by Arjun Singh
Should former President Donald Trump win the 2024 presidential election, liberal activists fear difficulty raising funds to support their operations, according to a report by Politico.
Trump is the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, having won the first two primary contests of Iowa and New Hampshire, and is currently ahead of President Joe Biden, the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination, in polls of battleground states. Should Trump become the 47th president of the United States in 2025, activists express the fear that they will lose donations amid dissatisfaction with politics from their supporters, Politico’s Michael Schaffer reported.
“I think what’s missing right now is, what is Plan B if [P]lan A doesn’t work — Plan A being, obviously Biden wins the election,” said Micah Sifry, a writer and political organizer, to Politico. Sifry is among many activists who indicate that their fundraising and operations will be adversely affected by a Trump presidency.
Activists do not appear to have considered a strategy for Trump’s electoral victory. While donations and interest in these organizations increased shortly after Trump took office in 2017, the activists warn that the relative ineffectiveness of efforts to oppose Trump’s policies means that donors are unlikely to give them again.
“There was this kind of collective moment, three, four or five years ago, where the climate funders started to say, you know, we’re not really making progress…[e]nvironmental funding has basically been level or flat or in slow decline,” said Dave Gallagher, a fundraising consultant who has worked with activist organizations to Politico, apparently in reference to the effect of the Trump administration on fundraising.
“[It would be] very difficult to keep some of these large progressive organizations funded robustly — people will look back on that and think it didn’t work,” said David Brock, an activist who works on anti-Trump initiatives, to Politico. “Nobody is talking about [a Trump victory]. People don’t want to go there right now.”
However, some activists disagree, suggesting that rank-and-file activist opposition to Trump will resurge as it did during his presidency, which contributed to his electoral loss in 2020.
“[I]t’s hard for me to imagine that those same people, those same individuals, those same communities, those same organizations won’t respond similarly,” said Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, to Politico.
“We’ve got fatigue to deal with, we’ve got burnout, but we also have a majority of Americans who are interested in maintaining a democracy,” said Lauren Duncan, a psychologist at Smith College. “I don’t think people are going to roll over and give up.”
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Arjun Singh is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
