Gun control activist David Hogg is living high on the hog thanks to the many donors cutting checks to his political action committee (PAC), Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show.
Hogg created a group in the aftermath of the 2022 midterm elections called Leaders We Deserve PAC, which states that its goal is to elect Generation Z politicians to offices throughout the country. He created the PAC with Kevin Lata, the campaign manager for Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL)—a Generation Z Democrat elected in 2022.
Hogg launched the group with great fanfare, telling National Public Radio (NPR) that during former President Donald Trump’s presidency, a “social movement” was born on the left.
“For every year of Trump’s presidency, I think there was a new chapter of a social movement that was born, whether it was the Women’s March, March for Our Lives, the environmental movement, or the movement for Black Lives,” Hogg said.
Hogg touted his group’s efforts to elect young Democrat candidates—promising that Leaders We Deserve PAC would provide them with the resources they needed to win races:
[We’re] trying to pick them and say, you know, we would like to help you run for office, we’ll supply you with all of the resources that you need and help basically coach you and hold your hand to get there, which is kind of the gap that’s in the space right now, for at least young people at the state legislative level.
Since Hogg’s group came into fruition, much of the few million dollars raised has gone not to electing candidates or executing its stated mission but to luxurious expenses, such as travel bills, as well as political consultants and legal fees. In fact, the group, in 2023, only spent on a handful of candidates—four to be exact—one of whom was already serving in the U.S. Congress, Frost, and another who lost a race in a special election in Alabama. The vast majority of the group’s money, the FEC filings from 2023 show, did not go to helping candidates at all—and much of it went to other political consultants at various firms as well as to Hogg and Lata, with a lavish travel budget to boot.
The year-end 2023 FEC filing from Leaders We Deserve shows that the group stated it raised slightly north of $3 million in its first year in operation. The group reported $3,035,868.87 in total receipts in 2023. That is an admirable amount of cash for a totally new PAC.
Some very high-profile donors who have given the PAC big sums include filmmaker Alexander Adell, who gave $10,000; Tusk Holdings CEO Bradley Tusk, who gave $10,000; Florida investor Gary Sugarman, who gave another $10,000; Omaha, Nebraska, wealthy donor Barbara Weitz, who gave $100,000; Chicago-based Democrat Judy Wise—who served in former President Barack Obama’s administration as an adviser on gun control and has long been a fixture on the left—who gave $25,000; Pilot House Associates Chairman Amos Hostetter, who gave $25,000; San Francisco-based venture capitalist Ronald Conway, who gave $100,000; former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who gave $1,000; and the accuser of former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Democrat Lindsey Boylan, who gave $1,000.
The group also took in a total of $41,000 over three transfers from another PAC that Hogg is involved in called Ban Assault Weapons Now! That group, of course, was Hogg’s first major foray into the political arena and comes from the celebrity he became after he survived the shooting at Marjory Stoneham Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.
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