Checkpoint: Democrats Use Dark Money To Silence Progressives
Bloomberg
Between election denials, the January 6th United States Capitol Insurrection, allegations of voter fraud, and congressional redistricting, Republicans have leveled numerous attacks on the credibility of U.S. elections. While these brazen incursions into the integrity of the electoral process are reprehensible and have rightfully dominated the news cycles, Democrats have quietly been deploying a more covert weapon for election manipulation: dark money. “Dark money” is the catchall term for money of unknown or untraceable origin spent to influence elections. The influx of dark money in our elections began in 2010, with the controversial Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee. The Court sided with conservative nonprofit organization Citizens United and ruled that laws restricting the political spending of corporations and labor unions are unconstitutional and violate the free speech protections guaranteed by the First Amendment. Since that ruling, billions of dollars have been funneled into some of the country’s most competitive elections. Because of the loopholes in campaign disclosure rules that the Citizens United decision created, some of the largest donors to congressional, executive, and judicial races are unknown. Citizens United removed the transparency requirements around campaign financing, and now elections are flooded with dark money.
In this post-Citizens United political environment, dark money primarily enters our politics in two ways— via super PACs and via undisclosed paid social media content. A traditional PAC (Political Action Committee) is a tax-exempt organization that collects contributions from donors and spends them on political campaigns in the committee’s interests. Traditional PACs can donate directly to political campaigns, must be registered with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), and all their contributors and contributions are disclosed to the public. There are also limits on how much money a PAC can donate toward one candidate, election, or political party per year. A super PAC, on the other hand, while not allowed to donate directly to a political candidate or campaign, has no limit on how much it can fundraise and spend. Super PACs, because they cannot donate directly to campaigns, tend to spend heavily on political advertising, i.e., television, radio, social media, and print ads, and on voter outreach, i.e., employing people to canvas, phonebank, and direct mail campaigns. Super PACs can legally spend an unlimited amount of money to assist a political candidate, and, while donors to super PACs do have to be reported to the FEC and therefore the public, the moneyed interests who wish to influence elections have found a loophole. Super PACs can legally receive massive donations from 501(c)(4) nonprofits. The 501(c)(4) is a tax-exempt designation given by the IRS to civic organizations that allows for unlimited political lobbying and advocacy for legislation. Examples of 501(c)(4) organizations include the National Rifle Association and the Sierra Club. Other groups, however, create shell corporations, apply for and use the 501(c)(4) designation, and fundraise for and donate to super PACs. While the super PAC will disclose the nonprofit’s name, the nonprofit itself is not required to publicly disclose the original donors behind that money. This is how untraceable dark money enters elections via super PACs.
Dark money has also found another entryway into our politics— social media. While platforms like Instagram and TikTok have guidelines mandating that creators disclose when content is a paid promotion for a product, they have no such transparency guidelines around paid political messaging. In August 2025, tech journalist Taylor Lorenz reported that a Democrat dark money group (and 501(c)(4) nonprofit) the Sixteen Thirty Fund had employed a secret sub-organization called Chorus to offer influencers as much as $8,000 per video to produce content aligned with the group’s messaging goals. Key conditions of the contract were that creators could not disclose their partnership with Chorus, could not remove or correct content without express authorization from Chorus, and had to have all guests pre-approved by Chorus. The lack of disclosure regulations on social media platforms, combined with the unlimited spending allowed by the Citizens United decision, has allowed lobbying groups to influence public political opinions by secretly dumping undisclosed donor dollars into social media content.
While Republicans have dominated the dark money landscape since 2010, there’s been a recent uptick of donors from the Democratic establishment levying funds to unseat or challenge progressive candidates in primaries, or to control the media environment as approval of the Democratic Party wanes. Dark money groups contribute to super PACs, which, in turn, spend donor funds to help centrist Democrats defeat progressives. In the primary for Colorado’s 1st Congressional District held earlier this year, a super PAC called Mile High Accountability Project spent $350,000 on digital ads attacking then-candidate Melat Kiros. The PAC did not properly disclose its donors, despite FEC mandates. Kiros still won the primary, a testament to voters’ frustration with establishment Democrats, but the issue of super PAC spending in the election remains. Not only did the Mile High Accountability Project not disclose donors, but it also employed the “pop-up super PAC” tactic. The PAC did not start spending until immediately before the primary, thus avoiding pre-election reporting rules and having to disclose its contributors until after the election. In June of this year, dark money was used to attack progressive Zach Wahls, who ran for Iowa’s senate seat against a more moderate candidate, Representative Josh Turek. Turek won the primary, and the interlinked entities supporting him include a group run by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Dark money has appeared as well in Minnesota, where the state’s progressive lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan has accused secretive super PACs of interfering in the Senate primary race on the side of the more moderate candidate, Representative Angie Craig.
On the social media front, one influencer in the messaging records Taylor Lorenz reported on said that Chorus would prevent them from interviewing then-Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, who, at the time, was gaining momentum and taking on the Democratic establishment by running against Andrew Cuomo in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. “If I get Zohran and he wants to [do an] interview with me, I don’t want to give that to them,” the anonymous creator said. Influencers with millions of followers among them were outed in Lorenz’s exposé, but there are likely dozens, if not hundreds, more influencers pumping out undisclosed paid political content.
The dark money spending facilitated by the 2010 Citizens United decision has eroded the integrity and transparency of U.S. elections. The only sure way to stop the flow of dark money is for the Supreme Court to overturn Citizens United and eliminate dark money from politics altogether. Given the current conservative majority on the Court, this is unlikely to happen, some smaller fixes could ameliorate the issue. Apps like Instagram and TikTok must mandate disclosure of paid political content the way they do with other advertisements. The 501(c)(4) designation must be amended to prevent anonymous donors from creating shell companies to contribute to super PACs. Both Republicans and Democrats are taking advantage of the campaign financing loopholes provided by the Citizens United decision, and they’re spending billions of dollars to target the progressives who eschew super PAC funding and run on promises of change.
