Billionaire donors & political adversaries join forces to transform politics in post-COVID America

On April 24, the day the U.S. death toll from coronavirus topped 50,000, I joined a dozen billionaire political donors gathered by video including business leaders, foundation chiefs, scientists, advocates, and political strategists to discuss a bold plan called IN THIS TOGETHER, to transform the business of politics in post-COVID America.

The group was convened by my friend and Dallas real estate scion Trammell S. Crow, to bring together major donors to both parties, in a rare effort to reduce political polarization and work across partisan lines to solve problems like climate change. These donors and their peers are expected to contribute $30 billion to presidential campaigns this year, often against each other, in a political arms race that shows no signs of abating. Crow’s objective: to reduce the spend on political warfare, and redirect billions toward solutions that can unite a governing majority of Americans from the left to right.

“We can’t meet this crisis or any future one as a divided nation,” Crow reminded us. “We’re not enemies. We’re a family with differences to work through. Polarization is our real enemy.” 

For ten years, Crow and other high net worth donors in the virtual room had invested well over $100 million on a variety of strategies to help reunite Americans on issues like the environment, education, and democracy reform. Most of the time, they failed - polarization and gridlock are built too deep in today's politics and media.

But at this April 24 meeting, two sets of donors reported on successful models they had separately developed, to win elections and advance causes not by dividing Americans into polarized silos on the far left and right, but by helping them unite across the broad mainstream.  

Their strategies mark a departure from politics-as-usual, where strategists target easy-to-trigger voters at the extreme ends of the spectrum, then add on less strident supporters who are more repelled by the other side’s extremists than their own.

Digital media and big data have intensified the divide. By identifying the biggest fears and deepest prejudices of specific voter segments, strategists can trigger such repulsion at one candidate that voters will readily support the lesser of two evils. That drives turnout among hardened ideologues. But it divides and marginalizes the 70% broad middle - the 7 in 10 voters who are partisan but pragmatic. Most strategists discount them because they are less dogmatic and harder to trigger than those with fixed opinions. It’s simply more cost-effective to motivate the hard-core left to vote down the hard-core right, and vice-versa. Even if they’re frustrated with their own standard-bearers, there’s no question which party’s candidate they’ll vote for. 

That strategy drives revenue for pollsters, messengers, and strategists on both sides. But it accelerates a political arms race that is driving campaign costs to astronomical heights.  

More worrisome, our current political trends undermine those who would rather solve problems than sow discord. It elects candidates dependent on vested interests for dollars and true-believers for votes. Constrained by these two forces, it’s practically impossible for them to legislate. Bipartisan agreements are mostly off the table. Politicians must speak to a base that demands change, while they act to protect a status quo that likes things much as they are.  

That makes genuine problem-solving difficult. Evidence-based reform - say, protecting the climate, improving schools, or preventing pandemics - requires massive investments by foundations and individual donors willing to outbid the interest groups and offset the ideologues just to get a fair hearing. 

But in California, one set of donors has taken a different approach. In campaigns for candidates and ballot measures, they don’t use trigger language or fear tactics to activate a narrow ideological base. Instead, they reach out to eight definable voter segments they call Solution Voters and focus on linking them together on common ground. In highly competitive races, the approach consistently draws at least 15% of once-partisan voters across party lines to elect problem-solvers over polarizers - an almost unheard-of shift.

The strategy of bringing together Solution Voters has helped pass ballot measures to end gerrymandering and open primaries in California, and was essential to the bipartisan agreement that renewed the state’s cap-and-trade climate law, despite intense opposition from ideologues on both sides. 

At more than twice the cost of triggering ideologues, Solution Voters used to be expensive to identify and mobilize. But “big data” is changing that. With sophisticated predictive modeling, strategists can identify Solution Voters with 87% accuracy. By reaching a few thousand in a competitive district, they have defeated better-funded but more polarizing candidates.

To take that capacity national, a second set of donors have built a database platform to mobilize voters they call “bridge-builders” and “problem-solvers.” Called Citizen, the database platform includes 270 million Americans, including all 240 million eligible voters, plus 30 million additional influencers. Backers plan to mobilize Solution Voters to swing primaries away from polarizers so that when voters mark their ballots in the general election, they have at least two problem-solving candidates to choose from.    

At the April 24 roundtable, these two donor communities and others joined forces to take their approach national. This fourth of July, we will be launching a cross-partisan recruitment campaign called IN THIS TOGETHER. Our audience includes 98 million voters dissatisfied with both parties - especially 45 million bridge-builders and 14 million problem-solvers. By growing a new base of Solution Citizens resistant to ideological litmus tests and interest group manipulation, they hope this new business model will elevate politics, and shift influence to the broad 70% base of voters ready to get things done.

Crow doesn’t fit the stereotype for a wealthy Texas political donor. He calls himself an “endangered species:” a Republican environmentalist. His biggest passion is EarthX, now the world’s largest environmental exhibition on the planet held each Earth Day in Dallas. Crow had planned his biggest EarthX yet this year in celebration of the fiftieth Earth Day. He wanted to prove that conservative middle Americans love the planet just as much as coastal progressives.

Then came COVID-19.  

Crow sees the pandemic through an ecological lens, as a warning sign of what happens when the planet’s life support systems are strained by the global economy that is too uniform, tightly-connected, and consumptive. Without the diversity to stop global contagions - biological, environmental, and digital - humanity can’t last long.

“The virus is a lesson from nature,” Crow and I write in our forthcoming book, In This Together. “If we ignore the lesson, and double-down on mass global consumerism, we will lose our prosperity, and miss our chance to step forward into a richer, more diverse, resilient, and lasting civilization.”

IN THIS TOGETHER launches on Independence Day July 4, with the book, online videos, social media campaign, and Declaration of Interdependence that recognizes the importance of combining the best qualities of the political right and left, to tackle causes ranging from COVID and climate change to education and justice reform to prosperity and job creation.

IN THIS TOGETHER

A declaration of our interdependence

We are all in this together. We are not all the same, but we are a family. We have our conflicts, but we are not at war. We respect our differences. They link us together and make us whole.  

It is in acts of caring, connection, and creation across all our differences that we repair our social fabric, weave the future we want, and find the meaning and purpose in our lives.  

We resolve to unite across our differences, and reclaim a democracy of, by, and for the people, following four Guiding Principles:

• No Enemies – we work through our conflicts to find solutions.
• No Denial – we face facts, discuss our differences, and resolve them
• No Excuses – we each do our part – every citizen, leader, and business
• No Delay – we each take action together, now

Join us. Let’s go there together. 

Sign the Declaration of Interdependence today.

NOTE: The declaration and its signatories will be unveiled this July 4th, along with the book I co-authored with Trammel S. Crow, In This Together: How Republicans, Democrats, Capitalists, and Activists are Uniting to Tackle Climate Change and More.