Vice President Kamala Harris speaking to supporters in Philadelphia at her final campaign rally, the night before Election Day. She raised vast sums of money from Democratic donors but lost every battleground state. Erin Schaff/The New York Times
By Theodore Schleifer
Reporting from Washington
Nov. 27, 2024
In the weeks after Election Day, one of the biggest donors in the Democratic Party, the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, has considered what would once have been unthinkable for a billionaire who often talks about his patriotism.
Leaving the United States.
Mr. Hoffman, who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on politics over the last few years, has told friends and allies that he is weighing a move overseas, according to three people with knowledge of the talks who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Mr. Hoffman, who declined to comment through a spokeswoman, has helped pay for some of the most aggressive private litigation against Donald J. Trump, and he is worried about retribution from a president who has promised to go after his political opponents, including major Democratic donors.
While Mr. Hoffman’s reaction is dramatic — and it’s unclear how much moving abroad would protect him or his assets from Mr. Trump’s wrath — he is hardly alone in a liberal big-money world still stunned by Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat.
Several major donors or their advisers have privately floated the idea of moving abroad, while many others are squinting apprehensively at the future — or trying to shape it. Some are distributing memos meant to guide the postmortem analysis for Democrats, beginning to kick around ideas for new media companies or imploring their peers not to let liberal fund-raising dry up.
All of that agita and nervous energy congealed last week in the lobby of the Salamander Hotel in Washington, where the typically sedate biannual meeting of the Democracy Alliance, a network of major liberal donors, became a four-day group therapy session.
Dejected Democrats debated what happened at early-morning breakfasts and evening drinks around a firepit on the sidelines of the conference, the first gathering of its type since the election. The lobby was buzzing as Democratic donors, operatives and interlopers caught up with friends.
Still, two attendees said unprompted that the scene felt like a “funeral.”
“People are kind of shellshocked — and trying to figure out what happened,” Steve Silberstein, a software entrepreneur who has donated millions to Democrats over the last decade, said in an interview at the gathering. “People are trying to adjust to reality and plot out a path forward.”
Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on politics over the last few years. Clara Mokri for The New York Times
Defiance from a Soros scion
Relatively few major donors came to the meeting of the Democracy Alliance, which has largely been supplanted by other donor networks. Its gatherings are now most commonly attended by strategists and officials from philanthropic foundations and unions, as opposed to billionaires themselves.Those who do join get lots of attention: Karla Jurvetson, a major progressive donor, dispensed hugs to well-wishers before waiting for a drink at the bar to bring to her meeting with Senator Laphonza Butler of California. Two wealthy donors who are close friends of Ms. Harris, the couple Wayne Jordan and Quinn Delaney, held court at a happy-hour scene.
But the most eyeballs were trained on Alex Soros, a son of George Soros, the liberal world’s most famous donor and a founding backer of the Democracy Alliance. The younger Mr. Soros now controls his 94-year-old father’s philanthropic empire, and his decision to attend was warmly received. On one afternoon he was nestled on an oversize couch, spending 45 minutes talking with Patrick Gaspard, the former head of the Soros family’s foundation.
Mr. Soros, a 39-year-old history Ph.D., acknowledged in a brief interview the widespread worry of some Democrats that the party’s donors might withdraw from politics.
“I’m always concerned about that,” he said. But was he still committed to progressive giving after Mr. Trump’s victory? “Of course,” he said as he walked to a black S.U.V. waiting to whisk him away. “Have I not made that clear?”
Alex Soros, a son of George Soros, the liberal world’s most famous donor and a founding backer of the Democracy Alliance, attended the group’s biannual meeting last week in Washington. Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Mr. Soros also said he would not be intimidated by Mr. Trump, who has verbally attacked the Soros family for years, calling the president-elect and his allies “bullies.”
Behind closed doors, Mr. Soros was a touch more judgmental toward some Democrats. At an evening celebration of his father, Alex Soros suggested that Barack Obama should have listened more to his father. George Soros had a tense relationship with Mr. Obama, but his son called upon the close relationship that Franklin D. Roosevelt had with a finance titan of his day, Bernard Baruch, as the model of how they could have worked together.
“I think if he was taken more seriously, some of the problems that America still deals with today would not be here and we’d be on more stable footing,” Alex Soros said of his father, according to two people with knowledge of his remarks. But he also encouraged Democrats to buck up: “I really think that we should honor my father’s wisdom today by not letting ourselves be defeated.”
Second-guessing of Democratic strategy
While Alex Soros has called Mr. Trump a “super candidate” who could not have been defeated, other Democratic donors are more critical of the party’s decisions.Many of them — joined notably by some Harris campaign officials — have taken aim at Future Forward, the main pro-Democratic super PAC. Others have privately wondered whether there should have been better coordination among major givers. Many conversations at the Democracy Alliance touched on a need for liberals to rebuild their media ecosystem, with the podcaster Joe Rogan often coming up.
Almost every Democratic donor urged patience on “hot takes” about the election until more data about voters emerges next year.
And yet the debate rages — not just at the Salamander but in private Signal chats and email threads.
Tory Gavito, a co-founder of a group called Way to Win that focuses on donors and voters of color, expressed nervousness about Democratic infighting in a memo this month to her donors and allies.
“History has taught me that there will be leaders who will read our analysis and may disagree,” Ms. Gavito said. “Instead of engaging in healthy debate to forge new alliances, they will break off and build on their own.” She added, “This is not a time to allow factions to grow within the anti-MAGA majority.”
Others have a different view. Seth London, an adviser to some of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, wrote a private memo addressed to “Discouraged Democrats” arguing that the party should “begin with a complete rejection of race- and group-based identity politics.”
The sweeping four-page memo, obtained by The New York Times and earlier reported by Politico, was both widely forwarded and a source of controversy in Democratic circles.
“Democrats have increasingly focused on the priorities of core party activists over the common voters we claim to represent,” wrote Mr. London, who has spent the last three weeks working with other Democratic strategists to build what he envisions as a “a party within the party” of media companies, donors and advocacy groups that support charismatic, moderate officeholders.
Dmitri Mehlhorn, another influential adviser to top Democratic donors who formerly helped guide Mr. Hoffman himself, had a darker, more nihilistic takeaway. Two days after Election Day, he wrote an email to his network saying that “The Second American Republic (1868-2024) is over.” He said that “the fact that the Second American Republic existed for 150 years is itself extraordinary. But like the 2024 election, it is now history.”
Mr. Mehlhorn, who has worked full time in politics since 2017, said he was halting that work. “It is time to move forward and let go of the past,” he wrote in the email. “I look forward to building the kind of world that the Enlightenment era offers, despite America’s decision.” He went on, “I’m joining what I call the Archipelago of Light, by which I mean all of the humans in the world living under enlightenment principles.”
On Tuesday, he sent a second note suggesting he was largely giving up on American politics. “With federal power dominated by anti-Enlightenment forces, our focus will shift to supporting humanist ideals globally,” he said.
Mr. Mehlhorn’s arrival into politics typified Silicon Valley’s increased influence among Democratic donors. These tech billionaires stormed into big-money circles after Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016, and many Democratic fund-raisers have voiced anxiety about whether they remain energetic about funding liberal projects after Ms. Harris’s loss.
Keeping these Silicon Valley donors from retreating is particularly important at a time when many Democratic fund-raisers worry that they have not attracted enough new major donors during the Biden era.
One tech billionaire, the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, started a philanthropy in 2014 called Democracy Fund, which recently sent a private memo to allies expressing urgency to protect the vulnerable. “Donors should stand strong and surge dollars now,” reads the memo, obtained by The Times.
‘Grim, but determined’
The hope from more optimistic liberal donors and fund-raisers is that Mr. Trump’s actions in office will motivate Democratic megadonors. Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times
Many Democrats expect money to be somewhat tight for now, and layoffs have begun at several entities. One group that thrived after Mr. Trump’s 2016 election, Run for Something, announced this month that it was laying off employees because of the tougher fund-raising climate.
“While the presidential campaign and its allied organizations raised more than a billion dollars, the rising tide didn’t lift all boats,” Amanda Litman, the group’s co-founder, said in its announcement. “We know that, much like in 2023, we weren’t alone among our partners in having fund-raising challenges this year.”
Leah Greenberg, a founder of the group Indivisible, another donor darling of the post-2016 anti-Trump movement, described progressive donors at the Democracy Alliance gathering as “grim, but determined.”
“Nobody’s checking out or stepping back,” she said.
The hope from more optimistic liberal donors and fund-raisers is that Mr. Trump’s actions as president will eventually motivate Democratic megadonors. Defeats, they note, can focus the mind: Democrats formed the Democracy Alliance after John Kerry’s crushing loss in 2004.
Todd Schulte, who runs Fwd.US, an outside group focused on immigration and criminal justice, encouraged a quick pick-me-up.
“Taking a couple deep breaths is good,” said Mr. Schulte, who is close with donors in the tech industry. “Not taking a long nap though — that’s what we want to avoid.”
Kenneth P. Vogel contributed reporting.
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