Tag: deomcrats

Here Are The Democrats And Republicans Who Received Campaign Cash Linked To Bankrupt Crypto Empire FTX

Democrats heavily benefited from the campaign contributions of disgraced cryptocurrency billionaire and FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, while other affiliates of the company likewise helped Republicans ahead of the company’s failure last week.

FTX filed for bankruptcy on Friday after users discovered that firms controlled by Bankman-Fried were allegedly fraudulently intertwined, causing him to lose his fortune overnight. The young multibillionaire contributed nearly $39 million during the recent midterm elections, with 99.6% of funds benefiting Democratic candidates, according to data from Open Secrets, which listed him as the nation’s sixth-largest individual midterm donor.

The 30 year old donated $27 million to Protect Our Future PAC, a left-leaning group which in turn spent heavily on behalf of Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives. A contribution of over $10 million from Protect Our Future PAC benefited Carrick Flynn, who lost his Democratic primary in Oregon. Other beneficiaries included Rep. Lucy McBath (D-GA), Rep. Shontel Brown (D-OH), Rep. Robert Garcia (D-NC), and Rep. Valerie Foushee (D-NC), all of whom won re-election.

Bankman-Fried also contributed $1 million to the Senate Majority PAC, which supports Democratic candidates for the Senate, and $6 million to the House Majority PAC. During the 2020 election cycle, he was the second-largest donor to the Biden campaign.

Bankman-Fried directly supported a number of individual candidates as well. Two such candidates, Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK) and Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia (D-IL) donated their respective $5,000 and $2,900 contributions to charity after FTX filed for bankruptcy, according to a report from The Block.

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‘If we do this right …’: The new Dem organizing strategy catching fire ahead of the midterms

A group of Democratic strategists is trying to spread a novel organizing tactic in this year’s election. Technically, it’s called “paid relational organizing,” but it boils down to this: paying people to talk to their friends about politics.

Democrats think it helped them win the Senate in 2020 — and are hoping the get-out-the-vote strategy will help limit the pain of a brutal 2022 election environment.

Conversations with friends, family members or neighbors are more likely to earn a voter’s support than chats with a stranger at their front door, which is the traditional way campaigns have run paid canvassing programs in the past. And an important test case for deploying the strategy at scale came out of the Georgia Senate runoffs in 2021 when now-Sen. Jon Ossoff’s (D-Ga.) campaign, flush with nearly unlimited cash but only two months to spend it, used a paid and volunteer relational program to get people talking to acquaintances instead of strangers about the election.

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