got traction with that messaging.”

“There is no path forward on the Biden administration’s policy priorities if we cannot secure the right to vote,” Ufot said. “We don’t exist to elect Democrats. … We exist to win things for ourselves and our families.” And without serious conversations about where the party is failing its voters, “it’s going to slap us all in the face.”

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“Government spending is a HUGE problem,” the conservative video site PragerU tweeted in September 2019. “We must reinvest in Americans by giving them a hand up, not handouts,” the group wrote in another tweet that November with a video of then-Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson discussing rehabilitation for incarcerated people titled, “Americans Need A Hand Up, Not Handouts.”

But last year, right-wing groups that have long opposed the concept of increased government spending on “handouts” were the recipients of more than $1.7 million in Paycheck Protection Program loans while seeing significant increases in contributions or net assets, according to new research from the government watchdog group Accountable.US. Last April, the Small Business Administration launched the $349 billion emergency loan program to help small businesses struggling at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

PPP loans to Prager University Foundation, the Ayn Rand Institute, and Americans for Tax Reform Foundation were all made public last summer. But recently released 990 forms for 2020 show that each groups saw significant increases in contributions or net revenue at the same time they received hundreds of thousands of dollars in government subsidies.

“Right-wing groups that wave their finger at federal relief spending for local governments and working families never seem to mind when it benefits them,” Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, said in a statement. “The same people who’ve made careers out of bashing government programs were among the first in line for taxpayer-funded assistance during the COVID-19 crisis — aid intended for struggling mom-and-pop businesses. Their hypocrisy is trumped only by their shamelessness. If these groups were serious about their own purported principles, they’d return that money to the taxpayers.”

At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic last year, not long before Prager University Foundation received a PPP loan, Dennis Prager was already at work downplaying the severity of the virus. Videos posted throughout the pandemic by the conservative video site PragerU, which Prager co-founded in 2011, alleged that there was an “orchestrated attack” against the experimental use of hydroxychloroquine, and that the death toll from Covid-19 has been inflated. The group’s YouTube page has 2.9 million subscribers, and it said its videos were viewed more than 1 billion times in 2019.

Prager University Foundation, which hosts PragerU, received more than $704,000 in PPP loans the same year that it saw a 55 percent, $12.3 million increase in contributions from 2019, and a $15 million increase in net worth over the same period. The nonprofit group, founded in 2009, has long criticized the concept of government spending and “handouts.” In October, PragerU published a video titled “The Bankrupting of America,” which criticized former President Donald Trump’s approval of “a massive increase in government spending” during the pandemic, as well as additional spending by President Joe Biden.

The Ayn Rand Institute received more than $713,000 in PPP loans last spring. The group’s mission is “to create a culture whose guiding principles are reason, rational self-interest, individualism and laissez-faire capitalism—a culture in which individuals are free to pursue their own happiness.”

Last May, ARI posted a blog explaining why it was OK to accept government aid despite Rand’s well-known position against such programs. “The CARES Act has created a moral dilemma for those Americans who value freedom,” they wrote. “The pandemic has cost them their jobs, their savings, their businesses. And they blame a significant part of this loss on the government. But because they oppose government handouts, they worry that accepting CARES money would be a breach of integrity. At the Ayn Rand Institute, we are dedicated to philosophic principle. And because we are, we will take any relief money offered us. We will take it unapologetically, because the principle here is: justice.”

ARI reported $7.6 million in contributions last year, a 19 percent increase from 2019. The group reported $1.2 million in gains last year, up from losses of $790,000 in 2019.

Americans for Tax Reform Foundation, the nonprofit wing of Americans for Tax Reform, received more than $290,000 in PPP relief last spring. The group said the loan helped the company avoid layoffs, writing that it is “a legally and financially separate research and educational 501(c)3” that “was badly hurt by the government shutdown.” ATRF’s net assets increased last year by 36 percent or $4.6 million, cutting its 2019 deficit of $17.5 million to $12.9 million. Americans for Tax Reform and its foundation were founded in 1985 by Republican Grover Norquist at former President Ronald Reagan’s request, to oppose all tax increases.

Despite its stated aims, billions of dollars in Paycheck Protection Program loans went to wealthy business owners and not the mom and pop shops they were designed to support. Several such small businesses were denied outright or received less money than they asked for. The PPP program was also accused of shutting out Black small business owners.

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The federal government loses $600 billion each year because wealthy Americans avoid paying taxes. The top 1 percent of Americans “choose not to pay” more than $160 billion a year in taxes, according to an analysis last month from the Department of the Treasury. Tax enforcement should rely on the IRS, but Congress has routinely cut its budget year after year. The rate of audits of wealthy taxpayers has dropped significantly over the last two decades. “They play by a different set of rules,” President Joe Biden said last month. The ultrawealthy, he said, pay “virtually nothing” in taxes because, with lax reporting requirements, the IRS doesn’t know how much they made.

Democrats are planning to do something about it. The bill working its way through reconciliation process, which Democrats are using to sidestep the filibuster, includes provisions designed to make sure people pay what they owe; target the wealthy Americans Biden has called “tax cheats”; and close the corporate tax loophole. One approach is to change the IRS reporting requirements, which the Treasury Department estimates would raise $460 billion in revenue over the next decade, to force banks to report customer account information.

The moves are facing opposition. Democrats are reportedly poised to back away from the corporate tax hike, saying that they might include it in another bill. And, in recent months, big banks and financial industry lobbying groups have ramped up efforts to fight the reconciliation package’s enhanced IRS reporting requirements. Republicans — prone to asking how social programs like Biden’s Build Back Better agenda will be paid for — are also lobbying against the tax reporting provisions. Twenty Republican attorneys general sent a letter on October 15 to Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen opposing the measures.

“We can pay for these game-changing investments in economic growth by asking the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement. “The fact that Republicans and big banks are bending over backwards to protect wealthy tax cheats who are breaking the law and actively taking advantage of every other American says all you need to know about what’s on the line in this debate over the future of the American middle class.”

Opponents of the reporting requirements argue that forcing banks to disclose gross individual account flows to the IRS would invade individual privacy, put an undue burden on banks, and open up a wealth of data to potential breaches. Groups like the Independent Community Bankers of America, a trade group that represents 5,000 small and mid-sized banks, lobbied against the new reporting requirements by describing the proposal as the “IRS monitoring plan.”

“Banks and their wealthy clients are outright lying about this proposal, claiming that it would give the IRS information on individual transactions,” Senate Finance Committee member Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. said on a press call last week with Finance Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., to push back on what they called a disinformation campaign by bank lobbyists and Republicans. “And many Republicans are backing them up to satisfy their corporate and wealthy donors. It’s no surprise that those who have billions in unpaid taxes on the line would gladly spend millions of dollars lobbying against this proposal, because it would help un-rig the tax system just a little bit.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., talk with reporters on July 21, 2021.

Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Banks began lobbying in earnest directly against the reporting measures earlier this year, when the proposal was rolled out as part of Biden’s American Families Plan, the first iteration of Democrats’ social spending package. The American Bankers Association, the country’s largest bank lobbying group, sent representatives to Capitol Hill to push back on the proposals.

In August, Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, introduced an amendment to stop the IRS from using funds to assess individual account flows and called Biden’s proposal an “outrageous violation of the privacy of American citizens.” He thanked the Independent Community Bankers of America and other groups for backing his amendment, which failed in a 49-50 vote. Crapo has received at least $10,000 this year from banks and industry PACs, including at least two groups fighting the measure.

By September, banking groups’ opposition picked up. The American Bankers Association, along with the Community Bankers Association, the Independent Community Bankers of America, the Mortgage Bankers Association, the Auto Care Association, the National Association of Professional Insurance Agents, and 35 other bank lobbying and interest groups sent a letter to House leadership to express “strong opposition” to the IRS reporting requirement.

Bank of America lobbied last quarter on issues related to “financial account reporting” in the reconciliation package, according to disclosures. JPMorgan Chase issued guidance in recent months instructing bank tellers not to make political statements or explain the reporting proposal to customers who asked or complained about the potential changes; spokesperson Patricia Wexler told The Intercept that the bank did not spend on ads or lobby against the proposed changes and had not urged its customers to contact members of Congress.

In addition to national groups, more than a dozen state banking and industry lobbying groups have also spoken out against the proposal, including a host of state-level chambers of commerce. The Texas Bankers Association said last month it was considering a legal challenge if the reconciliation package includes a “bank surveillance” program. The group launched statewide radio ads against the proposal last month, and spokesperson Carlos Espinosa said it had gotten 40,000 responses so far to its efforts. Several local banks posted the same statement to Facebook last month: “While we typically do not raise issues occurring in Washington with our customers, Congress is considering requiring financial institutions to report detailed information on customer bank accounts to the IRS.”

Banking interest group officials justified their opposition by arguing that the reporting would be too onerous on the banks. “It’s not a function of just adding a few lines on something,” said Paul Merski, an executive vice president at the Independent Community Bankers of America, who claimed new software and staff would be required to implement the changes.

Experts questioned whether the burden for banks would be so high when virtually all banking is computerized. “You’re talking about two pieces of information on a given account. You’re talking about information that the bank already has,” William Gale, an expert on economic policy at the Brookings Institution, told The Intercept. “The objection that this is an intolerable administrative burden seems entirely misplaced to me.”

“If you show me a bank that manages its bookkeeping and accounts by hand, then I will agree that for that bank this would be a burdensome regulation,” Gale said. ”I think it’s much more sort of a reflexive claim on the part of the financial institutions that they don’t want to have to report anything.”

Biden’s proposal is an important piece of efforts to curtail tax evasion, Gale said. “It’s hard to see how policymakers are willing to support the continued high levels of tax evasion that we see.”

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