Special Report

Arabella Advisors’ $600 Million Shadow over the Election


Liberals may complain about “dark money” meddling in elections, but a $600 million empire has been aiding Democrats for years with almost no scrutiny from the media or the Left.

This network is centered on four nonprofit “sisters”—the Sixteen Thirty Fund, New Venture Fund, Windward Fund, and Hopewell Fund—operating from the office of Arabella Advisors, a major for-profit consultancy in the heart of Washington, DC. Since 2006, this network has pumped a stunning $2.4 billion into politics with nary a peep from “dark money” hawks such as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) while liberal groups bemoan the threat of conservative political spending to the republic.

Exposing Arabella Advisors

That is, until we exposed it last year in Big Money in Dark Shadows, a groundbreaking report that mapped the reaches of Arabella’s then-$500 million nonprofit empire.

Figure 1. Arabella’s Money-Mixing Machine

Source: Capital Research Center

Our report brought critical attention to a half-billion-dollar behemoth shaping the future of America’s elections to suit the wishes of ultra-wealthy foundations and special interests. It revealed Arabella’s extensive use of “pop-up” groups—slick websites designed to look like stand-alone activist groups—as fronts for its powerful set of in-house nonprofits.

And it exposed how a private company commanding hundreds of millions of dollars tried to block the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, fundamentally transform the nation’s health care system, and inflict abortion-on-demand laws on a country that rejects them.

The Update

Now in The Shadow over America we continue to pull back the curtain on this vast political machine. Our sequel report dives deeper into the Arabella nonprofit netherworld and its role as a massive pass-through conduit from liberal foundations to leftist activists and lobbying giants.

We unearth the startup funders of the Sixteen Thirty Fund (Arabella’s in-house lobby shop) to show how Sixteen Thirty bears the legacy of long-“dead” ACORN. And we reveal how Arabella used its $600 million to tilt the 2018 midterm election toward Democrats by bolstering Democratic voter turnout and launching phony state-based “pop-ups” meant to fool voters into believing they were grassroots campaigns.

 

Read The Shadow over America: Arabella Advisors $635 Million Empire in 2018.

Hayden Ludwig

Hayden Ludwig is the Director of Policy Research at Restoration of America. He was formerly Senior Investigative Researcher at Capital Research Center. Ludwig is a native of Orange County, California,…
+ More by Hayden Ludwig