Democrats lost 2024 — but their ‘charities’ won

The 2024 election was miserable for the Democratic Party. Enthusiasm was flat, voters checked out, and traditional Democratic fundraising was down 30% after inflation, compared to the 2020 cycle. But one piece of the operation did not just survive the year. It thrived. And it looks poised to be brighter still in 2026.The bright spot is the sprawling, little-known network of tax-exempt “charities” that Democrats have desperately depended on for voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives for more than two decades. Call it what it is: the tax-exempt vote machine. It is one of the largest and most scandal-prone political operations in America. And 2024 was its best fundraising year ever.According to Capital Research Center’s latest special report, more than 80 left-wing groups doing primarily get-out-the-vote work raised nearly $640 million in 2024. That represents a 10% gain over 2020 after adjusting for inflation. Traditional Democratic fundraising over the same span saw revenues fall by roughly 30%. Charitable voter engagement is legal only when it is nonpartisan. The problem is the widening gap between what IRS rules stipulate and what a subset of these groups really do.Democrats and their donors know the “nonpartisan” label on many of these outfits is camouflage. That is precisely why they use them. The IRS insists that charitable voter engagement must be nonpartisan in both intent and effect, yet a Democratic Super PAC was caught telling donors that “nonpartisan” voter registration targeting “underrepresented” communities is “four to ten times more cost-effective” at “netting additional Democratic votes” than traditional campaign spending.The DNC’s autopsy of the 2024 election, the document meant to explain what went wrong, repeatedly credits the “soft-side” groups, “outside organizations,” “state tables,” and “partners” who did the organizing and voter registration work. It even acknowledges that “funding restrictions” prevent these groups from “associating themselves with the word Democrat.” The party knows what these groups are and how badly it needs them, even though the law says they cannot say this out loud.The vote machine’s 2024 growth wasn’t an accident. A campaign called All by April, spearheaded by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, pushed other wealthy donors to move their money to get-out-the-vote charities early, by April, so the groups could operate at full capacity through Election Day. By the campaign’s own count, it steered $155 million into nonprofit turnout operations in early 2024. A recent LinkedIn post from All by April shows the effort is not just alive in 2026 but growing. It has already directed $268 million this cycle. That is a 72% jump in a midterm election year.Set the data points side by side: Traditional Democratic fundraising floundered in 2024, while the tax-exempt vote machine set records. All by April’s 2026 midterm election haul is already dwarfing its last presidential year total. The pattern is clear, which raises at least three concerns for American politics.First, these groups keep getting caught breaking the rules. The pressure to deliver partisan results has produced scandal after scandal. The Voter Participation Center was caught filtering its Facebook ads to avoid registering likely Republicans. Consultants for the Everybody Votes campaign were caught submitting thousands of fraudulent voter registrations in both Michigan and Pennsylvania. The New Georgia Project was hit with the largest state ethics fine in Georgia history for illicit partisan campaigning. The Ohio Organizing Collaborative was raided by the FBI as part of an investigation into fraudulent voter registrations. And Capital Research Center’s own investigations have shown that Everybody Votes was concocted in the email chains of seasoned Democratic operatives, including John Podesta and a representative of Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss.Second, the structure creates an enormous cost asymmetry between the parties. The tax-exempt vote machine lets Democratic donors give to “charities,” saving big with tax deductions and also enjoying anonymity. The Republican side has nothing remotely comparable. Worse, IRS enforcement has for years allowed left-wing 501(c)(3) charities to operate as if electing Democrats were itself a tax-exempt purpose, while conservative 501(c)(4) advocacy groups — which are legally permitted to help elect Republicans — have been investigated or shut down. Look no further than the Lois Lerner scandal of the Obama era, which prevented hundreds of conservative (c)(4) groups from engaging in 2012 and possibly cost Republicans the presidency, or the Biden administration’s pressure campaign against conservative nonprofit organizations. Third, charities face none of the donor restrictions PACs do. A foreign billionaire or a foreign government cannot legally contribute a penny to a PAC, party, or campaign. They can contribute unlimited amounts to a charity. That is not a theoretical loophole. Wyss’s role in Everybody Votes is a concrete example.BREAD LINES OR BREAD WINNING? THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S FATAL LEFTWARD DRIFTThe tools to address this already exist. Consistent enforcement of the nonpartisanship rules the IRS has on the books, and meaningful state-level oversight of groups that keep landing in trouble, would each address a different piece of the problem. Whether any of these tools are used is a separate question. What the record shows is straightforward. The tax-exempt vote machine grew during an election in which its Democratic allies struggled to raise funds, and it’s on track to grow even larger in a midterm year when Democratic fundraising is still lagging behind. Put simply, tax-exempt charities are becoming a larger and larger portion of the Democrat machine. That is the fact pattern. The public and policymakers will have to decide what, if anything, to do about it.Parker Thayer is an Investigative Researcher at Capital Research Center.