The 2024 presidential campaign is already flooded with dark money

When Mike Pompeo announced his political action committee last June, he set off a wave of news stories heralding the move as a potential step toward a 2024 presidential campaign. But the former secretary of State kept his next big launch behind the scenes.

Two months later, Pompeo allies including Ulrich Brechbuhl, a close friend, West Point classmate and former State Department official, quietly formed a nonprofit group — Champion American Values Fund — to work alongside Pompeo’s Champion American Values PAC. According to corporate records from Delaware and Virginia, Brechbuhl serves as president of the organization, which can raise and spend unlimited funds without disclosing its donors — an increasingly popular feature for politicians eyeing the White House.

At least a dozen potential candidates for president in 2024 have active nonprofit groups aligned with them, according to a review of corporate filings, campaign disclosures and financial records obtained by POLITICO. Some of them, like the nonprofits affiliated with Pompeo or Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), have never been publicly revealed before. Others, like those supporting President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, have been operating in the open for years.

What they all have in common is the ability to pay staffers, fund polling and policy research, run ads and accept money from megadonors without divulging those funders’ names — or much information about any spending until many months after the fact. It’s the latest escalation in a fundraising arms race that has seen personal benefactors, super PACs and now secret money become common building blocks of presidential campaigns.
 
Every candidate who seeks the White House in 2024 will have to start disclosing their campaign fundraising and spending once they officially declare their campaigns. But in the meantime, and in the absence of new legislation or an enforcement crackdown from tax or campaign-finance regulators, prospective presidents can use nonprofits to shield their donors — and much about their preparations — from the public eye.

“Anybody thinking seriously about running for president in 2024 needs to have a large, sophisticated soft-dollar operation up and running by no later than this year’s general election,” said Luke Thompson, a Republican strategist who runs Protect Ohio Values, the super PAC backing J.D. Vance in Ohio’s Senate race.

“With a small number of donors, you can do a lot of list-building, a lot of polling and research, and another really valuable thing you can do is keep staff members you’re going to hire and lock them down,” Thompson continued.

It’s unclear just how big many of these groups are now, since they don’t have to file tax returns detailing their financial activities until 11-plus months after the end of each fiscal year. Nonprofits can't spend more than half of their money on expressly political activity, but they can still make a big mark on the electoral landscape.

Advancing American Freedom, the group founded in 2021 by former Vice President Mike Pence, estimated it would raise $5 million and spend nearly that much last year, according to a filing with state regulators in North Carolina. And the Pence nonprofit announced plans earlier this year for a $10 million TV ad campaign targeting 16 House Democrats. By comparison, Pence’s PAC — Great America Committee, which cannot accept individual contributions of more than $5,000 per year — has raised over $557,000 and spent $787,000 since January 2021.

Pompeo’s Champion American Values Fund and the Scott-aligned Opportunity Matters Network, which also formed in 2021, have yet to make any filings detailing their size. But the Scott-aligned group has taken in $650,000 from its sister group, a super PAC funded by donors including tech billionaire Larry Ellison, according to the super PAC’s campaign finance disclosures. Scott’s political operation declined to comment on its activity.

Pompeo’s political operation also declined to comment.

But one of the larger known 2024-affiliated nonprofits, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley’s Stand for America, shows just what potential candidates can do with such a vehicle leading up to a presidential election.

Haley’s group raised $9.3 million in 2020, according to its most recent federal tax filing, which was obtained by POLITICO. The largest donor gave $750,000, and another six donors gave at least $100,000 apiece. But most of the nonprofit’s money came in smaller increments, and it spent big on mail and digital fundraising activities, building up a money-raising program for Haley, who last ran for office in 2014.

Stand for America spent more cash — $9.9 million — than it raised in 2020, including $3.1 million on fundraising expenses, its tax filing says. The group’s biggest vendor was Coldspark Digital, a vaunted Republican consulting firm that boasts on its website of “building a low-dollar fundraising operation from scratch” for the former South Carolina governor. The firm also works with Haley's PAC, according to FEC records.

“The last time she had been a candidate was 2014 — an eternity in the digital age,” the site notes. Now, she has a growing list stocked with fresh email addresses and engaged supporters. If Haley chooses to run for president, her campaign could rent or buy the list built at Stand for America.

There’s more to the machinery than fundraising, too. The nonprofits are also housing staff and promoting policy that could become foundational pieces of presidential campaigns. Stand for America’s executive director, Timothy Chapman, previously ran the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The Haley group published a policy book and sends out daily and weekly policy-focused newsletters to hundreds of thousands of people on its list, and it has worked with GOP members of Congress and Hill staff on policy pushes related to China and other issues, according to the nonprofit.

The top ranks of Pence’s organization include board president Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff as vice president, and executive director Paul Teller, another Pence aide during the Trump years who was Sen. Ted Cruz’s Senate chief of staff during his 2016 presidential run. The group has been hard at work developing Pence’s newly released policy platform.

Pence has already given a handful of major policy speeches over the last year and is likely to continue the series working off major themes in his new “Freedom Agenda,” according to a person familiar with Advancing American Freedom’s plans. The group is also convening big donors, like at the retreat it held last year in Jackson, Wyo.

As far-reaching as the 2024 nonprofit activity already is, the track record of similar groups that operated in the 2016 primaries show how much more they can do with dark money.

A dark-money group laid groundwork for Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential bid in secret for a year before he launched his campaign. The nonprofit, Conservative Solutions Project, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Rubio’s data-analytics consultants to conduct detailed research on voters in early caucus and primary states. It later spent millions on an ad campaign boosting Rubio and ultimately raised more than $22 million — almost all of it from at most two secret donors, OpenSecrets found.

Before New Hampshire’s 2016 primary, another nonprofit group used pushy “social pressure” tactics to induce people there to vote, generating backlash. But since the group’s origin was unclear, it didn’t generate blowback against John Kasich, the candidate the nonprofit was formed to support.

And the shadows created by the nonprofit world’s scant, time-lapsed disclosure requirements even give cover to supporters of presidential rivals colluding against another opponent, CREW found. Right to Rise Policy Solutions, the nonprofit aligned with Jeb Bush, sent $500,000 in 2016 to the nonprofit linked to then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, America Needs Leadership — which financed mailers in 2016 attacking Rubio and Kasich in New Hampshire.

It was nearly two years later that the pro-Bush group finally disclosed the donation that linked it to the Christie group’s attacks against their mutual rivals.

The biggest of the dark-money groups — also known as 501(c)(4) organizations, after their section of the tax code — associated with 2024 contenders are the ones aligned with Biden and Trump. Building Back Together, the group charged with building public support for Biden’s agenda, has spent at least $22.8 million on advertising since the beginning of last year, according to AdImpact, a TV and digital ad-tracking service.

Then there’s America First Works, the nonprofit group paired with Trump’s super PAC in the 2020 election. It raised $51.3 million that year as Trump ran for reelection and ended the year with $7.7 million in the bank, its latest tax filing showed. The group has also formed an alliance with another newer nonprofit, America First Policy Institute, CNBC reported. America First Policy Institute was launched by Trump White House officials Brooke Rollins and Larry Kudlow soon after his 2020 election loss, and Trump’s PAC sent a $1 million contribution to the group in June 2021.

With Biden expected to run for reelection, there’s been more nonprofit activity on the GOP side so far. But several prominent Democrats have affiliated dark-money groups, too, which could be involved in a national campaign at some point in the future.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a wealthy former investment banker, immediately raised questions about whether he was considering a future presidential run when some of his closest political aides and his wife launched Stronger Fairer Forward, a new nonprofit, in February. (Murphy already benefits from another supportive nonprofit that has backed his agenda as governor.)

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg also has a nonprofit associated with the PAC he launched after ending his 2020 presidential run, though both entities have been quiet since Buttigieg joined Biden’s cabinet.

But the bulk of the build-up has centered around ambitious Republicans. Others with supportive nonprofit groups run by allies include Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Ben Sasse (R-Neb.). Axios reported Rubio, the Florida senator, has used an email list built up by a nonprofit group, Stand Up to China, run by one of the same operatives who helmed his 2016 outside groups.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who is term-limited and declined entreaties to run for Senate this year, has said he’s considering seeking the presidency. Meanwhile, a group founded by close political allies in 2019 has been running national digital ads, promoting Hogan as a problem-solver and calling attention to his statement that Trump running for president in 2024 would be bad for the country and the GOP.

The new nonprofit got off to a slow start, raising only $340,000 in 2020, according to its tax filing, as Hogan suspended fundraising efforts for the group to focus on managing his state through the coronavirus pandemic, according to a person familiar with the group’s activity.

But in 2021, the nonprofit aggressively promoted a number of Hogan’s signature policies, including boosting police funding and decrying gerrymandering. The group was also involved in bringing together bipartisan members of Congress to discuss national infrastructure legislation.

Notably, Hogan already had a supportive nonprofit group founded in 2019, Change Maryland, backing his agenda as governor. The two groups together raised between $3 and $4 million in 2021, according to the person familiar with their activity.

But the new group has a name more befitting a politician with national ambitions: An America United.