Shadowy Big Tech Group Raising $100 Million Warchest to Beat Trump – By Allum Bokhari (Breitbart) / Jan 9 2020
A shadowy Silicon Valley group that, largely unnoticed, bankrolled Democrat candidates up and down the country in the 2018 midterms, will spend up to $140 million to topple President Trump in 2020, according to Recode.
The group, called “Mind the Gap,” is led by Stanford law school professor Barbara Field, former Obama staffer Graham Gottlieb, and former Hewlett Foundation president Paul Brest.
The group uses a data-driven approach to target funding to seats where donors’ dollars will have the maximum impact, funded 20 Democrat candidates in 2018, ten of whom won.
Via Recode:
In 2018, the group, which is led by Stanford law school professor Barbara Fried, raised about $500,000 for 20 different Democratic congressional challengers, many of whom were underdogs to win their bids. Ten of them won. Mind the Gap became a hit in Silicon Valley in particular because it asked tech leaders to fund races where it had calculated each dollar would have the greatest marginal impact on Democrats taking back the House, which synced with the industry’s data-driven thinking.
This time around, the group is asking its donors to fund three separate voter-registration programs: the Voter Participation Center (VPC) and the Center for Voter Information (CVI), which in September alone sent out 7.1 million voter registration applications by mail, according to Mind the Gap. The last endorsed group is Everybody Votes (EV), which is training organizers to sign up voters in local communities and has used some of the $35 million that Mind the Gap has already raised to register Democratic voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota. (Future money from the group is going to do the same in Florida, Arizona, and Nevada.)
In this cycle, the group aims to raise over $100 million to fund get-out-the-vote efforts and other political activities:
Mind the Gap told prospective donors last fall that it had already raised at least $35 million in political contributions for voter registration efforts, which is part of a fundraising goal that could stretch to $100 million, according to a memo obtained by Recode.
Mind the Gap is also seeking another estimated $30 million for get-out-the-vote work along with another estimated $10 million for “orphan races” — which means primarily funding candidates for state legislatures that the group sees as wrongly under-funded.
Read the full article at Recode.
Continue to article: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/01/09/shadowy-big-tech-group-raising-100-million-warchest-to-beat-trump/
