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YOUR GUIDE TO THE BILLIONAIRE-BACKED GROUPS WORKING TO PUSH DEMS
RIGHT IN 2026  
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Adam Johnson
September 24, 2025
real News Network
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_ A rebrand of previous centrist initiatives, Majority Democrats pins
the blame for Democratic Party woes on “woke.” They vaguely
gesture toward the Democrats shedding support in the working class,
but largely chalk up this loss to “cultural” factors. _

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has changed his approach since
voting with the GOP last March to keep the government open, (photo: J.
Scott Applewhite/Associated Press).

 

It's clear that the Democratic Party, and the Liberal-Left more
broadly, is in total disarray. As the Trump administration continues
to erode liberal norms, worker protections, due process, free speech,
and civil liberties, there’s a broad consensus that the most
impactful way to push back against Trump’s unprecedented power grab
is at the ballot box in 2026 and 2028. The stakes for these elections
couldn’t be higher, and thus the approach Democrats take to do so
couldn’t be any more salient. Attempting to get ahead of this
narrative, and steer the party away from anything with even the
vaguest whiff stench of Left populism, are a recent constellation of
think tanks, PACs, and “movements” designed to keep the
fundamentally neoliberal, billionaire-approved Democratic Party
fundamentally neoliberal and billionaire-approved. 

But simply appealing to the status quo wouldn’t be credible after
the Democratic Party has fallen to their lowest point in over 40 years
(if not 100). So these factions are creating pseudo-worldviews and
political frameworks that are meant to appear bold and
forward-looking, but are ultimately just a rebranded defense of the
party establishment. And we know this because, to the person, they are
funded by the same billionaire donors that have shaped democratic
politics for decades and are working in concert with party leaders
looking to deflect blame for their own repeated failures. 

There have been several centrist efforts hatching in the marshes of DC
this year, but for the purposes of this essay we will focus on three
high-profile ones that launched in 2025: the so-called Abundance
Movement, Majority Democrats PAC, and the Searchlight Institute. They
differ somewhat in approach and branding but all operate under the
same false premise: that Vice President Kamala Harris lost to Trump
last November not because the party had become too centrist, or too
inauthentic, or spent decades alienating labor, or campaigned too much
with Liz Cheney, or threw too many constituencies under the bus, or
was backing a horrific, generation-defining genocide
[[link removed]]. Instead it
was because Harris_—_and the party brand in general_—_had somehow
_gone too far to the Left_. The evidence for this premise, as I will
lay out, is wanting. But it’s become conventional wisdom in elite
liberal circles, first and foremost, because it lets everyone in elite
liberal circles off the hook.

Indeed, it’s an exceedingly convenient narrative for the
billionaires backing these factions. Post-2024 loss, if I’m a
Democratic consultant or “strategist” wanting to hoover up money
to “rebuild the party” and polish my personal brand, I won’t
find much funding by telling wealthy liberal donors that the problem
with the party is that it sold out the working class and didn’t do
nearly enough during the Biden years to win them back, or that it
needs to embrace bold redistributive policies like Medicare for All or
stronger labor unions, or that it needs to embrace
Sanders-Mamdani-style politics of class conflict, less hawkish foreign
policy, and unapologetically progressive stances on “social
issues.” Obviously, this would not only prevent me from getting
millions to start my own “institute” or “movement” and being
featured in glossy puff pieces in the New York Times, it would
actively upset these donors and effectively ice me out of funding
networks. 

Thus, the buyer’s market for supposedly new “thinkers” and
“movements” that will repackage the existing power structure as
edgy, bold, and new is hotter than ever. Enter: these three
projects.  

THE ABUNDANCE MOVEMENT – BROAD NETWORK/BUZZWORD 

Unlike the other two factions on this list, the Abundance faction
isn’t a specific group, but a deliberately vague, supposedly
post-ideological worldview that, its supporters claim, can include
everyone from socialists to the far right. In practice, however, the
movement is textbook neoliberalism. Primary boosters of this
“movement” include Silicon Valley and Wall Street-funded
organizations like the Niskanen Center, Arnold Ventures, Open
Philanthropy, Emergent Ventures, increasingly many elements within the
Koch Brothers network, the overtly rightwing American Enterprise
Institute, and a smattering of other billionaire-backed organizations
and passthroughs. Henry Burke of the Revolving Door Institute recently
published a detailed report
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laying out each blade in the sprawling carpet of astroturf. 

Since its two primary thought leaders, the New York Times’ Ezra
Klein and the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, published their book,
_Abundance_ in March 2025, the movement, such as it is, has received
largely fawning, uncritical coverage in our media due in large part to
the movement’s so-vague-as-to-be-unobjectionable premise. Their
pitch goes something like this: The reason why liberalism is falling
out of favor is because it “no longer builds” anymore. It’s a
tempting solution and one that not only rejects class politics as a
path out of the woods, but embraces its opposite: further enriching
and empowering the wealthy through deregulation so they can
“innovate” and “build” us back to prosperity. They will
sometimes throw in “building state capacity” rhetoric as an appeal
to left-leaning types to throw them off the neoliberal stench, but
it’s_—_at best_—_an afterthought.  

If this sounds like “the Good Things Plan”, a politics so generic
and devoid of serious rigor that it can basically be anything to
anyone, that’s because it is. This genericness, combined with its
total lack of class politics and heavy emphasis on deregulation, is a
major reason why it has sucked up so much billionaire money and elite
media buy-in. Adding urgency to this dynamic, and a good explanation
for the gobs of Silicon Valley cash backing it, is the rapidly
increasing AI energy demands
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that the US can, by its backers’ own admission, only meet by
massively “streamlining” safety, climate, and environmental review
for new energy production, including that of new fossil fuel
extraction. Which, once again, worked out well for those in power. 

MAJORITY DEMOCRATS – PAC

A rebrand of previous centrist initiatives, Majority Democrats pins
the blame for Democratic Party woes on “woke.” They vaguely
gesture toward the Democrats shedding support in the working class,
but largely chalk up this loss to “cultural” factors (see: changes
that won’t offend billionaire donors) rather than the party takeover
by corporate forces.

“These Younger Democrats Are Sick of Their Party’s Status Quo,
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reads the obligatory New York Times launch puff piece, framing the
astroturf effort as an organic youth movement. “Majority Democrats,
a new group of elected officials from all levels of government, has
outsized ambitions to challenge political orthodoxies and remake the
party,” the New York Times informs its readers. 

How exciting! What bold new subversive project is Majority Democrats
doing to win over working class and younger voters? Ending US support
for genocide in Gaza? Medicare for All? 

Alas, the New York Times piece is light on specifics. There’s a lot
of “trading best practices” and “debating and developing
ideas,” but little moral or political vision on offer. (“Majority
Democrats has yet to issue policy prescriptions,” The Times notes,
as if it’s an afterthought.) The group is said, however, to be
embracing the advice of “Seth London, an adviser to major Democratic
donors,” which is a somewhat incomplete biography in that it omits
that Seth London is a multimillionaire venture capitalist
[[link removed]]. But, we are told, he
has access to donors, which is not seen as a conflict of interest that
could, perhaps, undermine their nominal aim of “winning back
working-class voters.” Instead, this access is presented as a mark
of Seriousness. 

In paragraph 19, the New York Times spells out what’s really going
on:

“In some ways, the group’s structure resembles that of the
Democratic Leadership Council, the once-influential group that
successfully pushed the party to the middle in the Clinton era.

But while many of the officials involved in Majority Democrats
similarly come from the center-left, organizers insist there is no
ideological litmus test to join.”

Once again, they are aware of the branding problem of neoliberalism
and its previous avatar, the Democratic Leadership Council. They want
to gesture towards it to assure wealthy donors it’s a fundamentally
centrist project, but throw in vague rhetoric about how they
“don’t have an ideological litmus test” despite all its members
being down-the-line pro-Israel centrists.  

Again, when one needs to repackage More Of The Same donor-friendly
politics but make it seem new and fresh and subversive (most often in
opposition to a fictitious Woke Establishment), there’s really only
one place to go: become more bigoted. There’s two general
philosophies on how best Democrats can “win back working-class
voters”: (1) what we can generally call the Bernie-Mamdani wing,
becoming more aggressively Left, economically populist, and more
anti-war (which the working class overwhelmingly is
[[link removed]]);
or (2) turn up the racism, transphobia, and anti-immigrant dial from 5
to 8 without any Left economic populism. Which one of these paths is
more likely to appeal to wealthy donors? The answer, and thus the
rhetoric and diagnosis of Democratic failures from these factions, is
obvious. 

SEARCHLIGHT INSTITUTE – THINK TANK 

What if Democrats’ brand is in the toilet not because wealthy
donors, Silicon Valley, or Wall Street have outside influence on their
policies and made them divorced from Labor, pro-“free trade,” and
run by dead-eyed lawyers, but it was, instead, because far-Left
activists were manipulating the party behind the curtain and forcing
candidates into taking unpopular positions? This is the general theory
being promoted by Sen. John Fetterman’s former Chief of Staff Adam
Jentleson and his team of centrist operators, who last week launched
the Searchlight Institute, a new “think tank” making a similar
pitch to that of Majority Democrats PAC: that Democrats’ central
problem is they have become too Woke. Specifically, Jentleson pins
Harris’ loss on “the groups,” namely the ACLU, which asked
Harris in 2019 if she supported healthcare for incarcerated trans
people, which she did—a stance, it is now dogma in elite circles,
that significantly contributed to her defeat by Trump, despite this
claim having little to no empirical basis. But it vaguely _feels_ true
and, most essential of all, blames a fairly powerless constituency
instead of the consulting class and their billionaire patrons. 

This latest effort to rebrand neoliberalism, like Majority Democrats
PAC, is clever enough to gesture towards populism, but does so in a
superficial and class-flattening way. Indeed, the ever-cynical
Jentleson keeps attempting
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ideological credit for the success of New York City Democratic mayoral
nominee Zohran Mamdani, despite the fact that Jentleson never
supported his candidacy and has been openly hostile
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and smug [[link removed]] towards
the pro-Palestine movement that made up the backbone of Mamdani’s
early, evangelical volunteer core
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In the New York Times obligatory launch puff piece for Searchlight
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published last week, they would, per usual, allow these centrist
operators to advance the entirely unfounded idea that Mamdani’s
primary win somehow proves their centrist theory of change works
because something something “affordability.” (Abundance partisans
use this gambit [[link removed]] as
well, because Mamdani said he is open to market-rate housing, despite
the fact they oppose basically everything else in his platform. But
victory, as they say, has a thousand fathers.)

Since Ms. Harris’s loss, many in the party have adopted a more
economic-focused message while avoiding social issues. Some prominent
Democrats, like Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, have backtracked on
prior support for transgender rights and open immigration policy. The
most prominent liberal candidate to capture the party’s imagination
this year, Zohran Mamdani, decisively won the Democratic primary for
mayor of New York with an intense focus on the affordability of
housing, groceries and child care. 

Reading this, one would think Mamdani, like Newsom, also “avoided
social issues,” but he very much did not. In addition to being
openly combative with ICE
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during the campaign, repeatedly pledging to defend trans New Yorkers
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and promising to defend abortion
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Mamdani put on fundraising events with Mahmoud Khalil, the former
Columbia Gaza protest leader targeted by Trump. Indeed, Mamdani is
exhibit A on how one marries robust Left economic populism and
progressive “cultural” stances seamlessly, without needing to
throw either under the bus. But the New York Times, without any basis,
accepts Jentleson’s dishonest narrative and presents Mamdani as the
opposite.  

This is a popular sleight of hand, and one also advanced by
influential centrist pollster David Shor
[[link removed]]: the conflation
of “focusing on affordability” grounded in clear class-oriented
left populist politics—in Mamdani’s case born out of the
Democratic Socialist of America—and what Jentleson and Shor are
doing when they say Democrats need to “focus on affordability,”
which is mainly a rhetorical box-checking exercise untethered from
broader class politics. Neither Jentleson nor Shor push for renewing
labor, bringing union leaders into the fold, or pushing for major
redistributive policies that would meaningfully empower the working
class such as Medicare for All—all of which Mamdani does. They
instead act as if the working class can be tricked into voting
Democrat with tweaks around the margins, more acceptance of bigotry,
and better “messaging” that uses the right
“affordability”-adjacent language. 

In paragraph six, the New York Times casually mentions the rub with
Jentleson’s Searchlight Institute: “The organization is subsidized
by a roster of billionaire donors highlighted by Stephen Mandel, a
hedge fund manager, and Eric Laufer, a real estate investor.”

The use of “roster” and “highlighted” implies there are
several more billionaire donors. TRNN emailed Searchlight to find out
who these other billionaire donors were. Searchlight did not reply to
our request for comment. 

But this is the buyer’s market right now: DC operators and
careerists seeking support from a handful of mega-donors to “remake
the Democratic Party” into an equally zionist, slightly more
populist-sounding, exceedingly more racist and transphobic version of
its 2024 self. And our media, ever indifferent to the broader
structural forces backing these overnight “groups” and
“movements,” treats all of this as largely organic, with no class
interests, much less conflicts of interest. Everything is presented as
good faith, simply Concerned With Pragmatic Necessities of Winning,
and neoliberalism is rebranded as something novel and grassroots. And
everyone in party leadership, big donor circles, and the wealthy
consultancy class in power gets to, once again, remain in power.

_Adam Johnson hosts the Citations Needed
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[[link removed]] on Substack. Follow him
@adamjohnsonCHI [[link removed]]._

_THE REAL NEWS NETWORK (TRNN) MAKES MEDIA CONNECTING YOU TO THE
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MORE JUST, EQUAL, AND LIVABLE PLANET. We broaden your understanding of
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_We are rigorous in our journalism and dedicated to the facts, but
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illuminating pathways for collective action. _

* Democratic Party
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* Political consultants
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* Democratic Leadership Council
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* Majority Democrats
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