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dark money
'Pathetic': Maine Democrat Blames 'Dark Money' Indivisible for His Refusal to Hold Town Halls
"Small-dollar donors are the backbone of Indivisible's budget, and we're proud to be accountable to a nationwide grassroots base," said one of the progressive group's campaigners.
May 09, 2025
Congressman Jared Golden has been accused of dodging his constituents by refusing to hold town hall meetings with them, and now the Maine Democrat is blaming a grassroots progressive movement for what critics have called his cowardly stance.
Golden isn't alone in refusing to hold town halls. Numerous congressional Republicans have come under fire for avoiding their constituents' wrath by eschewing public meetings with them. However, Golden's right-wing positions on issues ranging from border security to voter ID and his support for some of President Donald Trump's policies and dismissal of his administration's threat to democracy have stoked progressives' ire at the fourth-term congressman.
Indivisible, a grassroots movement comprised of thousands of local groups "with a mission to elect progressive leaders, rebuild our democracy, and defeat the Trump agenda," has been a constant thorn in Golden's evasive side. Maine chapters of the group have called attention to his shrinking from constituents by holding "empty chair" town hall meetings, at which attendees hold up signs asking, "Where's Jared?"
Now Golden is hitting back, accusing Indivisible, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, of being a "dark money group" that divides Democrats and alienates conservatives.
"So he's mad at his own base, the ones who knocked doors to get him into Congress?"
"They make clear that they want to purge the Democratic Party of anyone who doesn't meet their definition of what it means to be a Democrat," Golden said last week. "My perspective is, they call themselves Indivisible, but they are literally dedicated to division within the Democratic Party itself."
Sarah Dohl, Indivisible's chief campaigns officer, scoffed at Golden's "dark money" allegation.
"Jared Golden's claims that Indivisible is funded by dark money is pathetic," she told the Portland Press Herald on Friday. "Small-dollar donors are the backbone of Indivisible's budget, and we're proud to be accountable to a nationwide grassroots base, not a single donor or interest."
Former Maine state Rep. Dianne Russell (D-39) took to social media to slam Golden's accusation, writing: "So he's mad at his own base, the ones who knocked doors to get him into Congress? And he's so mad that he is afraid to answer to the same Maine people who knocked those doors? Wow!"
Golden—a member of the shrunken Blue Dog Caucus of 10 right-wing Democrats—contended that Indivisible "has formed connections very successfully with local groups" and "uses those local groups to whitewash what is an extremely partisan agenda."
"Their goal is to beat up on any Democrats who seek in any way to work with and show an openness to compromise with the Republican Party," he added.
Critics counter that Democrats should be combating Republicans' increasingly authoritarian agenda, not seeking to compromise with it. They've expressed alarm over Golden's accommodationist stance and his statement that he is "OK" with Trump winning the 2024 election.
"I reject the premise" that Trump is "a unique threat to our democracy," Golden said last July, predicting Trump's victory.
Statements like these have stirred progressive Mainers to action. Last month, Indivisible Mid-Maine members led a protest of Golden's private speech at Colby College in Waterville.
"Along with his refusal to address constituents at town halls," protester Lisa Joy
said outside the event, "he is on the wrong side of democracy at this particular crisis moment in our history."
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The 2024 Election Was Smothered in Dark Money—How Do We Turn on the Lights?
A new Brennan Center study found that dark money groups spent almost $2 billion on the 2024 election, roughly double the total spent in 2020.
May 08, 2025
Every day brings a new story about the outsized role of private wealth in American politics. Elon Musk slashing and burning his way through federal agencies. Billionaire campaign donors like Howard Lutnick and Linda McMahon running cabinet departments. Other Trump patrons reportedly shaping policy on everything from crypto to the Middle East. Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, a small group of major donors is organizing to fund the party’s 2026 push to retake Congress.
And these are only the donors we know about.
The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision ushered in the era of “dark money”—ballooning campaign spending by groups that do not disclose their funding sources. On Wednesday, the Brennan Center published a study by the journalist Anna Massoglia. She found that dark money groups spent almost $2 billion on the 2024 election, roughly double the total spent in 2020. And that’s the money Massoglia could identify—the real total is almost certainly higher, perhaps substantially so.
Voters are deeply unhappy about the role of money in politics, but years of inaction to address this issue have also left them understandably cynical.
The term “dark money” as we use it refers to election spending by groups that are not legally required to—and do not—disclose their donors. Most of this spending would have been illegal before Citizens United, which eviscerated many long-standing limits on campaign money and led to the creation of super PACs, political organizations that can raise and spend unlimited money on campaigns.
The justices got many things wrong in Citizens United. One of them was their assurance that all the new campaign spending they had just allowed would be transparent, allowing Americans to be fully informed about who was trying to influence their votes.
The justices seem not to have realized, however, that many of the new groups they were now permitting to spend unlimited amounts on campaigns were not subject to any disclosure rules. There have since been numerous efforts to fix this oversight and require all major campaign donors to be made public—most recently as part of the Freedom to Vote Act, which came within two votes of overcoming a Senate filibuster in 2022—but none of those bills have made it through Congress.
Meanwhile, dark money in federal elections has continued to rise—and become even harder to trace. In the years immediately after Citizens United, groups that didn’t reveal their donors tended to purchase their own campaign ads, which were at least reported to the Federal Election Commission if they ran in the weeks before the election and were therefore fairly easy to track. Even if the source of the money was opaque, we could see the spending itself.
Now, as our new analysis shows, reported campaign ads account for just a tiny fraction of dark money spending. Most of it now goes directly into the coffers of super PACs, and some of it pays for online ads and early-cycle TV and radio ads not subject to any legally required disclosure. We are able to track down some of that money due to voluntary disclosures and research using services that monitor TV advertising, but our overall tally of dark money spent in 2024 is an undercount, possibly by a large margin.
Both Republicans and Democrats benefited from significant dark money support in 2024, but the majority of traceable dark money backed Democrats. Most of those funds went toward enormous spending in the presidential race—$1 out of every $6 in dark money that we can track was funneled to Future Forward, the super PAC backing Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris. Trump’s dark money support that we know about was not as high, although it still amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars (including more than $35 million that paid for apparent “false flag” ads in swing states designed to look like they came from Harris).
Ultimately, neither party will have any incentive to curb reliance on secret spending absent a change in the law. To congressional Democrats’ credit, they included a fix in the Freedom to Vote Act. It was among the most popular provisions in the bill, enjoying broad public support among voters from both parties.
Voters are deeply unhappy about the role of money in politics, but years of inaction to address this issue have also left them understandably cynical. Regaining Americans’ trust must include concrete steps to make it easier for them to hold political leaders accountable. Providing the transparency that even Citizens United promised 15 years ago would be a good place to start.
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Why David Hogg (Almost) Gets It, and the DNC Still Doesn’t
DNC Vice-Chair David Hogg is right to call out do-nothing Democrats but fails to articulate a bold, unapologetically populist vision that names the enemy.
Apr 29, 2025
The Democratic National Committee needs to take a step back and reflect on the moment in which it finds itself. The sense of national anxiety and uncertainty is palpable. Trust in our institutions is staggeringly low. Everyday Americans are scared, and they’re looking for actual leadership. They’re looking for hope. They’re looking for visionaries.
However, for the sake of party unity and integrity, the leaders of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) must remain neutral when it comes to primary challengers.
At least, that’s what the DNC leadership is saying now.
The only way to win back the trust of voters and challenge the proto-authoritarian regime we’re up against is by listening to the demands of working-class people and dropping the paternalistic attitude that insists the elites know best.
That certainly wasn’t the approach taken in 2016 when Hillary Clinton was given insurmountable preference and privilege by the DNC, and again in 2020 when early primary victories for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) sent the party establishment into a panic. Deals were made, and party elites all but sealed the nomination for former President Joe Biden. Neutrality surely wasn’t a priority then.
So what changed? A young, occasionally progressive vice-chair of the DNC with a massive platform announced that his personal grassroots organization, unaffiliated with the DNC, would pledge funds to back primary challengers in democratic strongholds where the running incumbents are failing to rise to the moment we face, and are pompously ignoring the demands for bold change from their constituents. Now, all of a sudden, it would be improper for anyone with real influence in the party infrastructure to pick a side in contested primaries. Interesting. Apparently it’s only improper for party officials to pick a side when the side they pick challenges the status quo.
DNC Vice-Chair David Hogg is right to call out do-nothing Democrats who cling to power while refusing to fight for popular policies like Medicare for All, green jobs, and a wealth tax on the ultra-rich. These corporate-backed incumbents are dead weight on the party, and are more concerned with donor checks than the people they claim to represent. But where Hogg, and too many well-meaning liberals, fall short in their criticism is in their failure to articulate a bold, unapologetically populist vision that names the enemy: a rigged political system in which wealthy donors, corporations, and special interests can buy off politicians of both parties, and subvert the will of the people by simply writing a check.
The party establishment may not have gotten the memo, but the voters certainly have. According to a February Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults of both parties, the role of money in politics is the issue described by the highest percentage of respondents (72%) as “a very big problem,” followed closely by the affordability of healthcare (67%).
We need candidates and a party that refuse to accept dark money in the primaries. We need candidates and a party that draw a sharp distinction on this front. The Democratic Party must be a democratic party, not a plutocratic or oligarchic party.
If the DNC wants to be the vehicle the future requires, it must rally behind candidates who dare to say that healthcare is a human right, and will fight for a single-payer system. The party needs primary challengers who will unapologetically say that our tax dollars should pay for public services, not for bombs that are sent overseas to maim and murder civilians. We need candidates committed to a transformational Green jobs investment. We don’t need lip service and half-measures, but a full-scale mobilization to save our planet from climate catastrophe and corporate greed. We need candidates who will say enough is enough.
The moderate, establishment wing of the Democratic Party would have you believe that these policies are too radical, fringe, and unrealistic to help win elections. These political elites spend so much time convincing the media that they represent the views of the average voter that perhaps they’ve even begun to believe it themselves. The facts tell a different story.
Not only have progressive policies been proven successes in countless advanced democracies all over the world, but they are also extremely popular among Democratic voters. Let’s first look at who is currently popular among the Democratic base. As of last month, the Democratic Party’s favorability rating stands at just 29%. By contrast, the popularity of bold progressive voices in the party is dwarfing that of establishment moderates. Bernie Sanders, alongside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), is drawing massive crowds scarcely seen in nonelection years on their Fighting Oligarchy tour, while centrist Democrats are struggling to adequately respond to frustrated crowds at their town halls. According to a CNN poll from March 2025, 1 in 6 voters under 45 describe AOC as “emblematic of the party’s values,” much higher than any other politician listed in the poll.
With 48 years separating them, their popularity has less to do with age, and more to do with progressives’ ability to articulate a vision of the future for America that offers more than returning to business as usual. Working class Americans feel left in the dust in a rapidly changing economy that values quick profit over long-term growth and sustainability. The Biden administration failed to acknowledge and sufficiently address the challenges of struggling Americans, and the Kamala Harris campaign didn’t do enough to convince voters that it would be responsive to their needs..
The citizens of this country want to know that their vote and their voice matters, and that it won’t be drowned out by the overwhelming noise of super PACS and billionaire donors. They want to know that a devastating medical emergency won’t be the cause of their family’s bankruptcy. They don’t want the laws of this country to reinforce the idea that the value of your voice and the value of your life are directly tied to the amount of money in your bank account.
The bottom line is this: You win elections by responding to the needs and the concerns of the voters. When the voters of both parties agree that the electoral system is rigged for the rich and the healthcare system is broken, and yet both parties refuse to do anything meaningful about either of those problems, it inevitably follows that voters will look for leaders who seek to fundamentally change the parties that ignore them.
The DNC and the Democratic Party must recognize that leading into the midterms, we are truly at an inflection point. The playbook of the past has failed. There is no reviving it. The only way to win back the trust of voters and challenge the proto-authoritarian regime we’re up against is by listening to the demands of working-class people and dropping the paternalistic attitude that insists the elites know best. While we may disagree with David Hogg on certain issues and candidates, his commitment to cutting the dead weight from the Democratic Party is commendable. Where his strategy misses the mark, however, is in failing to articulate that what we need is not just young candidates willing to fight against Trump. We need to back young candidates willing to fight for a version of America that lives up to its promise in action, not just rhetoric.
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