George Soros’s first-disclosed donations of the 2022 election cycle are now publicly available, providing insight into the priorities of the left-wing mega-donor.
During the first quarter of 2021, Soros’s only disclosed donations were to three Democrat U.S. senators. Two are freshmen: Maggie Hassan (N.H.) and Catherine Cortez Masto (Nev.). The third recipient of Soros cash was Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who, at 81 years old, is the president pro tempore and the most senior member of the Senate.
Soros gifted Hassan the maximum-allowed amount of $5,600, while Cortez Masto received $2,900 and Leahy’s campaign and PAC together received $7,900.
All three Senate seats are up for election in 2022. Freshmen Haasan and Cortez Masto have already launched their reelection bids, while Leahy has not yet confirmed whether he will run again.
Republicans are on the lookout to flip seats next year, and all of these three seats could be targets. The GOP needs only to take one in order to regain control of the upper chamber. Hassan is reportedly the most vulnerable of the bunch:
“After lamenting the influence of special interest groups in Washington for years, Senator Hassan has now happily accepted contributions from the biggest liberal influence-peddler of them all, George Soros,” National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesman T.W. Arrighi told the Washington Free Beacon in a statement.
According to Arrighi, the Soros contribution is emblematic of a larger shift to the left by Hassan since she was first elected in 2016, when Soros also donated to her. “Hassan has lost touch with New Hampshire,” Arrighi said, adding that “the Maggie Hassan of six years ago would not recognize herself today.”
New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, Vermont Governor Phil Scott, and former Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval, all Republicans, have been tapped as possible Senate candidates, though none of the current or former governors has yet announced a run.
Soros was one of the top donors in the 2020 election. He largely worked through his new Democracy PAC. Soros personally donated $500,000 to help Joe Biden, with wealthy donors in total contributing $83 million to the Biden Victory Fund.
One of the benefits of Soros’s use of Democracy PAC is that he gets to keep his name off the donors’ lists. He has transferred tens of millions during this election season from his $750 million Fund for Policy Reform (part of his Open Society Foundations network) to Democracy PAC and from there to various candidates, PACs, and nonprofits.
In addition, Soros has increased his lobbying spending. His D.C.-based lobbying arm, the Open Society Policy Center, totaled expenditures of $48 million in 2019, a personal record. This was more than was spent by the lobbying shops of large corporations such as Amazon, Facebook, Boeing, or Google.
Beyond helping socialist candidates, Soros used his money to support mail-in voting. One of the top organizations behind the movement for mail-in voting was the Brennan Center of Justice, based out of New York University School of Law. The center received considerable financing from Soros’s Open Society Foundations and has been the beneficiary of several Open Society grants, receiving more than $7,466,000 from 2000 to 2019 alone.
Soros has also taken a keen interest in pushing the Biden policy agenda forward. His Open Society Foundations is pumping $20 million to whip up grassroots support in favor of Biden’s infrastructure proposals. The Soros outfit plans to use the $20 million as a building block to ultimately raise $100 million with which to get the word out for the White House’s program.
Despite Soros’s net worth of $8.6 billion, obtained through a long career in investing (which he began as a protégé of the notorious Rothschild banking dynasty), his groups collectively received tens of millions in taxpayer dollars from the COVID-19 Paycheck Protection Program.
Among these were entities that form part of Soros’s Democracy Alliance, which collectively received between $8.5 million and $20.7 million.
According to its website, Democracy Alliance was created in 2013 to keep supporters of Barack Obama engaged, using its network, technology, and volunteers to support issues such as “gun violence, women’s health, comprehensive immigration reform, middle-class job creation, climate change, marriage equality, and other legislative priorities at the state level.”
Americans can count on Soros continuing to be a major force on the left going into the 2022 elections.
