President Donald Trump is escalating threats to crack down on what he describes as the “radical left” following Charlie Kirk’s assassination, stirring fears that his administration is trying to harness outrage over the killing to suppress political opposition.
Without establishing any link to last week’s shooting, the Republican president and members of his administration have discussed classifying some groups as domestic terrorists, ordering racketeering investigations and revoking tax-exempt status for progressive nonprofits. The White House pointed to Indivisible, a progressive activist network, and the Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros, as potential subjects of scrutiny.
Although administration officials insist that their focus is preventing violence, critics see an extension of Trump’s campaign of retribution against his political enemies and an erosion of free speech rights. Any moves to weaken liberal groups could also shift the political landscape ahead of next year’s midterm elections, which will determine control of Congress and statehouses across the country.
“The radical left has done tremendous damage to the country,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday morning when leaving for a state visit to the United Kingdom. “But we’re fixing it.”
Trump has sometimes made similar threats without following through. But now there’s renewed interest fueled by anger over the killing of Kirk, a conservative activist who was a prominent supporter of Trump and friends with many of his advisers.
More than 100 nonprofit leaders, representing organizations including the Ford Foundation, the Omidyar Network and the MacArthur Foundation, released a joint letter saying “we reject attempts to exploit political violence to mischaracterize our good work or restrict our fundamental freedoms.”
“Attempts to silence speech, criminalize opposing viewpoints, and misrepresent and limit charitable giving undermine our democracy and harm all Americans,” they wrote.
White House blames ‘terrorist networks’
Authorities said they believe the suspect in Kirk’s assassination acted alone, and they charged him with murder on Tuesday.
However, administration officials have repeatedly made sweeping statements about the need for broader investigations and punishments related to Kirk’s death.
Attorney General Pam Bondi blamed “left-wing radicals” for the shooting and said “they will be held accountable.” Stephen Miller, a top policy adviser, said there was an “organized campaign that led to this assassination.”
Miller’s comments came during a conversation with Vice President JD Vance, who was guest-hosting Kirk’s talk show from his ceremonial office in the White House on Monday.
Miller said he was feeling “focused, righteous anger,” and “we are going to channel all of the anger” as they work to “uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks” by using “every resource we have.”
Vance blamed “crazies on the far left” for saying the White House would “go after constitutionally protected speech.” Instead, he said, “We’re going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence.”
Asked for examples, the White House pointed to demonstrations where police officers and federal agents have been injured, as well as the distribution of goggles and face masks during protests over immigration enforcement in Los Angeles.
There was also a report that Indivisible offered to reimburse people who gathered at Tesla dealerships to oppose Elon Musk’s leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency. Sometimes cars were later vandalized.
Indivisible’s leadership has said “political violence is a cancer on democracy” and said that their own organization has “been threatened by right-wingers all year.”
Nonprofits brace for impact
Trump’s executive actions have rattled nonprofit groups with attempts to limit their work or freeze federal funding, but more aggressive proposals to revoke tax-exempt status never materialized.
Now the mood has darkened as nonprofits recruit lawyers and bolster the security of their offices and staff.
“It’s a heightened atmosphere in the wake of political violence, and organizations who fear they might be unjustly targeted in its wake are making sure that they are ready,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the government watchdog group Public Citizen.
Trump made retribution against political enemies a cornerstone of his comeback campaign, and he’s mobilized the federal government to reshape law firms, universities and other traditionally independent institutions. He also ordered an investigation into ActBlue, an online liberal fundraising platform.
Some nonprofits expect the administration to focus on prominent funders like Soros, a liberal billionaire who has been a conservative target for years, to send a chill through the donor community.
Trump recently said Soros should face a racketeering investigation, though he didn’t make any specific allegations. The Open Society Foundations condemned violence and Kirk’s assassination in a statement and said “it is disgraceful to use this tragedy for political ends to dangerously divide Americans and attack the First Amendment.”
Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, wrote on social media that “the murder of Charlie Kirk could have united Americans to confront political violence” but “Trump and his anti-democratic radicals look to be readying a campaign to destroy dissent.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said “it is disingenuous and false for Democrats to say administration actions are about political speech.” She said the goal is to “target those committing criminal acts and hold them accountable.”
Republicans back Trump’s calls for investigations
Trump’s concerns about political violence are noticeably partisan. He described people who rioted at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as “hostages” and “patriots,” and he pardoned 1,500 of them on his first day back in the Oval Office. He also mocked House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi after an attack on her husband.
When Trump condemned Kirk’s killing in a video message last week, he mentioned several examples of “radical left political violence” but ignored attacks on Democrats.
Asked on Monday about the killing of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman over the summer, Trump said “I’m not familiar” with the case.
“Trump shrugs at right-wing political violence,” said Ezra Levin, the co-executive director of Indivisible, in a newsletter.
Some conservative commentators have cheered on a potential crackdown. Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist with a long record of bigoted comments, said “let’s shut the left down.” She also said that she wants Trump “to be the ‘dictator’ the left thinks he is.”
Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller and a former administration spokeswoman, asked Bondi whether there would be “more law enforcement going after these groups” and “putting cuffs on people.”
“We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech,” Bondi said. “And that’s across the aisle.”
Her comments sparked a backlash from across the political spectrum, since even hate speech is generally considered to be protected under the First Amendment. Bondi was more circumspect on social media on Tuesday morning, saying they would focus on “hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence.”
Trump is getting more support from Republicans in Congress. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and others proposed legislation that would enable the Justice Department to use racketeering laws, originally envisioned to combat organized crime, to prosecute violent protesters and the groups that support them.
Rep. Chip Roy of Texas wants the House to create a special committee to investigate the nonprofit groups, saying “we must follow the money to identify the perpetrators of the coordinated anti-American assaults being carried out against us.”
___ Associated Press writer Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.
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Chris Megerian, Lisa Mascaro, Alanna Durkin Richer, The Associated Press
Ron DeSantis’ first speech as a presidential contender was a dark and broody recitation of the forces he blames for ruining the country. Standing in front of a two-story American flag on a stage in Iowa, he rattled them off: “cultural Marxism,” “woke ideology,” Hunter Biden and, finally, corporate America.
“There was a little business that you may have heard of in Florida,” he said, “named Disney. People told me, ‘Listen, the media’s coming after you, the left — but if Disney weighs in, they’re the 800-pound gorilla. You better watch out, they’re going to steamroll you.’ Well, here I stand. I’m not backing down one inch,” he said to whoops and scattered applause.
“We run the state of Florida. They do not run the state of Florida.”
It’s strange days in the ongoing realignment of the modern GOP. A majority of Republican voters have gone from admiring large companies and financial institutions to reviling them. Presidential candidates are crusading against giant corporations like Bud Light for the crime of acknowledging LGBTQ+ people, and DeSantis has declared open war on his state’s most valuable employer for daring to come to their defense. The Republican Party has a rich tradition of drafting off of hatred for minorities, but never before has it placed them on such a direct collision course with their other primary source of power, the American boardroom.
DeSantis has bet he can ride these shifting currents by styling himself as America’s most vicious culture warrior. His nebulous path to victory depends on peeling support away from the original fake populist, Donald Trump, despite having none of the former president’s charisma. And his fight with Disney offers a way for him to manufacture the illusion that he poses a serious threat to corporate America. For good measure, he has also picked an abstract fight over “woke banking.”
But an illusion is all it is. In interviews with Florida politicians, activists and members of the business community — many of whom won’t whisper a word against him on the record — they describe how DeSantis has catered to special interests as ferociously as he has fought the culture wars. DeSantis wields near-dictatorial sway over his state, which he has used to grant special interests a breathtaking list of favors. He has helped them evade accountability, steamrolled regulations, funded their pet projects, and foisted bailouts and tax breaks onto ordinary taxpayers. Often he does so quite openly. One day after launching his 2024 presidential campaign in a live event on Twitter with its owner, Elon Musk, he signed a law relieving private space companies like SpaceX, another Musk company, from liability for accidentally killing its employees.
In exchange for how he has run the state, DeSantis raised more money for his 2022 reelection than any governor in U.S. history. The funds now power his nascent presidential campaign: Just a few weeks ago, he transferred $82.5 million from his gubernatorial campaign into his presidential super PAC. As a declared presidential contender, he continues to be a fundraising juggernaut, despite donors complaining he has all the personality of wet cardboard.
This doesn’t mean businesses are getting everything they want — it means they’re getting everything DeSantis wants them to have. Despite building his campaign around falsehoods about LGBTQ+ people and fearmongering of woke boogeymen, DeSantis has identified one true thing, which is how few countervailing forces there are against corporations and their political whims. Even in states where Republicans have gerrymandered popular opinion into irrelevance, big consumer-facing companies remain invested in public sentiment. North Carolina’s anti-trans bathroom bill cost the state the NBA All-Star Game. Racist voting restrictions in Georgia did the same for the MLB All-Star Game and draft. DeSantis understands the threat this poses to his ascendance but remains reliant on corporate financial support, which is why his most meaningful attacks on corporate power have all involved reducing it relative to his own.
The word is out. “If you want to get in good with this governor and his team, you have to pay up,” said a Republican consultant in Florida who requested anonymity. The consultant added, “You need to be very careful getting crosswise with the governor.” He will not hesitate to remind you who really runs the state.
A Lock On The Legislature
The Florida 2023 legislative session doubled as the opening act of DeSantis’ presidential campaign. The House and Senate were under the control of a Republican supermajority, which in turn was under the thumb of DeSantis. “I’ve never seen a governor in my lifetime with this much absolute control of the agenda in Tallahassee as Ron DeSantis,” one of his allies, super-lobbyist Brian Ballard, told the Tampa Bay Times.
Virtually every bill that passed somehow furthered his presidential ambitions, allowing him to enter the race without resigning as governor and to conceal his travel records from the public.He signed a ban on gender-affirming care for minors (it has since been blocked in federal court), a six-week abortion ban, a law (likely unconstitutional) allowing non-unanimous juries to impose the death penalty, a vast expansion of private school vouchers and a bill to rename a road after the deceased blowhard Rush Limbaugh.
This is his “blueprint for America’s revival,” a spokesperson for his presidential campaign has said. DeSantis’ pitch is that he will “Make America Florida,” a place where he stomped the “woke elites” by taking on corporate power. “In this environment, old-guard corporate Republicanism is not up to the task at hand,” he wrote in his second biography, “The Courage to Be Free.”
At least that is DeSantis’ carefully crafted mythology. Insofar as you know DeSantis as the book- and drag-show-banning governor, it’s catching on. Other pieces of his legislative agenda — particularly the many bills he signs without cameras present — tell another story altogether.
“If you want to get in good with this governor and his team, you have to pay up.”
This June, having accepted more than $2 million in donations from Florida car dealerships, he signed a law cementing their profits by banning direct-to-consumer sales of cars. The law contains a notable carve-out for Tesla, which relies heavily on direct sales and is another Musk property.
Another law he signed this month will exempt Minor League Baseball players from Florida’s minimum wage law. When the bill was filed, minor leaguers were at the bargaining table, trying to raise minimum starting salaries above $20,000. “I’ve been covering Florida politics for more than 20 years now, and I have never seen a more mean-spirited piece of legislation than this,” said Jason Garcia, an independent journalist and Florida’s foremost chronicler of pay-to-play politics. “It’s the sort of bill Montgomery Burns would sponsor.” The day after the bill was filed, Joe Ricketts, whose family owns the Chicago Cubs, gave $1 million to DeSantis’ 2022 reelection fund.
Some donors have enjoyed a striking return on investment. In May, he signed a bill discounting insurance for homeowners who install spray-foam insulation that was written by a chemical company struggling to sell spray-foam insulation. The company, Huntsman Corp., its CEO, Peter Huntsman, and his mother, Karen Huntsman, gave DeSantis’ campaign a combined $27,000 last year, and the company hired his ex-chief of staff and ex-economic development director to lobby for the bill.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis delivers remarks at the 2022 CPAC conference at the Rosen Shingle Creek in Orlando, Thursday, February 24, 2022. (Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel)
Orlando Sentinel via Getty Images
Even DeSantis’ messaging bills tend to serve his biggest backers. A key bill DeSantis rammed through the legislature this year prohibits Florida’s public pensions and state-held funds from taking ESG (environmental, social and governance) factors into consideration before investing. ESG investing is a recurring villain in DeSantis’ “war on woke”; at press conferences, he sometimes appears under banners bearing inscrutable catchphrases like “Government of Laws. Not woke CEOs.” But the law serves a second purpose. It also contains a provision that would specifically punish banks that have refused to do business with the GEO Group, a Florida-based private prison contractor and one of DeSantis’ earliest and most steadfast donors.
It didn’t start out this way, with DeSantis openly picking his state’s winners and losers. His path to the Governor’s Mansion ran through a grinding 2018 primary campaign in which nearly every Florida politician and industry association of note supported his main opponent, Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam. After defeating Putnam, DeSantis won the general election by the thinnest of margins, beating Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum by less than half a percentage point.
He used his first year in office to broaden his appeal, seeking funds to raise teacher pay and restore the Florida Everglades, and appointing Democrats to his administration. He deliberately stopped appearing on Fox News, where he had been a bellicose fixture throughout the campaign.
The kinds of political favors he granted were business-as-usual for a state that had always been friendly to its business lobby. The first significant tax legislation he signed — a $2.8 billion reduction in the state’s corporate income taxes — simply continued the cuts negotiated under his Republican predecessor, Gov. Rick Scott. DeSantis even abandoned key parts of his agenda when they conflicted with corporate interests, like when he scrapped a campaign promise to force all Florida employers to adopt E-Verify and check employees’ immigration status.
Privately, though, DeSantis had a plan.
Two weeks after he was sworn in as governor, his campaign already had a strategy for raising donations from high rollers around the country. A private memo, drafted by the fundraising consultant for his Friends of Ron DeSantis organization and uncovered by the Tampa Bay Times, proposed that his first year in office be loaded with “intimate and high dollar gatherings” at donors’ homes and nine-hole, one-on-one rounds of golf for which contributors would be expected to pay $100,000. “This timeframe is relatively aggressive because it is the governor’s desire to fundraise and maintain a high political profile at all times ― inside and outside of Florida,” Susie Wiles, his then-campaign manager, wrote in an email presenting the plan to the governor’s staff.
Fundraising has always been DeSantis’ forte. “You’re talking about a politician whose almost singular skill and dedication is the money chase,” said David Jolly, a former Republican representative from Florida who ascended to Congress around the same time as DeSantis. “It was incredible to see his success because he was a safe freshman in a Republican district, and here he was nationally fundraising with some of the biggest Republican donors — the Ricketts, the Adelsons, you can go down the list — because he was a man in a hurry.”
As governor, he honed this into a science. His in-state travel, the memo urged, should sync up with when ultra-wealthy snowbirds flocked to their homes on Hobe Sound and John’s Island. If he traveled to a fundraiser out of state — he had invitations from Republican mega-donors in Texas, Nevada and New York — DeSantis ought to demand a minimum commitment of $250,000.
Wiles denied to the Times that DeSantis executed the plan, but the facts suggest otherwise. Campaign finance records from his first year in office show he routinely raised six figures in a single day, from just a few wealthy donors at a time. About half of his campaign contributions came from onetime supporters of Putnam. Just a few weeks into his term, Duke Energy was pledging $100,000 for three of its lobbyists to play golf with DeSantis on Biscayne Bay. (“All political contributions made by Duke Energy come from shareholders, not customers,” Shawna Berger, a Duke spokesperson, said in response. Other donors mentioned in this story did not return requests for comment.)
For the eye-popping sums he commanded, DeSantis often spent just a single hour with his benefactors. Supporters have complained over the years that he is impersonal, irritable and downright rude. “He’s a block of wood,” said a longtime Florida insider, when I asked how DeSantis acts in a room full of donors.
Charm was simply not necessary. Along with his fundraising objectives, DeSantis entered office with a tactical plan to accumulate more executive power than any governor preceding him. “One of my first orders of business after getting elected was to have my transition team amass an exhaustive list of all the constitutional, statutory, and customary powers of the governor,” he wrote in “The Courage to Be Free.” “I wanted to be sure that I was using every lever available to advance our priorities.”
“It is the governor’s desire to fundraise and maintain a high political profile at all times ― inside and outside of Florida.”
The sudden emergence of COVID-19 in early 2020 gave DeSantis an unexpected opportunity to speed-run his plans. Even among Republicans, he distinguished himself for his willingness to politicize a sweeping health emergency. He ended virtually all public safety precautions after just three weeks of lockdowns — declaring, “We will never do any of these lockdowns again” — and resumed his Fox News appearances in order to rail against school closures and, later, mandatory vaccinations. When local leaders tried to impose mask mandates, he signed an executive order invalidating them.
Many governors during that time brought their legislatures into special session, giving elected representatives the ability to help shape extraordinary COVID-era policymaking. Not DeSantis. Instead, he seized total power to set the state’s masking policies and dole out federal COVID funding himself. “The legislature let the governor run roughshod during the state of emergency,” said Anders Croy, communications director for Florida Watch, a progressive organization. The balance of power has never recovered. “Since then, the governor has essentially ruled by administrative fiat.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis vows to keep restaurants open during COVID-19 at a news conference on Dec. 15, 2020, at Okeechobee Steakhouse in West Palm Beach, Florida. DeSantis and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are sparring over the transporting of migrants to California authorized by DeSantis. (Michael Laughlin/South Florida Sun Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
South Florida Sun-Sentinel via Getty Images
The pandemic forged the belligerent, autocratic DeSantis who runs Florida today. Before, there was always a give and take. The state House and Senate had their priorities, and the governor had his priorities and there was friendly horse-trading. (Republicans have held a trifecta in Florida for 24 out of the last 25 years.) “It is completely different right now,” Croy said. “The fact that everything comes from the plaza level” — meaning, the governor’s office on the Plaza Floor of the state Capitol — “and they’re dictating 90% of the agenda is an absolute flip of how it used to be.”
Now Republicans wanting to vote no on DeSantis-backed legislation had to obtain permission. He had become a household name and a right-wing folk hero, and any lawmaker who put a toe out of line would pay. Using the 2022 elections as a live threat — the governor was hand-selecting midterm candidates to run for the legislature and even local school boards — DeSantis rammed through a bevy of laws that raised his national profile while targeting and immiserating minorities, such as the “Don’t Say Gay” ban on classroom discussions of gender identity and sexual orientation and a ban on the teaching of critical race theory.
“There is no acceptance of the idea of opposition,” said a longtime political organizer who requested anonymity for all the reasons just laid out.“I’ve been around this for a very long time, and this feels different. He shook the shit out of all of them. What is very clear is, from the very top, there is an agenda, and if you fucked with that agenda, it’s ‘I’m going to fuck with you.’”
When Disney Didn’t Get In Line
“Florida is becoming a testing grounds to see how far people will go,” said Sheena Rolle, the senior director of strategy for Florida Rising. “Did he invent crony capitalism? No, but he is a test of ‘Can he get away with being so blatant?’”
The pandemic unleashed this side of DeSantis, too. Early in his first term, DeSantis stacked state boards, commissions and task forces with more campaign donors than did his predecessors. But it was in the years after the pandemic when the list of favors DeSantis doled out became truly staggering.
In 2021, he signed a $2.6 billion corporate tax cut that shifted the burden of refilling the state’s unemployment fund, which had been devastated by COVID, off of Florida’s largest employers and onto ordinary shoppers via an internet sales tax. For the year 2021, the top 100 employers would have owed $193 million more in unemployment taxes if the law hadn’t been in place.
His administration approved a $16.5 million state grant to upgrade a vehicle import facility a few weeks before the owner, JM Family, gave his political committee $200,000. A lottery vendor that gave DeSantis $125,000 was awarded a multimillion-dollar state gaming contract by a DeSantis appointee. The owner of a Key West cruise ship pier donated just shy of $1 million to Friends of Ron DeSantis before the governor signed a law overturning Key West’s ban on cruise ship docking.
“There is no acceptance of the idea of opposition.”
Rob Walton, whose family owns Walmart and is one of the wealthiest families on the planet, donated $25,000 to DeSantis in April, just days before he signed the first of two new laws that were privately championed by a law firm handling the Waltons’ fortune. The laws increased secrecy around family trusts incorporated and permitted trusts, which the ultra-wealthy use to pass on tax-free inheritances, to exist for 1,000 years. Another law he signed raised the commission that grocery stores and gas stations pocket anytime they sell a lottery ticket. Two of the biggest beneficiaries were Publix, the grocery store giant that has donated $150,000 to DeSantis since he became governor, and Sunshine gas station, whose parent company owns a pair of jets it lends free to DeSantis.
Into this ongoing power trip walked Disney.
It was summer 2022, and the Florida Legislature was on the verge of passing the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, an open assault on LGBTQ+ teachers and students. “Acceptance and understanding in the classroom promote compassion and kindness,” said one Tampa Bay high school teacher. The law would create “a world where their identities are summarily erased.” Among the fearful and outraged were Disney’s 75,000-plus Florida employees and their families. Disney’s then-CEO, Bob Chapek, opted to stay silent until after the bill had passed and all that was missing was DeSantis’ signature. Then he broke his silence and said Disney opposed the bill and was pausing all of Disney’s Florida political donations.
“People forget: They closed the faucet,” said state Rep. Anna Eskamani (D).Disney had made $1 million in contributions to Florida Republicans in 2020. DeSantis was up for reelection in November and entering the most high-stakes fundraising period to date of his political career, the one that would tee him up to challenge Trump. By this time, he had raised $100 million to face an uncontested primary and a field of weak Democrats — “a gaudy figure,” the Sarasota Herald-Tribune called it, traceable to how boldly DeSantis was rewarding his contributors.
Disney itself had enjoyed countless special favors. Just a year before the “Don’t Say Gay” law, the DeSantis administration had worked to exempt the Disney+ streaming platform from a tech regulation bill. Now here was Disney thinking it could threaten him.
In his memoir, he recalled giving Chapek a counter-warning: “You will end up putting yourself in an untenable position.”
Weeks later, DeSantis announced lawmakers would consider a proposal, previously relegated to the libertarian edge of his party, to dissolve the special tax district that allows Disney to self-govern its Florida theme parks. Known then as the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the arrangement allows Disney to avoid many state regulations, raise money using tax-exempt bonds and generally save millions of dollars a year. There are hundredsof special tax districts across Florida, each costing the state revenue, but DeSantis was only interested in attacking this one.
Not even Disney seemed to realize how hellbent he was on getting retribution. When the bill came up for debate, allies with the Associated Industries of Florida and the Florida Chamber of Commerce sat in the back rows, silent. “The thinking at the time was, he’ll do this, he’ll get some headlines, it’ll go away,” said someone familiar with their thinking. His relentlessness also stunned many Florida Republicans, who have worked hand-in-glove with Disney for decades. “I can’t tell you how many Republican legislators there are in the House and Senate who openly behind-the-scenes” — openly behind-the-scenes! — “mock the governor for this fight with Disney,” said a Republican consultant in Florida who requested anonymity.
LAKE BUENA VISTA, FL – JUNE 3: A “Don’t Say DeSantis” t-shirt at Disney World’s Magic Kingdom on Saturday, June 3, 2023 in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. “Gay Days” at Disney began three decades ago and is one of the nation’s largest Pride Month events. (Photo by Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
The Washington Post via Getty Images
Jolly, the former Republican congressman, said they were missing the point. Grievance politicians have no predictable allies, only temporary friends and enemies. “Trump has ushered in a post-ideological party, and DeSantis is a perfect example of that.”
At the signing of the 2022 state budget, DeSantis line-item vetoed millions in funding for his fellow Florida Republicans’ personal passion projects. He said he was targeting “pork” spending. Around the same time, he approved a sales tax exemption for tickets to Formula One Grand Prix races. The tax break was sought by Steve Ross, the billionaire owner of Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium, who had donated $100,000 to DeSantis one month earlier.
The way that DeSantis has tried to resolve his fight with Disney is telling. (The company and DeSantis are now locked in a legal battle.) A series of laws he signed this year requires the company to answer to a handpicked board of cultural warriors but leaves its tax-exempt status and ability to raise revenue through tax-exempt bonds, which has saved the company millions of dollars, intact. They made Disney weaker mainly insofar as it has to answer to him.
By the time his first term ended, DeSantis had a gigantic seed fund for his presidential ambitions. The Herald-Tribune’s political editor counted 42 billionaires among DeSantis’ donors. (You can add one more to the list: Records show that Todd Wagner, who co-owns 2929 Entertainment with Mark Cuban, is linked to a limited liability company that donated $300,000 to DeSantis a week after his reelection.)
His top donor, the Republican Governors Association, took in millions from companies with business before the state of Florida — such as Florida Power & Light, which benefited from DeSantis administration-approved consumer rate hikes. He cruised to reelection in November having raised $217 million, more money than any governor in U.S. history.
“They’re all saying the quiet part out loud; there’s no effort to hide it. It’s just all out in the open.”
And he never stopped passing the hat. Members of his administration were texting lobbyists for contributions to his presidential campaign, NBC reported, during the weeks when DeSantis could line-item veto their clients’ political priorities. In addition to the $82.5 million he transferred into his presidential super PAC, his super PAC had separately raised $30 million as of April. (The group will not have to disclose its donors until July 1.)
“Under his administration, crony capitalism has just been given full license,” said Rich Templin, the director of politics and public policy for the Florida AFL-CIO. “They’re all saying the quiet part out loud; there’s no effort to hide it. It’s just all out in the open.”
Whether or not average Floridians are tracking these feudal machinations, they are probably feeling the effects. Last year, Realtor.com ranked Florida as the least affordable state in the country. Rents in all four of Florida’s major metro areas — Miami, Tampa, Orlando and Jacksonville — grew faster than the national average, with rent in some markets shooting up 31% and even 57% year over year. This year, Florida is one of the only places in the country where home prices are still rising. Meanwhile, home insurance prices surged 50% during DeSantis’ first term in office.
DeSantis’ answer to these crises is essentially to offer what the relevant industries want. After Hurricane Ian sent Florida’s insurance markets into a tailspin, he called a special session where lawmakers passed a $1 billion taxpayer-funded bailout of struggling insurers that didn’t put any brakes on insurance prices. “The industry got a wish list of reforms,” said Democratic state Rep. Hillary Cassel. “What have we done for consumers? Nothing. What have we done for insurance companies? Everything.” Florida insurance prices are projected to rise an additional 40% this year.
His moves to address the affordable housing crisis have won broader support but are also limited to market solutions. In the spring, he committed $711 million in incentives to homebuilders to construct badly needed worker housing. The same package prohibited local governments from regulating landlord-tenant agreements in any way. The law preempted rent control and other tenant-friendly measures passed in Democratic strongholds like Miami-Dade County, Pinellas County and St. Petersburg. In Orange County, where the average household spends 37% of its income on rent, the law preempted a ballot measure passed in November that would have temporarily capped rent increases at 9.8%.
“People are sleeping on their children’s couches, literal grown-ass women,” said Roxey Nelson, the executive vice president of 199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, the country’s largest healthcare workers union, who is also an Orlando area resident. David Maldonado, the pastor of Hablamos Español Florida, said members of his congregation have slept in their cars or rental storage units. “I know one woman, with two children, who spent a few nights in a U-Haul truck she rented to sleep in because she had no other option.”
Clouds Over DeSantis’ Sunshine State
DeSantis has a message for his haters: People love it here. He won reelection in a 19-percentage-point landslide and with a strong approval rating while thousands of others voted with their feet. “Florida is the fastest-growing state in the nation,” he said in March at his annual state of the state address. “We did it our way, the Florida way. And the result is that we are the number one destination for our fellow Americans who are looking for a better life.”
DeSantis didn’t invent moving to Florida. Its population has grown faster than the rest of the country in every decade since the 1950s — never faster than in the 1950s, at the dawn of the air conditioner. Still, he’s right. Florida grew about three times faster than the rest of the country from 2021 to 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, with most of its growth coming from the more than 444,000 new residents who were seduced by Florida’s permanent summer, lack of COVID restrictions or 0% income tax.
*Rent control advocates for Orange County demonstrate in front of the Florida Realtors office building Saturday, Oct. 22, 2022, in Orlando, Fla. (AP Photo/John Raoux)
Few people have relocated with as much fanfare as Ken Griffin, the CEO of the titanic hedge fund Citadel. In June 2022, Griffin announced that he was moving his family and the headquarters of his $59-billion-assets-under-management company from his longtime home of Chicago to Miami. Griffin had spent the months leading up to the announcement blasting Illinois leadership over Chicago’s crime rates. (In 2021, when he began complaining, overall crime in Chicago had actually fallen for three years running.) “If people aren’t safe here, they’re not going to live here,” he said. He called his new home “a vibrant, growing metropolis that embodies the American Dream.”
His move dovetailed nicely with the story DeSantis is telling — on the surface. Griffin, whose estimated net worth is more than $36.3 billion, had also just endured a bruising political loss. In Illinois’ gubernatorial primaries, he spent $50 million on a Republican who whimpered to a third-place finish. A Chicago Sun-Times headline dubbed it the “worst political investment in Illinois history.”
“He wasn’t going to have a future of control and influence, politically speaking, in Illinois,” said a source deeply rooted in Chicago’s business community — a reality check that just so happened to coincide with his decision to move to Florida.
When ordinary people daydream about moving to Florida, they think of sunshine, beaches and low taxes, said Croy, of Florida Watch. “When billionaires and large corporations look at Florida, they know they can increase their bottom lines and decrease workers’ wages and not have to worry about regulations from the government.” The latter group has done an extraordinary job of profiting off of the former. And for now, they rely almost entirely on DeSantis’ favor in order to do so.
But as the presidential campaign takes him further away from his power source, there is the possibility that his grip on power will weaken. A majority of Florida’s Republican caucus in Congress have endorsed Trump. His fear tactics don’t work as well on people without business before the state of Florida, and several major Wall Street donors have recoiled from his campaign as early polls show him losing to Trump. Suddenly, he’s not their only option.
Even Griffin is feeling fickle. As of last year, he was DeSantis’ largest donor, having given him more than $10 million, and he backed the idea of DeSantis running for president. But two sources said his enthusiasm waned after DeSantis signed Florida’s six-week abortion ban; he also reportedly disapproves of DeSantis’ opposition to military funding for Ukraine. (A spokesperson for Citadel did not respond to a request for comment.)
“Ultimately, what do people that wealthy want? Control,” said the Chicago source. Griffin blamed his move on crime, this person believed, because what else could he do? “He’s not going to say, I want to be the puppet master, so I’m moving to the place where there are more puppets.”
Will capital stay under Ron DeSantis’ thumb? Does it matter? A longtime Florida organizer told me her job from now until November 2024 is to “save the rest of the American populace from Ron DeSantis” — but even that might not constitute a victory. Win or lose, DeSantis is taking his brand of authoritarian capitalism on a national roadshow. What would stop a wised-up second Trump administration from copying the Florida way?
“A lot of us in Florida right now are just wondering when the cavalry is coming,” said the AFL-CIO’s Templin. “All of the book banning and privatization of public education — we really feel like we no longer live in the United States.”
In his nightmare scenario, Florida begins to feel familiar again because it’s the same as it is everywhere else.
When the closely watched Georgia Senate race went to a runoff, nonprofit organizations that educate voters strained to ramp up operations again after Election Day.
“It’s not just, ‘Find new canvassers and recruit new volunteers.’ It’s also, ‘Find new money,’” said Kendra Cotton, CEO of New Georgia Project — founded by Stacey Abrams, the Democrat who lost her second campaign to become the state’s governor last month. The project’s goal was to raise $1 million to inform voters about the runoff, help them find out where and how to vote through phone banking and text banking, as well as voter protection at the polls. As of Monday, they have raised $797,000.
Grassroots groups have missed the mark in educating donors, Cotton said, explaining that she’ll hear from even high dollar donors that they don’t need to donate to her group because they’ve already given to Abrams or to Democrat Sen. Raphael Warnock, who will take on Republican challenger Herschel Walker in the runoff.
Many don’t understand, she said, that their political donations do not trickle down and that grassroots nonprofits cannot work with campaigns or advocate for candidates.
However, the group believes their efforts are essential, especially in this case. Many voters don’t know there is a runoff and are confused about whether they are eligible to vote in it, Cotton said. Canvassers will say, “’Yes, ma’am or yes sir, you might have already voted on November 8th, but there is another election on December 6th,’ and they’re like, ‘What the hell? Between who?’” Cotton said.
In Georgia, where district boundaries and voting rules have changed since 2020, this kind of voter outreach and education is vitally important and not something most political campaigns focus on, she said. Her organization put together a map of the hours and locations of early voting sites in every county, which numerous other nonprofits are using.
Other grassroots organizations like Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta are also involved in voter education, targeting what Phi Nguyen, the organization’s executive director and a civil rights attorney, called “high potential, low propensity” voters, especially in Asian American and Latino communities.
“We will be knocking on doors, we’ll be texting, we’ll be phone banking, and we’ll be doing election protection,” said Nguyen, whose sister Bee Nguyen was the Democratic nominee for secretary of state in Georgia. In that race, the incumbent Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was reelected.
Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta also provide interpreters for people at polling sites in 10 counties, including five in the Atlanta area.
The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) support dozens of organizations like these in five southern states. In June 2020, SPLC announced it would grant $30 million from its endowment to fund grassroots organizations “to increase voter registration and participation among people of color with a lower propensity to vote.” Last December, it added another $100 million over 10 years, again from its endowment, to its Vote Your Voice grant program, which the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta is overseeing.
The project is part of SPLC’s mission of achieving racial justice in the South, said senior advisor Amy Dominguez-Arms. Contributions to SPLC more than doubled from 2016 to 2017, the year Donald Trump was elected president, from $58 million to $136 million according to nonprofit information source Candid.
Philanthropic funding for tax exempt nonprofits that do nonpartisan voter registration or mobilization is often concentrated in the two months before Election Day, but this support is long term. Participation in a democracy doesn’t just happen when it’s time to vote, Dominguez-Arms said.
Major philanthropic conveners like the Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation are encouraging donors who want to fund civic engagement or democracy portfolios to unlink their funding from the political calendar.
“Organizations, if they’re really going to be building civic engagement in democracy, small ‘d’ democracy, the money is needed year round,” said Paul Ryan, deputy executive director of the FCCP.
Political donations that are not tax exempt are also pouring into the Georgia runoff, even though Democratic control of the Senate is already decided. The IRS rules that govern nonprofit activity allow nonpartisan voter registration and mobilization as well as things like education on the voting process, creating candidate questionnaires and supporting or opposing ballot measures.
Nonprofits are prohibited from supporting political campaigns in any way whether that is through donations, the sharing of resources or written or verbal endorsement.
The rules for nonprofit activity around elections have come under scrutiny especially after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan made a $400 million donation in 2020 to two nonprofits that then granted funds to help elections officials administer the vote during the pandemic when neither vaccines nor effective treatments were available.
Lawson Bader, president and CEO of DonorsTrust, whose mission is to safeguard the philanthropic intent of self-described conservative and libertarian donors, said his organization hasn’t tracked an increase in donations around the midterms, though he wouldn’t be surprised if there was more interest in helping elections become more efficient.
He said it’s worrisome that frustration with money’s influence in politics has spilled over from the world of political action committees and 501(c)4 nonprofits, whose work is not tax exempt, into nonpartisan work.
“I don’t think anyone disagrees that it would be great if this didn’t have to be philanthropy and it could be resourced through the government. But unfortunately, that’s not where we’re at,” said Ashley Spillane, senior advisor at Power the Polls, an initiative that started in 2020 to help recruit poll workers when the pandemic was keeping many, especially older poll workers, from participating.
Her organization recruited potential poll workers on Election Day this year and is continuing to recruit for the runoff in Georgia.
Voters have less than three weeks to receive and return absentee ballots and at least five days of early voting during the last week of November. That’s a narrow timeframe, Spillane said.
“Voters in Georgia are going to have to show up to polling locations,” Spillane said. “And making sure that they are incredibly well staffed and that there aren’t any gaps or polling location closure closings is absolutely critical in an election like that.”
The Warnock campaign sued successfully to allow for early voting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, though only some decided to open polling stations that day, leading to long lines and hours-long waits.
Political affiliations vary among the communities that Nguyen’s organization reaches, she said, given the range of ethnicities, languages and migration backgrounds that shape people’s worldviews.
“When we’re out there doing nonpartisan voter registration and getting out the vote, it really could be that the person is voting for anyone,” she said, adding, “It’s absolutely a nonpartisan issue to want every Georgian and every eligible voter to be able to access the ballot.”
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Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.
ATLANTA — Jane Fonda says the work of the Georgia-based nonprofit organization she founded to prevent teenage pregnancies has become “far more important” in the months since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to abortion it guaranteed to women in the United States.
The activist and Oscar winner has been an outspoken critic of the court’s decision, previously calling it “unconscionable.”
While a post-Roe world will be harder on girls because they are the ones who would have to carry a baby, the work to fight teen pregnancy must also focus on adolescent boys, said Fonda, who was in Atlanta for a fundraiser Thursday to celebrate the 27th anniversary of the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Power & Potential.
“We have to help our boys understand that they don’t have to get a girl pregnant to be men, that being a real man means taking care of yourself, respecting your body and the body of your partner,” Fonda told The Associated Press. “Things are much, much harder for boys and girls now and, so, teaching them skills around their reproductive health, how to stay healthy, how to stay pregnancy-free, how to say no, how to have agency over their body, these things are more important than ever.”
Fonda, 84, founded the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention in 1995 when she lived in Atlanta and when Georgia had the highest teenage birth rate in the United States.
In 2012, the organization changed its name and expanded its mission beyond teenage pregnancy prevention to include nutrition and physical activity. The group says its programs now reach more than 60,000 young people every year.
“We have to educate them about how their bodies work so that they will know how to protect themselves,” Fonda said. “We have to help young people see that they have a future that will be productive, that they can work for – towards, that they can reach towards – and getting in trouble when they’re a teenager and having a baby when you’re very young will make reaching for that future that much harder.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, the birth rate for 15- to 19-year-olds in the United States in 2020 was down 8% from the previous year and down 75% from its peak in 1991.
Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana have the highest teenage birth rates in the U.S. Birth rates also remain higher among Native American, Hispanic and Black teenagers.
Fonda served as GCAPP’s chair until she moved from Atlanta to Los Angeles in 2010.
NEW YORK — A Colorado businessman returns to New York Monday for a retrial on charges that he cheated thousands of donors to a $25 million online crowdfunding “We Build The Wall” campaign to construct a wall along the southern U.S. border.
Timothy Shea’s first trial ended in early June without a verdict when jurors informed the judge that continuing to deliberate would leave them “further entrenched in our opposing views.”
The case once included as a defendant Steve Bannon, a onetime top adviser to former President Donald Trump. Trump pardoned Bannon just before leaving office last year. Two others charged in the case pleaded guilty.
The deadlocked jury came days after 11 jurors sent a note to the judge claiming one juror was politically biased against the government and in favor of Shea after labeling the rest of them as liberals and complaining the trial should have been held in a southern state.
Jury selection in the second trial begins Monday morning in a Manhattan federal court.
Last month, Judge Analisa Torres rejected Shea’s request to move the trial to Colorado on the grounds that “political polarization” in New York and publicity about his first trial made it impossible for him to get a fair result in Manhattan.
She wrote that a jury note in his first trial might have indicated that differences in political opinions affected the jury’s deliberations, but he had not shown that those differences reflected a prejudice against him. And she said he had not explained why “political polarization” would be less pronounced in Colorado or anywhere else.
Shea, of Castle Rock, Colorado, has pleaded not guilty to conspiracy and falsification of records charges lodged against him after questions arose over how donations were spent from a campaign that raised about $25 million for a wall. Only a few miles of wall were built.
Prosecutors said Shea and other fund organizers promised investors that all donations would fund a wall, but Shea and the others eventually pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars for themselves.
Shea’s lawyers said he acted honorably in the fundraising campaign and did not commit a crime.
Shea owns an energy drink company, Winning Energy, whose cans have featured a cartoon superhero image of Trump and claim to contain “12 oz. of liberal tears.”
SAN DIEGO — Two years ago, California banned flavored tobacco products such as menthol cigarettes and cotton candy vaping juice, arguing that they mostly attracted kids and were especially dangerous amid the coronavirus pandemic when youth deaths spiked from respiratory complications.
But the law never took effect. Tobacco giants, including R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and Philip Morris USA, spent $20 million on a campaign that gathered enough signatures to put the issue to the voters.
Californians now will decide on the Nov. 8 statewide ballot whether to toss out the law or keep it.
The issue has set off a fierce fight. The tobacco companies are pushing hard to keep from being shut out of a large portion of California’s vast market. Meanwhile, supporters of the ban, who include doctors, child welfare advocates and the state’s dominant Democratic Party, say the law is necessary to put a stop to the staggering rise in teen smoking.
However, the California Republican Party wants to repeal the law, saying it would cause a giant loss in tax revenue. The independent Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates it could cost the state tens of millions of dollars to around $100 million annually.
If voters approve, California would become the second state in the nation to enact such a ban after Massachusetts. A number of cities, including Los Angeles and San Diego, have already enacted their own bans.
It’s already illegal for retailers to sell tobacco to anyone under 21. But advocates of the ban say flavored cigarettes and vaping cartridges are still too easy for teens to obtain. The ban wouldn’t make it a crime to possess such products, but retailers who sold them to kids could be fined up to $250.
The ban, which passed the Legislature with bipartisan support, would also prohibit the sale of pods for vape pens, tank-based systems and chewing tobacco, with exceptions made for hookahs, some cigars and loose-leaf tobacco.
The tobacco industry’s campaign has painted the ban as being especially bad for Black and Latino people, who use menthol at higher rates than others.
“It’s unfair for communities of color. Bad law. Bad consequences,” said one online banner ad paid for by RAI Services, a subsidiary of Reynolds American, which is the parent company of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco.
But the ads drew a backlash from some Black leaders who call the campaign offensive.
“I am insulted that the tobacco industry would make an effort to make us believe that mentholated cigarettes are part of African American culture, and that this is a discriminatory piece of legislation against Black people,” then-Assemblywoman Shirley Weber said before the Legislature voted on the ban. Weber, a San Diego Democrat who chaired the California Legislative Black Caucus, is now California’s secretary of state.
So far the campaign to allow the law to take effect has raised more than $6 million, nearly four times more than the effort to stop it, according to state campaign finance records.
Some small neighborhood market owners favor repealing the law, calling it another blow to their businesses as they struggle to recover from a drop in sales during the pandemic.
ISLAMABAD — Pakistan pushed back Saturday against a comment by President Joe Biden in which he called the South Asian country “one of the most dangerous nations in the world.”
Biden was at an informal fundraising dinner at a private residence in Los Angeles on Thursday sponsored by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee when he made the comment. Speaking about China and its leader Xi Jinping, he pondered the U.S.’s role in relation to China as it grapples with its positions on Russia, India and Pakistan.
“How do we handle that?” he said, according to a transcript on the White House web page. “How do we handle that relative to what’s going on in Russia? And what I think is maybe one of the most dangerous nations in the world: Pakistan. Nuclear weapons without any cohesion.”
Pakistan’s current prime minister and two former prime ministers rejected the statement as baseless, and the country’s acting foreign secretary summoned the U.S. ambassador on Saturday for an explanation of Biden’s remarks.
“Pakistan’s disappointment and concern was conveyed to the US envoy on the unwarranted remarks, which were not based on ground reality or facts,” said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari said earlier in Karachi that he believed it was the sort of misunderstanding that was created when there was a lack of engagement, apparently referring to the former government of Imran Khan and its perceived lack of engagement in international diplomacy.
“When Pakistan has nuclear assets we know how to keep them safe and secure, how to protect them as well,” Zardari said.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif in a statement rejected Biden’s remarks calling them factually incorrect and misleading. He said Pakistan over the years has proved itself to be a responsible nuclear state, and its nuclear program is managed through a technically sound command and control system. He pointed to Pakistan’s commitment to global standards including those of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Sharif said Pakistan and the U.S. have a long history of friendly and mutually beneficial relations. “It is our sincere desire to cooperate with the U.S. to promote regional peace and security,” he said.
Zardari, speaking to reporters, said if there is any question about nuclear weapons security in the region, it should be raised with Pakistan’s nuclear-armed neighbor, India. He said India recently fired a missile that landed accidentally in Pakistan.
Pakistan and India have been arch-rivals since their independence from British rule in 1947. They have bitter relations over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, which is divided between them and claimed by both in its entirety. They fought two of their three wars over Kashmir.
Two former prime minsters took to Twitter to respond to Biden’s comments.
Former premier Nawaz Sharif, the current prime minister’s brother, said Pakistan is a responsible nuclear state that is perfectly capable of safeguarding its national interests while respecting international law and practices. Pakistan became a nuclear state in 1998 when Sharif was in power for the second time.
“Our nuclear program is in no way a threat to any country. Like all independent states, Pakistan reserves the right to protect its autonomy, sovereign statehood and territorial integrity,” he said.
Former premier Imran Khan tweeted that Biden is wrong about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, saying he knows for a fact that they are secure. “Unlike US which has been involved in wars across the world, when has Pakistan shown aggression especially post-nuclearization ?”
Khan was ousted in April in a no-confidence vote in parliament and has put forward, without giving evidence, a claim that he was ousted as the result of a U.S.-led plot involving Sharif. The U.S. and Sharif deny the accusation.
Zardari noted that Biden’s statement was not made at any formal platform like a news conference but at an informal fundraising dinner. “I don’t believe it negatively impacts the relations between Pakistan and the U.S.,” he said.
Pakistan and the U.S. have been traditional allies but their relations have been bumpy at times. Pakistan served as a front-line state in the U.S.-led war on terror following the 9/11 attacks. But relations soured after U.S. Navy Seals killed al-Qaeda leader and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden at a compound in the garrison city of Abbottabad, not far from Pakistan’s military academy in May 2011.
NEW YORK — Former President Donald Trump on Monday sued CNN, seeking $475 million in damages, saying the network had defamed him in an effort to short-circuit any future political campaign.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, focuses primarily on the term “The Big Lie” about Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud that he says cost him the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden.
CNN said it had no comment on the lawsuit.
Trump repeatedly attacked CNN as president, which resonated with his conservative followers. He has similarly filed lawsuits against big tech companies with little success. His case against Twitter for knocking him off its platform following the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection was thrown out by a California judge earlier this year.
Numerous federal and local election officials in both parties, a long list of courts, top former campaign staffers and even Trump’s own attorney general have all said there is no evidence of the election fraud he alleges.
Trump’s lawsuit claims “The Big Lie,” a phrase with Nazi connotations, has been used in reference to him more than 7,700 times on CNN since January 2021.
“It is intended to aggravate, scare and trigger people,” he said.
In a statement Monday, Trump suggested that similar lawsuits would be filed against other news organizations. And he said he may also bring “appropriate action” against the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by his supporters. The lawsuit comes as he is weighing a potential bid for the presidency in 2024.
New CNN chief Chris Licht privately urged his news personnel in a meeting more than three months ago to refrain from using the phrase because it is too close to Democratic efforts to brand the former president, according to several published reports.
Jumbo is providing an industry-leading virtual event platform to live broadcast the anticipated annual event
Press Release –
Mar 31, 2022
CHARLOTTE, N.C., March 31, 2022 (Newswire.com)
– Event technology startup, Jumbo, announces its latest political partnership with the Hawai’i Democratic Party (HDP), where it will be building the virtual component of the party’s hybrid state party convention in May. Jumbo deploys custom virtual event platforms for enterprise organizations of all sizes.
“We are excited to partner with Jumbo to create our most accessible state party convention yet,” says Tyler Dos Santos-Tam, Party Chair for the Hawai’i Democratic Party. “By using a custom-built digital ecosystem through Jumbo, we will be able to cultivate an online atmosphere that feels just as welcoming as our state and just as powerful as our mission, all the while remaining easy to use for attendees.”
This is not Jumbo’s first partnership with a political party, as the scrappy tech company is coming off the heels of its November event supporting the North Carolina Democratic Party, where they designed a branded and fully-integrated platform that hosts webinars, meetings and conventions. “Through the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic, we found that every industry, politics especially, needs a solution to safely host their events while still finding innovative ways to engage their participants. Jumbo has revolutionized virtual events and through the course of our tenure, we’ve built the ideal platform to achieve our client’s goals,” says Justin Ritchie, CEO of Jumbo.
While some of the attendees will be partaking in the Hawai’i Democratic Party State Convention in person in Honolulu, virtual participants will be joining via a custom branded platform built by Jumbo. In addition to hosting a live broadcast of the event, this digital ecosystem will also be home to pre-recorded videos for attendees to watch at their leisure and PDF documents outlining initiatives that require votes. Further, the branded platform will host a live chat feature, a directory of attendees, individual user profiles, an integrated registration system and voting capabilities.
“Our goal with the hybrid events that we support is to give our attendees the opportunity to experience the event, not watch other attendees experience it. That’s what sets Jumbo apart from other event hosting platforms,” says Dion Beary, Director of Business Development for Jumbo. He adds, “We are thrilled to continue our work supporting parties, candidates and event organizers who wish to use virtual events to engage their communities.”
About Jumbo:
Jumbo is an event technology company specializing in building virtual event platforms. Jumbo has revolutionized the virtual event industry by building custom virtual platforms for enterprise projects and providing its clients with the opportunity for a completely ownable platform with the flexibility and features they deserve.
