A press release followed by an Axios write-up this week zeroed in on a sprawling new partnership ahead of the 2024 election between TelevisaUnivision, the world’s largest Spanish-language media company, and “nonpartisan” groups to register and mobilize Hispanic voters across the United States. It’s called Vota Conmigo — or Vote With Me.
The collaboration “will provide comprehensive, nonpartisan, and Spanish language educational resources, drive record voter engagement and fight misinformation in the Hispanic community during this election cycle,” the press release said.
But the wire blast and favorable news story left out one notable fact: the campaign’s partner charities and their affiliated nonprofit organizations can thank the largest and most influential Democratic-allied dark money groups in the country for helping to keep their lights on — to the tune of at least $26.8 million over the last decade.
The funding, traced by the Washington Examiner through financial disclosures filed with the IRS, is a critical window into how groups connected to billionaire Democrats, such as George Soros, Hansjorg Wyss, Pierre Omidyar, and others, use their war chests to prop up left-wing activist hubs influencing elections under the banner of nonpartisanship.
To conservatives, the idea that these activist hubs are truly nonpartisan is a facade, one the Biden administration knows as it coordinates with some, including those linked to the TelevisaUnivision campaign, on historic voter mobilization efforts in the lead-up to 2024, documents show. President Joe Biden signed an executive order in March 2021 directing “nonprofit groups that study best practices for using technology to promote civic engagement,” which prompted lawsuits and pushback from GOP-led states over the order, among other things, providing tax-exempt groups with inside information and new tools to register voters.
“Executive Order 14019, also known as ‘Bidenbucks,’ is a massive, unprecedented, and legally questionable get-out-the-vote effort designed by the Left, to benefit the Left, by specifically targeting only those voters deemed more likely to support the current president’s political party,” said Stewart Whitson, senior federal affairs director for the Foundation for Government Accountability. The think tank is suing the Biden administration to release internal documents on the get-out-the-vote effort.
Maria Areco, a spokeswoman for TelevisaUnivision, declined to comment to the Washington Examiner on the dark money funding. She said in a statement the campaign is “nonpartisan” and aims “to amplify and get out the vote.”
In the Tuesday press release, TelevisaUnivision employee Teri Arvesu Gonzalez was quoted as calling the partnership, which is based on an initial campaign launched in 2018, “a collective commitment to democracy, empowerment and inclusion.” The word “nonpartisan” appeared four times in the Axios story.
According to tax forms, the Soros-backed Open Society Foundations grantmaking network is a key funder of groups behind the TelevisaUnivision campaign or those closely affiliated with the partner charities. The billionaire’s ties to TelevisaUnivision are nothing new: In 2022, the Soros-backed Latino Media Network bought 18 Hispanic radio stations from TelevisaUnivision.
In fact, Soros, 93, “is building an audio empire,” Semafor reported in April of this year.
Since 2016, the OSF’s Foundation to Promote Open Society and Fund for Policy Reform have directed $3.8 million combined to the Hispanic Federation, which is based in New York and is also partnered with TelevisaUnivision on the campaign.
And since 2018, four other top left-wing dark money groups have funneled $6.9 million to the Hispanic Federation.
The $6.9 million largely came from the California-based Tides Foundation, which sits on around $894 million in assets, followed by the Windward Fund, New Venture Fund, and Hopewell Fund, a trio of charities managed by Arabella Advisors, a Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm and the largest left-wing dark money network in the U.S.
Hispanic Federation was listed on a 2023 progress report document on Biden’s 2021 executive order, which was released by the Soros-backed Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, as a partner working “to promote access to voting” in a purportedly nonpartisan fashion.
In turn, personnel from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights were listed on internal documents obtained by the Foundation for Government Accountability as participants in a July 2021 planning call about Biden’s executive order earlier that year. A then-employee at the Open Society Policy Center, a separate group in the Soros-backed OSF network, was also on the call, according to the documents.
To Scott Walter, president of the conservative Capital Research Center think tank, the Hispanic Federation is staffed by left-wing activists and hardly a nonpartisan actor. Hispanic Federation has advocated race-based admissions at universities, known as affirmative action, and called for the expansion of controversial left-wing diversity, equity, and inclusion at corporations. The group has often lavished praise on the Biden administration and was a sharp critic of former President Donald Trump during his administration.
“It’s laughable,” said Walter, author of Arabella: The Dark Money Network of Leftist Billionaires Transforming America.
Then there’s UnidosUS, another group coordinating on the TelevisaUnivision campaign that was on the 2021 White House executive order planning call and was listed on the EO’s progress report documents. Republicans have accused the White House, which did not return a Washington Examiner request for comment, of unlawfully using federal dollars in connection to the 2021 executive order and infringing on the rights of states to oversee elections.
UnidosUS has called attempts by Republicans to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas “misguided” and also pressed to hold former President Donald Trump “accountable” for “his role in one of the darkest days of our country’s history,” referring to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
That self-described nonpartisan group has raked in $9.5 million since 2014 from the Hopewell Fund, New Venture Fund, and Tides Foundation combined, according to financial disclosures. The advocacy arm of UnidosUS, meanwhile, has received $1.1 million from the Open Society Policy Center, the Arabella Advisors-managed North Fund, progressive-left America Votes, and the Sixteen Thirty Fund, another dark money group in the secretive Arabella Advisors network.
America Votes receives large funding through Sixteen Thirty Fund, which also takes checks from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who was responsible for a $45 million donation to the fund in recent years. In 2021 and 2022, America Votes took home a staggering $77.5 million combined from the Berger Action Fund, a dark money group bankrolled by the Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss.
Some conservatives have cast Wyss as the “new George Soros.”
The Wyss-backed Berger Action Fund, in turn, has directed grants to the advocacy arm of Voto Latino, a foundation partnered on the TelevisaUnivision campaign.
It’s illegal for foreign nationals to make donations in connection to federal, state, or local elections, or advertisements boosting candidates, a fact conservatives have cited in questioning in the past whether Wyss is above board in parking his fortune with the Arabella Advisors network.
“Unless lawmakers take action to close the foreign influence loophole, Wyss will continue to pour his massive wealth into this destructive, foreign dark money apparatus,” said Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of Americans for Public Trust, a watchdog group that has in recent years pressed for federal investigations into Wyss-tied groups. The FEC’s general counsel, however, said in 2022 that the Wyss-tied groups did not provide evidence of certain grant agreements. That year, the agency also said Wyss skirted the law over the years for dishing out $119,000 in direct political donations, but no action was taken because the statute of limitations expired.
Meanwhile, the Voto Latino charity affiliate is funded by Media Matters for America, the Hopewell Fund, Planned Parenthood, Hillary Clinton’s Onward Together, and the Tides Foundation.
At least two other partners of the 2024 TelevisaUnivision campaign or their associated nonprofit group arms are funded by a mix of grants through the philanthropy of Soros, New Venture Fund, Sixteen Thirty Fund, and other left-wing dark money groups.
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“These groups that pretend to be nonpartisan never reach out to me,” said Republican Texas 2024 House candidate Mayra Flores, who lost reelection in 2022 and was the first Mexican-born member of Congress.
“They are here to help the Democratic Party,” Flores added.
