Liberal Group’s Seven-Figure Turnout Efforts Target Battleground States

A leading left-wing community organizing group is building a massive grassroots advocacy and voter turnout operation in battleground states that could decide November’s presidential and Senate elections, documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon reveal.

The Center for Popular Democracy is working to raise more than $7 million to support local and state-level organizing work that it hopes will translate issue-oriented advocacy into political power in November.

Documents detailing those efforts shed new light on how the left’s organizing apparatus is collaborating with prominent progressive groups such as MoveOn.org, labor unions, and foundations to build a campaign apparatus that can win short-term policy victories and translate those victories into a lasting political operation.

The nonprofit Center for Popular Democracy and its 501(c)(4) dark money arm, the Center for Popular Democracy Action, work with 42 partner organizations—including labor unions, community organizing groups, and other left-wing nonprofits—in 30 states to advance its goals.

The group’s $14 million budget supports a staff of more than 60 employees. In 2015, it sub-granted more than $7 million to its partner organizations. Those partners boast more than 400,000 members, 800 state-based staffers, and combined budgets of roughly $85 million.

That organizing power is diffused throughout the states, but a document obtained by the Free Beacon reveals that efforts have been underway since December to centralize decision-making in committees that represent both CPD and its local and state partners.

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