7 Big Questions for Democratic & Progressive Donors

TO: MVP Supporters and Allies
FROM: Billy Wimsatt, Founder & Executive Director of Movement Voter PAC
RE: 7 Big Questions for Democratic & Progressive Donors
DATE: April 25, 2025

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Dear friends and allies –

In the nearly six months since we lost the 2024 election, MVP staff have had more than 1,000 conversations with our grantee partners, donors, movement allies, and volunteers. Over and over again, we’ve heard seven big questions (click each link to jump to each respective section below):

1. Why did we lose and what did we learn?
2. How do we stop authoritarianism right now – before it’s too late?
3. How can we make our ground game better?
4. What do we do about the media?
5. What do we do about the Democratic Party?
6. Where is our leadership?
7. What can I do? 

These are wicked problems. Solving them won’t be easy. For our part, the MVP team has been furiously working in the lab, agitating, and talking with our partners and allies to develop not just answers but actionable solutions to Block MAGA, Build state-level power, Innovate and upgrade our strategies, and Win long-term governing power.

While working on these larger problems, we also launched our Comeback Campaign to stymie Trump’s agenda in the first 100 days and plant seeds for victory in 2026-2028.

In the first three months, MVP and our partners have been working hard on multiple fronts:

• We won in Wisconsin!!! Plus Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and more. These early wins — some of which, like PA, were quite unexpected — have shifted the national political environment. We have momentum! 

• We launched Battleground Alliance, a national collaborative effort to pressure GOP House members, block their legislation, and organize early for a Blue Wave in 2026. 

• We are upgrading our permanent swing-state organizing in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and all the states we need to win in 2026 and 2028. We have a chance to make huge gains – if we invest deep and early. 

• We’re supporting the movement against authoritarianism – as Trump ramps up his autocratic attacks, our partners are stepping up to block him – from supporting federal worker organizing to the April 5th “Hands Off” mobilizations to protecting immigrant communities from kidnapping and deportation.

• We’re developing a digital media strategy in partnership with dozens of creators and allies to highlight stories and narratives and build a more collaborative digital armada to counter the right-wing media Goliath (see below). 

• We’re seeding smart strategies from recruiting working-class candidates to convening leaders to supporting farmers, business owners, veterans, faith leaders, and more who can reengage the disillusioned base, persuade the conflicted middle, and wedge the persuadable right.

As you can see, we’ve been busy! We’re gearing up to invest in more upcoming elections – including Virginia and Pennsylvania – but obviously that’s just a start. 

Clearly we need to evolve our approach in fundamental ways. We need to reinvent the Democratic Party and the progressive movement as a whole to be larger, more diverse, more majoritarian, and more appealing to the people we represent.

As an MVP supporter, you are obviously an important stakeholder and a key part of this process of innovation, iteration, and evolution. We would love your feedback, ideas, and engagement on our strategy as it develops – email us at mvp@movement.vote. We read every email and reply to as many as we can!

Also: We’d love you to consider making a major investment in 2025 (and we want to thank everyone who already has!). We have to challenge the boom-and-bust cycle by linking arms and sticking together to bring consistent, steady support to the organizers on the frontlines. As we learned the hard way, funding organizing biennially doesn’t work.

We know! This is not the political situation we hoped to find ourselves in! But our despair is a gift to our opponents. It is not too late to turn things around. And turn it around, we must. If we invest wisely over the next 18 months, we can accomplish so many things: We can pull our democracy back from the brink. We can put the MAGA regime on notice. We can make our organizing better. We can grow our digital media. We can build a new movement and leadership. We can preserve free and fair elections. We can sweep again this fall. We can go into next year with momentum. We can blow out the midterms and win a trifecta in 2028 (yes, it is possible!). The MAGA regime is already generating backlash – here and around the world. Working with MVP’s partners, we can rebuild from this disaster, channel the backlash intelligently, and lay the foundation for a new progressive era.

To achieve all this, we have to confront some big questions. Here are our preliminary real-talk responses to the seven big questions we are hearing from our community:

1. Why Did We Lose and What Did We Learn?

We’ve all read countless hot takes (here is our concise post-mortem). In addition to asking “why did we lose,” it is wise to ask: “How did the other team win?” Like a sports team, we have to study the tape of our botched “World Cup match” so we can prepare for our next contest.

The biggest overlooked factor: our opponents have created a superior movement model – what I call the vertically-integrated meta church (or more simply: a MAGA super-movement) – in which everyone on their side (from billionaires to politicians to media to youth activists to regular people) feels like one big purpose-driven team. 

It sounds deceptively simple, but the other side’s collaborative team spirit is a huge, underappreciated competitive advantage. The Democratic side writ large, by contrast, is siloed, fractured, and tactical (as opposed to strategic or transformational). For too long, too many on our side have been doing politics in a transactional, consultant-driven, technocratic framework instead of in a social and community-building framework. Predictably, this has failed to create a sense of purpose, belonging, shared destiny, and community that people feel connected to and want more of in their lives. And even though many of MVP’s local partners actually do a great job of building community locally, we have yet to figure out how to weave it all together into a unifying national movement.

The right wing didn’t get their collaborative team spirit by accident. They built it by investing year-round in institutions like Turning Point USA, PragerU, and CPI (Conservative Partnership Institute) that are designed not around issues or elections but around creating a shared worldview, mass communication, and a sense of community and belonging. In short, they’ve created a much more holistic, robust model for building, winning, and wielding power. (This is why, even with Trump committing epic malpractice and trashing the economy, his approval is still hanging in at 44%.)

How did they build this? With a lot of money invested strategically over time.

How Does the Right Wing Fund Its Movements?

When it comes to smart investing in political change, we have to be humble and admit that we have a lot to learn from the people who just beat us. Right-wing donors fund in a way that is ideological, patient, serious about power, and savvy about organizing and growing their base. And they’re not afraid to invest huge amounts of money on big bets.

In the youth space alone, Turning Point USA has a baseline budget of $100M in non-election years. Election years are much higher. They also have a $61 million endowment. Another youth-focused media and education enterprise, PragerU, has a $72 million budget. Despite being a fairly new organization, PragerU has 22,000 monthly donors and over 550 “Legacy Circle” members who have put PragerU in their will or estate plan. Leadership Institute has a $54 million budget. One of the smaller budget groups, Students for Life, has a $14 million budget and 2,000 chapters across the country. 

By comparison, the largest youth organization on the Democratic or progressive side, the Alliance for Youth Action, has a core budget of less than $10 million, and most of its funding follows the boom-bust election cycle.

No wonder we’re losing young people!

Right-wing funders are constantly innovating and building new entities to fill gaps like the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI — “Where conservatives go to win”), which has a building in Washington DC that constantly incubates start-ups (with names like “Iranian Americans for Freedom”), facilitates collaboration between conservative organizers and elected officials, and churns out media hits on an hourly basis from their in-house studios. CPI ended the 2023 fiscal year with $41 million in the bank. (Thanks to The BLOC for making us aware of CPI, which few of us had ever heard of.)

Right-wing funders have spent years evangelizing and building their vertically integrated meta church. We have to re-engineer our model and play catch-up – it won’t be easy. 

But we can do it if we focus our efforts.

Transformational change has always come from sustained, organized, broad-based movements. The question is: In today’s reality, what are the key ingredients for a movement to win long-term cultural transformation, governing power, and policy change? Like it or not, MAGA has answered that question more successfully than any other U.S. movement in the 21st Century so far.

A Progressive Supermovement for the 21st Century

To create an equivalent super-movement on our side we need to: 1) Upgrade and scale up our local organizing; 2) Build a new media and youth leadership juggernaut to win hearts and minds on a mass scale; and 3) Transform the Democratic Party. To do all that — and this is where MVP and allied funders come in — we need to expand the funding pie and align our movements around a shared vision, narrative, and strategy.

Each of these is an enormous job (which we’ll begin to unpack further down). But I don’t see any way around them. If we want to be successful, we need to invest in unprecedented ways to plant the seeds of our future success. 

In the wake of 2024, our side has engaged in a lot of blame-shifting and excuse-making, with a shortage of critical self-reflection and taking responsibility. 

What we should learn from watching the leadership vacuum on our side over the last five months: No one is coming to save us. Any of us who is willing and able needs to step up and take responsibility – not just for our “lane” (supporting local organizing, in MVP’s case) but also to help meta-organize (organize the organizers and align the leaders) so we can rebuild the entire Democratic coalition as a purpose-driven alliance – with whole different level of team spirit.

We are here to take responsibility. Leadership begets more leadership. Our efforts in 2024 weren’t as effective as they needed to be. We all – from the grassroots to the grasstops – need to take responsibility for updating our entire portfolio of political, civic, and cultural strategies to win hearts, minds, elections, and transformational change.

2025 is a major inflection point for MVP as an organization, as it should be for all of us. From 2016-2024, MVP had a simple, concrete, time-bound theory of change: Invest in youth and communities of color in key states – the rising American electorate. The more we invest, the more elections we’ll win. Such a simple, linear, appealing model!

From 2016-2023, those efforts really paid off. We helped power the victories from 2017-2020. We defied the Red Wave in 2022. And we won hundreds of electoral and policy wins at the state and local levels. But 2024 challenged our assumptions about this linear theory of change. It shook us to our core. Yet even as the assumptions have come crashing down, it feels like our side is still mostly stuck in the past. Where are our new ideas? 

Is this really how we want our story to end? We just kept doing the same thing and… let the bullies win. Why? Because we were too fearful, too unimaginative, too attached to the status quo to take risks and try out new and asymmetric approaches (or even symmetric responses to the other side’s most successful strategies)?

The 2024 elections laid bare a simple truth: MVP’s focus on local organizing is necessary but not sufficient. The other side has a superior model, and it’s time for all of us in the big-tent Democratic coalition to adapt… or die. 

It is our responsibility to evolve and do everything in our power to build our equivalent of the vertically-integrated meta church. 

We need a super-movement that is ready to win, govern, collaborate, and communicate effectively in this brave new world. We need a major reset at every level of the political, economic, and cultural life of our country. We need to provide leadership and vision that a majority of Americans can believe in. It is our responsibility to create the conditions to make that happen.

MVP’s #1 focus will remain on supporting organizing at the local level. However, we are also pitching in with our partners and allies to help identify, seed, and scale the most promising strategies that are needed to improve our situation overall.

Let’s go!

2. How do we stop authoritarianism – before it’s too late?

Scholars of authoritarianism and groups like Protect Democracy have laid out the authoritarian playbook and shared global lessons learned on how to counter it. One indispensable component is civil resistance. Fueling this civil resistance is the crucial role MVP and our partners and allies have to play. 

Our local, state, and national partners are working to mobilize mass opposition (e.g., the March town halls and April 5th “Hands Off” Day of Action); shift political winds; turn popular will against Trump and his cronies; divide the MAGA coalition; strengthen the spines of judges, public leaders, critics, and whistleblowers; organize federal workers; scare and demoralize GOP lawmakers prior to the midterms; and translate public anger into electoral change – AKA throw the bums out! 

To be specific, we’ve mapped our partners’ work onto Protect Democracy’s seven core tactics of the authoritarian playbook. Here are those seven tactics, along with toplines of what our partners are doing to fight back:

1. Aggrandizing Executive Power: To counter Trump’s autocratic power grab, our partners are working to flip the House, win key state races, and pressure vulnerable GOP reps — building political power to rein in the regime.
2. Corrupting Elections: Our partners are securing elections by electing pro-democracy state Supreme Court justices and Secretaries of State, and deploying local safeguards against election subversion.
3. Scapegoating Vulnerable Communities: Our partners are shielding immigrant, LGBTQ+, and other communities through organizing, legal action, and policy campaigns to defend these groups’ dignity, safety, and inclusion.
4. Politicizing Independent Institutions: By winning down-ballot races and ballot measures, our partners are fortifying local institutions — from Attorneys General to School Boards — that can resist Trumpism at the ground level.
5. Spreading Disinformation: Our partners are deploying trusted messengers, deep canvassing, and culturally resonant campaigns to combat disinformation and win hearts and minds from the ground up.
6. Quashing Dissent: Our partners are mobilizing public protests, protecting digital infrastructure, and strengthening movement technologies to ensure organizers can organize, mobilize, fundraise, and resist repression.
7. Stoking Violence: To counter rising threats, MVP is supporting mutual aid, community safety, and de-escalation training to keep our partners and their communities safe, prepared, and resilient.

Read our full blog post for many more details and examples — but in short: There is so much still to do, but so many reasons for hope.

3. How do we make our ground game better?

2024 was a wake-up call, but organizers have been sounding the alarm for years: the local organizing “ground game” needs to grow a lot bigger and a lot better. 

Traditional voter mobilizing (door-to-door canvassing, phonebanking, and texting) worked pretty well from 2006-2023 when Democrats and progressives had a relatively unified coalition. And it still works decently when Democrats are a motivated opposition party with the wind at our back (as we recently saw in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania). 

Even in 2024, again, it’s very important not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Democrats won three close Senate races by 20,000-30,000 votes each (in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada) that we arguably would have lost without MVP’s local partners. Ditto for at least five (and as many as 15) close House races. Our partners helped block Republican supermajorities in North Carolina and Nebraska. They helped hold Democratic chambers in Michigan, Minnesota, Maine, and Pennsylvania. They helped pick up seats in Wisconsin and Montana. They won a lot of races down-ballot – from DAs to ballot measures – which we would not have won without local organizing and voter engagement.

But the lesson from 2024 is that, in this brave new media and cultural landscape, short-term voter mobilization tactics have diminishing returns – especially in a high-turnout election with the political winds against us. 

In many ways, voter mobilization has come at the expense of real, community-based, grassroots organizing. Unfortunately, many of the biggest political donors reward short-term metrics like quantity of doors knocked over quality of conversations and relationships, and longer-term assessment of effective organizing and power building.

To be clear, MVP has always focused our grantmaking on year-round local organizing groups that also do locally-rooted, relationship-based electoral mobilization. 2024 was no exception. But because of the prolonged, field-wide funding drought in 2023-2024, too many of our partners didn’t receive funding early enough to do their best work. Instead, many were forced to cut innovative programs, reduce staff, and limit their voter engagement to traditional voter contact at the expense of deeper, more relational methods.

Skillful, long-term transformational organizing can overcome right-wing propaganda if done at a meaningful scale. But our organizing field needs to not only be much bigger – funded continuously, year-round, at a higher level – it also needs to evolve and become better. 

This is the #1 problem the MVP team and our partners will be focused on over the coming years. We are doubling down and prioritizing our investments on the organizations working to build large, engaged membership bases and networks of distributed volunteer leadership.

Here is a sampling of some of the organizations we will be supporting in key states:

We are working with the brilliant architects of the “Minnesota model” (which led to some of the most sweeping state policy wins of the past decade) and other leaders to support the organizing field to upgrade and improve its craft. 

Imagine if we could make the organizing field twice as big and twice as effective. What a difference that would make! We’re working on it. MVP and our partners are asking tough questions, supporting deeper training on best practices, and agitating everyone we work with to experiment and make organizing better. We are drawing inspiration from groups like the Democracy & Power Innovation Fund to spread the utilization of “power metrics” that holistically capture both qualitative and quantitative measures of power-building work.

We also have to acknowledge that the political crisis we’re in has its roots in a deeper social crisis that has been growing over decades, which is much bigger than any of us. Americans’ epidemic of loneliness went through the roof during the pandemic. 

When people feel alone and like no one cares about them, they are easy prey for right-wing organizing. Many people have grown understandably cynical as our government increasingly fails to fulfill its basic purpose of serving the people and protecting our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Community organizing at its best is a cure for loneliness and powerlessness. It can give people a new sense of belonging and purpose, connect people who are chronically disconnected, and win tangible victories that improve our lives.

But the crisis of isolation and powerlessness is a profound challenge to overcome. The right-wing movement has very effectively capitalized on that crisis, spreading cynical messages that politics don’t matter, and organizing disaffected people to their side. We need to take a hard look at where our organizing and messages feel welcoming, empowering, and hopeful, vs. judgmental, elitist, negative, or exclusionary.

At its best, organizing is about long-term, sustained work, not quick fixes. Organizers have been warning donors for years that an over-emphasis on short-term voter mobilization could backfire. MVP is doing our own soul-searching about the degree to which we have perpetuated or incentivized a bias toward short-term, transactional voter engagement over long-term, relational organizing. We have to figure out how to break this vicious cycle together. 

Bottom line: Now more than ever, we believe local organizing is fundamental to connecting people together, building power, and achieving the change we need as a country – especially if we think bigger, better, and more strategically and collaboratively. 

MVP and our partners are committed to leveling up. But there is no question that organizing works. For all the power of the media, humans talking with humans – especially humans whom they trust – and linking arms together to work for a shared vision, will always be the most effective way to create lasting change.

4. What do we do about the media?

The right-wing takeover of media and media-related technology is horrifying and humbling, but it is also instructive. Our side is way behind, but our opponents have left us a blueprint that shows in dazzling detail what it looks like to invest massively in media alongside organizing. 

Graphic: Media Matters, 3/14/2025.

While MVP has supported some media-focused work in the past, we are heeding the call to grow our funding for media in tandem with organizing. Here is a quick overview of MVP’s roadmap for our next phase of media-related funding:

Step 1: Map the Landscape

The first thing we are doing is an extensive evaluation of:

1. The Progressive Media Ecosystem: Who are the players? What are the gaps?
2. MVP’s Local & National Partners: Who is excelling? Where can we support?
3. Progressive Talent & Platforms: Who are the key creators and influencers?
4. Left vs. Right Media Ecosystem: What can we learn from the right’s media successes?

Step 2: Research & Development

As we learn from this mapping effort, we will also explore – or expand our work – to: 

1. Support MVP partners that excel in social media and digital storytelling. 
2. Help our organizing partners upgrade their media strategies.
3. Expand support for partners with a focus on media, narrative, and culture.
4. Support collaborations between MVP partners and digital media creators.
5. Support media training and convening spaces.
6. Support media-focused funding intermediaries.
7. Seed and scale promising pilot projects.

We will be partnering with dozens of media entities, including Way to Win and Amplify, which have a lot of experience in digital media, and we’re planning investments in a set of promising strategies as funds become available. Potential projects we are exploring include:

1. Progressive Viral Social Content created by & for young people (right-wing example: PragerU).
2. In-Language Media: Partner with ethnic media platforms to amplify progressive content.
3. Influencer Schools: Train and coach the next generation of promising progressive influencers (right-wing example: Turning Point USA).

We will deploy, evaluate, and report back on these investments in the coming months.

Step 3: Scale Up the Best Strategies

Our goal is to find or help create and then scale up the most effective initiatives in this area by early 2026, so the progressive media ecosystem is in a very different place by the midterms. But to pull this off — and I cannot stress this enough — we need to start investing now.

5. What do we do about the Democratic Party?

Many voters see the Democratic Party as defenders of an unpopular status quo; overly beholden to special interests and consultants; culturally elitist, out of touch, and judgmental; not rooted enough in everyday people’s lives and on fighting for the working class; and overall weak and unable to get things done. The Democratic brand is unpopular, to say the least.

MVP’s role to date has mostly been to help infuse the Democratic party with new energy, candidates, and leadership. Ultimately, we believe the Democratic Party needs to be reinvented, from the top down and the ground up. We are supporting partners on a set of strategies from candidate recruitment to challenging timid Democratic leadership and pay-to-play culture to blocking bad legislation in defense of reproductive freedom, clean energy, education, healthcare, and marginalized communities.

The current and former heads of the Congressional Progressive Caucus both got their start at MVP partner organizations (Greg Casar at Workers Defense Project in Texas and Pramila Jayapal at OneAmerica in Washington State). MVP partners are a consistent talent pipeline for principled, pragmatic, inspiring – and largely working-class – political leadership. We support organizations engaged in candidate training and recruitment in multiple states. For instance:

• In North Carolina, Down Home NC researches, interviews, and endorses candidates who work for working people, and when there is not a candidate who reflects their values, their members run for office themselves.
• In New Hampshire, 603 Forward has helped recruit and support over 500 progressive young people to run for local office, of which over 250 are now elected leaders. These leaders now help form the bench for NH’s future state legislative and federal congressional seats. 
• Across the country, the Working Families Party has launched its biggest candidate recruitment effort ever — Working Class Wins — to recruit 1,000+ working-class candidates to run for local office in key districts.
• In rural areas, Contest Every Race has been leading the charge to make Democrats competitive everywhere and revive rural county Democratic parties. They have recruited and supported nearly 12,000 candidates for local office; helped elect over 5,200 of those candidates (a 43% win rate), and provided grants, training, operational support, and free text banking services to improve the work of several hundred county Democratic Parties.

Improving the Democratic Party has thus far been a fairly small part of what we do. But we are looking closely at how we can make a bigger difference in this area. With a larger, more reliable stream of resources in both odd and even years, we could dramatically scale up our impact.

Inside and outside of the Democratic Party, we can’t go back to the status quo. We need to campaign to create a huge reset in our political system to get money out of politics, limit the influence of mega billionaires who are openly buying elections, and deliver quickly on a popular economic agenda that quickly benefits working-class Americans.

6. Where is our leadership?

We’ve gotten so many forms of this question: Who is going to step up and stand up to Trump? Who can lead Democrats back to power? Who is going to put forth a positive, alternative vision for our country and rally a majority of the American people around it?

There is a synergistic relationship between political leaders and movements. Individual figures rise up to meet the moment. And social movements expand the political space for those leaders to break through. 

Obama emerged from the anti-Iraq War movement. Trump emerged from the Tea Party movement. Bernie and Warren emerged from Occupy. David Hogg and Maxwell Frost emerged from the anti-gun violence movement following the Parkland shooting. Alicia Garza and Maurice Mitchell emerged from the movement in Ferguson. AOC and the Squad (and in some ways Biden) emerged from the resistance to Trump. 

The movements of this era are going to elevate a new generation of leaders like Sarah McBride and Lateefah Simon, as well as not-so-new leaders like Cory Booker and Chris Murphy, who rise to meet the moment. MVP’s role is to support community organizers, grassroots leaders, and social movements that serve as the pipeline for our next generation of political leaders. 

In 2024, MVP was one of the only organizations that called for Biden to step aside, and we are considering whether to do that in other instances where the Democratic Party needs to make space for bold and effective new voices. Developing a stronger inside-outside strategy with the Democratic Party is a growing area of interest that we are exploring and will report back on.

MVP and our partners’ main job is to support local organizing – to build the best movement possible with a courageous, unifying worldview and cultural resonance, and to support political leaders who can inspire us, win elections, and get things done. 

No one is coming to save us. We all have to be the leaders now. Collectively, as a movement, we have a responsibility to lead and succeed.

7. What can I do? 

Start by getting organized and deploying your time, talents, money, and networks as effectively as you can. I suggest sitting down with a friend or two (you don’t have to do it alone!) and inventorying what you can bring to the team. Then make a plan to deploy your many assets. 

With your time (your most valuable asset), make a volunteering plan – ideally doing something you are good at or enjoy – with an organization or effort that you believe is making a strategic difference. Ask yourself: Where am I naturally drawn to contribute? What are my unique gifts?

With your money, make a giving plan – or become a monthly sustainer – again prioritizing organizations that will make a real structural (not just a band-aid) difference. 

With your talents and networks, develop an inventory and a plan that makes your heart sing.

Ideally, your plan will bring together all four types of assets: time, talents, money, and relationships, to do something greater than the sum of its parts. If you’re looking for somewhere to start and you love MVP, we have an increasingly robust volunteer donor organizing program that is worth checking out. We have an amazing and growing volunteer community.

Zooming out: How we engage, absorb, and develop zillions more volunteer leaders more effectively is a huge question we need a lot more people to work on. Our movement is never going to get to scale just by hiring more staff. Effective, high-level, year-round volunteer management and community building is one of our most important jobs!

Are You Ready to Make a (Really Big) Comeback?

The good news about the Trump II Era is that it will eventually come to an end. By early indications, the political pendulum is swinging back hard. We could find ourselves riding a political wave that puts in play states and districts that seem completely out of reach right now. 

In 2017, few people believed we would win a Senate race in Alabama or flip a chamber in the gerrymandered Virginia Assembly. It seemed nearly impossible in 2018 that we would flip the House. But we did. We made huge progress in states, and we even flipped completely off-the-radar house districts in states like South Carolina and Oklahoma that few people imagined were competitive. Now we have to use every tool in the toolbox to build the momentum we need not only to win in 2026 and 2028, but to actually transform policymaking so that it benefits us all, instead of a megalomaniacal cabal.

We can make a comeback. We can turn this around. We can build a winning movement ecosystem and make the same kind of turnaround that we made from 2004 to 2008. Remember how big and beautiful and surprising and hope-inspiring it was to go from Bush to Obama? The eight years that followed left plenty of work unfinished, but they also moved the ball forward in incredibly important ways. If we build a stronger, savvier, more unified supermovement, we can do an order of magnitude better this time. 2025 is our year to start an even bigger turnaround.

And it needs to be a really big turnaround because we know we’re going to be facing all sorts of voter suppression and disenfranchisement. And we need to break through people’s sense of hopelessness and despair.

Over the coming months, MVP will be releasing more detailed plans, analysis, and case studies from dozens of important organizations and projects we are funding and helping to weave together into a winning team. 

Obviously, all of this will take money.

How Do We Expand the Pie?

The past five months have been one of the toughest fundraising seasons we have ever experienced – for MVP and our many partners – for understandable reasons: 

1. Odd-numbered years are always a low point for fundraising related to politics.
2. People are grieving our collective 2024 losses, and are shellshocked every day by the Trump regime’s assaults and cruelty.
3. In this time of daily crisis, we’re all being asked to rally, march, defend against ICE kidnappings, and more. Donating money might feel far from the action. 
4. A lot of donors stretched in 2024. We asked people to dig deep, and it would be unsustainable for some donors to keep investing at the same level. 

We’re hearing from two categories of donors. One is coming back with resolve – saddled up and more committed than ever. Our volunteer donor organizing program raised almost $400,000 in March, much of it from people who hosted or attended house parties last year. Some donors are surprising us and sending in their 2025 gifts much earlier than they normally would. They instinctively know that the movement needs support now.

The other (much larger) category of donors is telling us they’re taking a break or only giving a fraction of what they gave last year. 

Do this thought experiment: If only half as many people donate in 2025 as in 2024, and they donate on average half as much, that means the field loses 75% of its funding in odd-numbered years – this is what creates the boom-bust cycle. 

If we believe that turning out and “persuading” voters at the last minute is enough, we should keep making donations only in even-numbered years. But if we believe that transforming our country requires winning hearts and minds, and building powerful communities and organizations, then we need to invest in year-round grassroots, cultural, and institutional power building, consistently, year after year. This is a very different paradigm for how to win elections and make change that lasts. 

Think Like a Gardener

What if we were to think like gardeners who truly love our “garden” (i.e., the voters and the people we are organizing with)? What if we think about odd-numbered years as the time to till the soil, plant seeds, trellis the tall plants, pull the weeds, and test new approaches? 

We need to think of odd-numbered years as “growing season” — the time to nurture and care for our base through local, digital, relational, and parasocial organizing that builds a sense of agency, worldview, and belonging. Every two years, elections are a time to harvest what we’ve grown. 

My organic gardener friend tells me that she has to spend the vast majority of her time and money on the early phases before you get to harvest. Imagine a gardener spending most of their time and money on the harvest – a laughable idea that wouldn’t make any sense! Yet that is the standard model for funding in political cycles – no wonder it doesn’t work. 

We have to bust the boom-and-bust cycle and embrace and fund the whole growing cycle. A gardener can’t just show up at harvest time and expect baskets of tomatoes!

2025 Is Our R&D Year – Time to Build a Better Movement!

In a previous lifetime, I was part of a team that created a Movement R&D Fund that focused on three areas: “Seeds, Sparks, and Glue.” Seeds were new ideas. Sparks were “movement moments.” Glue was the collaborative and relational infrastructure that helped movements stick together and become greater than the sum of their parts. We need to bring back that spirit of creativity, invention, and nonlinearity to our work. 

Most people want their solutions to be simple and fully baked. Adaptive change can feel scary and unclear. But this moment requires us to take risks, think big, and push ourselves to try new things. If there was a simple, pre-baked solution, we wouldn’t be in this situation.

We need to treat 2025 as an R&D year to scale up more transformational models of organizing and electoral politics that are rooted in everyday life and culture. We need to experiment and innovate. As donors, this is the time to collectively invest in as many credible, innovative projects to meet the moment as we can! We need to double down on deep, relational organizing — and we also need to build an entire fleet of media, innovation, collaboration, and movement-building initiatives. Not every effort will succeed. If they all succeed (as the saying goes) then we didn’t take enough risks!

I’ve been supporting movement and political innovation for a long time – way before MVP – and had a chance to play a role – large or small – in the early stages of over 100 start-ups and innovations including: Indivisible, MoveOn.org, Color of Change, Black Lives Matter, Black Voters Matter, Solidaire, Resource Generation, One for Democracy, and many more. Some efforts, like the League of Young Voters or the Run Liz Run! campaign (to draft Elizabeth Warren for President in 2016) or the Coffee Party (in response to the Tea Party), didn’t work as well as I had hoped. But some kicked ass! Innovation, like venture capital, is a non-linear enterprise requiring both patience and risk tolerance. The funders on the other side seem to understand this, and they are now laughing all the way to the Oval Office at having been underestimated yet again.

Do we have the patience and risk tolerance to create non-linear success?

MVP itself started as a small side project of an organization I founded 15 years ago called Gamechanger, whose mission was “innovation and collaboration to upgrade the movement for the 21st century.” MVP was the satellite that ate the mothership. Over time, Gamechanger’s original mission of innovation and collaboration faded into the background. 

We need to rekindle the spirit of Gamechanger. As a movement, we need to fight back with all we’ve got against authoritarianism, yes, and we also need to be in a zone of intensive rethinking, experimentation, and evolution. Every organization that wants to stay relevant in this new era is going to need to adapt. Some organizations are embracing change. Some are in denial. Some will evolve. Some will die. New ideas are being dreamed up and born. Some new ideas have yet to be dreamed. MVP sees our role as a philanthropic midwife – supporting our field through this period of intensive change, transition, and reinvention.

Here is what you can count on MVP to do in this crisis: 

1. Constantly study and assess the field, strategically and unsentimentally looking for emerging trends, threats, opportunities, ideas, talent, and leadership. We must approach new problems with a beginner’s mind – and as talent and idea scouts.
2. Lovingly agitate ourselves and our allies. We are not afraid to shake things up and ask big questions – starting with our allies and ourselves and our hundreds of partner organizations, in key states, nationally, at gatherings, and on digital media. 
3. Deploy resources strategically so we can to win elections, pass and block policies, and organize communities (including donors) toward a winning strategy. We are focused on winning: hearts, minds, elections, systemic change, and the political will to keep it.
4. Always listen, look for gaps, patterns, sweet spots, opportunities to meta-organize and do whatever we need to do (within the law) to succeed. This includes funding and rolling up our sleeves to support strategic convenings, organizer trainings, new alliances, promising leaders, media strategies, and creative ideas to win hearts and minds. Again: doing whatever it takes to win, govern, and deliver a better future.

I know that’s a lot. I know it’s not a simple, linear solution, wrapped up in a bow. But that is what we have to do. Simple, linear solutions have failed us. Working in silos has failed us. Technocratic silver bullets have failed us. Flash-in-the-pan movements have failed us. Most of our leaders and tried-and-true playbooks have failed us. The Democratic consultant class has failed us. We are in a new situation – a Houdini box. We need to learn new tricks.

Can We Build a Vertically-Integrated Meta Church?

We need to develop a new worldview that unifies and creates a sense of shared destiny and belonging, brings together a massive new base and coalition, and inspires a deep new bench of leadership. We don’t need to copy the right wing. But we do need to build our own version of a vertically integrated (secular) meta church of organizing, media, culture, and politics. 

This will not be a small change. It will require a paradigm shift. Reinventing the progressive movement and the Democratic Party won’t be easy. But having worked in journalism, politics, organizing, and philanthropy for over 30 years, I don’t see how anything less is going to save us. If you have a simpler or better solution, I’d love to hear it.

Building our version of a vertically-integrated (secular) meta church is a gigantic non-linear undertaking. Luckily, it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. Getting 50% or 60% there is much better than 20% (which is where it feels like we are now). To achieve that, we will need to fund hundreds of efforts, experiments, and collaborations to build a stronger movement with more people, more donors, more creators, more media platforms, and better elected leaders – that somehow all add up to something greater than the sum of their parts: a better country with better governance and a better culture.

I believe we can do it.

Let’s Plant Some Tulips

If we were trying to cure cancer and one medical trial didn’t work out, would we give up and walk away for a year before trying again? No! We would try new ideas and approaches, and do as many experiments as it took to make a breakthrough. Political organizing isn’t so different. To get the breakthroughs we want while they’re still useful, we have to invest in them now. 

Movement strategist Carlos Saavedra does a fascinating workshop on what he calls movement seasons. According to his analysis, we are in “winter” right now – which can feel like a depressing time. It feels like we are losing. Our opponents are winning. Our team feels in disarray. But winter is when you have to develop the new DNA and strategies. A successful winter of redesign is what leads to a successful new spring and summer. That is our job right now. To help seed, spark, and glue together a new movement for change.

As my colleague Zakiya Lord recently said, “If you want tulips in April, you cannot plant them in April. You have to plan ahead. It feels notable in this moment that tulips also need the cold. They need the dark. It is these moments that provide the nutrients for them to thrive and bloom.” 

We invite you to join us and make a proactive decision to invest strategically with MVP or whatever organizations you believe are doing the most promising and necessary work right now. And we hope you will bring your friends, family, neighbors, and networks along. We aren’t going to get to the movement we need without a big team of us joining together in investing.

The first half of 2025 – the most potent R&D phase of the next four years – is when all of our investments will make the most catalytic difference. 

If we want to have tulips in this brave new world, we have to understand our job in this season of despair: to boldly plant now for the coming Spring.

This memo was written by Billy Wimsatt in collaboration with Zo Tobi. Special thanks to Rachel Gordon and Rebecca Ennen for contributing writing, and to the MVP team for helpful feedback.