H’wood Dem Donors Rage: ‘Ask Me for Another Dollar, I Dare You’
'We're not just an ATM' as top party funders seek Silicon Valley-style leverage and wait (and wait) for a plan on how the party will meet the moment
Matthew Frank previously covered Gen Z’s digital war with Hollywood, the YouTuber caught in the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni saga and the online gamblers betting on your movie and the CEO whose prediction market can reveal what Netflix show will be #1.
One late January afternoon, with ash still floating in the air across Los Angeles and the newly sworn-in Donald Trump “burning down D.C.” — a “double pile of ash, one political and one real,” as one Democratic strategist described it to me — a donor advisor to L.A.’s business elite met with a longtime Hollywood client of hers. Usually, she says, these meetings have a similar cadence: which candidates they support, the issues they care most about and their desired strategy for exerting influence.
But in this particular meeting, the client — a staunch Democrat and longtime donor to the party — turned off the money spigot. “I need a multi-year break,” he told her.
This person wasn’t alone among her clientele. Other longtime donors who are “always in for everything,” according to the advisor, are now saying, “We’re not giving to anything.” Not only that, but also “we’re not even attending anything. We’re not engaging in anything.”
This was before Elon Musk went DOGE-wild infiltrating every government agency and wreaking havoc; before Trump doubled down on his CBS 60 Minutes lawsuit, seeking $20 billion; before Trump and VP JD Vance sandbagged Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in front of the press in the Oval Office; before the administration tanked the stock market into correction territory; before Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said he’d shut down the government and then quickly reversed course and gave Trump his budgetary wish list.
Almost every big industry donor I interviewed over the last two months indicated that they’d likely come around and give again, probably as soon as next year for the midterms and the chance to take control of the House and Senate. “The midterms are insanely important, the state-level races are insanely important,” says a prolific producer and reliable Democratic donor. “You have to engage. You can’t put your head in the sand. You can’t wallow.”
But as last week’s capitulation on the budget epitomizes, the Party is not making it easy for its supporters — especially its most consistent fundraising base in Hollywood. “Everyone is outraged,” the donor advisor tells me, adding that her clients are calling senators directly. The message: “Good luck” and “Ask me for another dollar, I dare you.”
Even amid the private fuming — which has led to collective feelings of “disillusionment,” “depression” and being “angry,” “frustrated” and “kind of pissed off” — some donors are seeking to be proactive. They’re using this moment to rethink how they interact with Democrats, moving away from being a no-strings-attached funding source and toward being more active participants in the political process.
“A lot of people are using their support to ask questions rather than writing checks,” one longtime studio executive tells me, sharing his line of inquiry with Democrats who want his money. “Tell me exactly what you’re doing. How are you defining the party’s relationship to the constituencies which diminished in support? What is the message? Who’s the messenger — and how are you delivering it? Have you managed to reconcile the progressive and other agendas of the party to come to some central message? What have you learned from what happened?”
The exec admits that nobody has the answers to those questions . . . yet. None of the donors, donor advisors and Democratic strategists I interviewed suggested they did either, many of whom asked to speak anonymously in order to vent their frustrations without fear of reprisal — though the following people did go on the record: campaign veterans Bill Burton (Barack Obama) and Bob Shrum (everyone from George McGovern to John Kerry) as well as former studio exec and producer Eric Paquette, writer and advocate Christy Callahan and longtime L.A. political advisor and activist Donna Bojarsky.
Needless to say, Hollywood isn’t rushing to write any outsized checks right now. In fact, sorting through the DCCC’s and the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) individual contribution reports from the election through the end of January, 105 names cracked the $5,000 threshold. The only two Hollywood donors: Producer Marcy Carsey (The Cosby Show and Roseanne) gave $8,087 to the DCCC, and Sopranos creator David Chase contributed $5,000 to the DNC. Both donations were made late last year. In comparison, after Trump won in 2016, five Hollywood names gave at or above that level: Peter and Megan Chernin ($59,424.15), Tom Rothman ($15,000), West Wing actress Susan Channing ($10,000) and producer Lyn Lear, who was married to Norman Lear ($5,000).
“I’m sympathetic to the donors who are sitting on the sidelines, because I don’t think there are any Democrats who are offering any true, productive path forward,” says Bill Burton, a former Deputy White House Press Secretary under President Obama and current Santa Barbara resident and CEO of the political consulting firm Bryson Gillette. “As Democrats sort through that, it is going to be slow getting donors to open up their pocketbooks. But it’s just a season, you know? We’ll go through it.”
Not that politicos aren’t trying to pry open those purses! House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is headlining an L.A. fundraiser on Mar. 19 along with Rep. Ted Lieu and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) chair Suzan DelBene — with entry fees on par with presidential visits:
Upon receiving the invitation, the prolific producer sent a blistering email back, writing, “This is not the time to be asking for money. This is a time to be telling us what the hell you’re doing.”
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One donor fully realized the need for a reset to their relationship with the Democratic Party shortly after the election during a debrief Zoom for major donors led by the DCCC, the inside details I learned.