Thanks to the chaos that overtook the Iowa caucuses, seemingly the result of a faulty app developed by former Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama aides, the results have been questioned, discounted, and ignored. This has to be especially galling for Bernie Sanders, who many believe was denied the 2016 nomination by party operatives backing Clinton.
Sure enough, the belated and possibly tainted results of the caucuses showed Pete Buttigieg besting Sanders in Iowa. It must feel like Groundhog Day to poor Sanders.
And then there are the motives of the players behind the failed app, a murky web of Democratic power players and megadonors who despise President Trump and, presumably, don’t much like Sanders, either. Disruption is the name of the game with this crowd, and not in a good way.
Faulty technology is nothing new to the world of politics. Both sides of the aisle have had their share of misfires in the race to beat the other side to digital supremacy. Does anyone remember ORCA? The more you follow the money, however, the more likely it seems that the special interests behind the app and not the app itself are to blame for the Democratic debacle in the Hawkeye State.
The app was developed by the ominously named Shadow, Inc. Three of Shadow’s top executives worked on Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign.
Shadow, it turns out, is a project of the blandly named nonprofit organization ACRONYM. ACRONYM, helmed by Obama campaign alum Tara McGowan, garnered lots of media attention last year with promises of big-money spends to ensure that Trump was denied a second term. The media and, strangely, some on the Right, were promoting McGowan and her organization as the cutting-edge new face of political strategy.
ACRONYM is one of those deceptive stories about political operatives suckling from the same old sources of leftist funding but pretending it’s the whiz-bang new thing that will revolutionize politics. ACRONYM, it turns out, took $250,000 from the nonprofit group New Venture Fund in 2018, a fund used by wealthy leftist philanthropists, including George Soros, to channel billions of dollars to shadowy nonprofit groups. With NVF and other similar funds distributing the money, these nonprofit groups don’t have to disclose its original source. They simply pop up overnight as AstroTurf political operations flush with undisclosed, untraceable cash.
Democrats rage publicly against dark money, but they simultaneously stick out their hands and greedily grab gobs of it. ACRONYM’s McGowan, it should be noted, uses a profile picture on Twitter of her smirkily reading a book entitled, Dark Money.
The debacle in Iowa proves that the status quo reigns in the Democratic Party. There may be new faces and glitzy new (malfunctioning) apps on the surface of things, but, deep down, it’s the same old secretive dark money funding the same old propagandists and peddlers of misinformation.
Teri Christoph is co-founder of Smart Girl Politics and host of the Smart Girl Politics podcast on Ricochet. Follow Teri on Twitter @TeriChristoph.
