Demos

The organization receives substantial funding from labor unions and progressive foundations. As of July 2021, the current president is Taifa Smith Butler, former CEO of left-of-center policy advocacy group Georgia Budget and Policy Institute and a member of Demos’ board of trustees since 2017. ⁵ She replaced K. Sabeel Rahman, a former fellow at the left-leaning New America Foundation. ⁵ In 2018, Rahman replaced Heather McGhee, a liberal political operative who formerly worked for the 2008 presidential campaign of North Carolina Democrat John Edwards.

Founding and History

Several liberal policy activists joined forces back in 1999 to form Demos, including David Callahan, a fellow at the Century Foundation; Charles Halpern, president of the Nathan Cummings Foundation; Rob Fersh, now the president of Convergence Center for Policy Revolution; Stephen Heintz, a vice president at the EastWest Institute; Sara Horowitz, the founder of Working Today and the Freelancers Union; Arnie Miller of the executive search firm Isaacson Miller; former U.S. Representative David Skaggs (D-Colorado); and Clinton administration State Department official Linda Tarr-Whelan.⁶

Heintz became the first president of Demos in March 2000, but left just a year later to become president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Miles Rapoport succeeded Heintz. A former Connecticut state legislator and secretary of state, Rapoport has long history in progressive politics. He was part of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960s. He was also director of Connecticut Citizens Action Group and helped to establish the Campaign for America’s Future.⁶

From 2010 to 2012, Demos partnered with the American Prospect, a liberal news magazine and opinion journal.⁷

Starting in 2014, under the presidency of Heather McGhee, Demos initiated a “transformation” intended to further ingrain left-of-center race ideology within the organization and to shift the demographics of its employees in way that favored racial groups other than whites. Within just four years, the Demos staff went from being approximately one-quarter to nearly two-thirds ethnic-minority, and all staff were now required to undergo training on how to implement race-based equality of outcome. In a report on this “transformation,” Demos leadership acknowledged that it had required “a major commitment in time, managerial resources, and money,” but claimed that these had been “well spent.” ⁸

Advocacy

Demos advocates for substantial left-wing changes to the sociopolitical system in the United States. The organization emphasizes three areas of commitment: voting rights expansion, a hybrid environmentalist-left agenda it calls “pathways to ensure a diverse, expanded middle class in a new, sustainable economy,” and advocacy for communitarianism and a liberal interpretation of racial equality.⁹

In practice, these commitments cover left-wing boilerplate. Amid the debates surrounding the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (known popularly as the “debt commission”) in 2010, Demos and aligned groups released a plan that would raise taxes, steeply cut the military, and raise spending on progressive priorities.¹⁰ In debates over healthcare reform in 2017, Demos proposed an expansion of Medicare to children, with the possibility of government-controlled “Medicare-for-all” left possible.¹¹

Demos has close ties to the wing of the progressive movement and Democratic Party led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Warren’s daughter serves as Demos board chair, and the organization’s blog hailed Warren’s leadership of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the launch of her U.S. Senate campaign in 2011.²

Trump Administration

Demos opposed President Donald Trump’s nominations and appointments to federal agencies. ¹² In 2017, then-Demos president Heather McGhee testified in opposition to the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, citing his support of the Court’s prevailing jurisprudence on First Amendment issues as grounds to reject the nomination.¹³

Starbucks “Racial Bias Training”

In July 2018, Heather McGhee of Demos and Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund served as curriculum advisers for coffee chain Starbucks’ racial-bias training. They also released a separate report outlining suggestions for how Starbucks could achieve a “full-scale racial equity overhaul.”¹⁴

2019 House Democrats Issues Conference

Sabeel Rahman, president of Demos, participated in a discussion titled “Uniting Working Men and Women Behind a Democratic Agenda” during the 2019 House Democrats Issues Conference which took place in Washington D.C. and Leesburg, VA in April 2019. He was joined by Dorian Warren, president of Center for Community Change, a left-of-center nonprofit. ¹⁵

Opposition to Nuclear Energy

Demos was one of more than 600 co-signing organizations on a January 2019 open letter to Congress titled “Legislation to Address the Urgent Threat of Climate Change.” The signatories declared their support for new laws to bring about “100 percent decarbonization” of the transportation sector but denounced nuclear power as an example of “dirty energy” that should not be included in any legislation promoting the use of so-called “renewable energy.” ⁴

Nuclear power plants produce no carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gas emissions, and as of 2021 accounted for 19 percent of American electricity production—the largest source of zero carbon electricity in the United States. ¹⁶ An October 2018 proposal from The Nature Conservancy noted that zero-carbon nuclear plants produced 7.8 percent of total world energy output and recommended reducing carbon emissions by increasing nuclear capacity to 33 percent of total world energy output. ¹⁷

Student Loans

In October 2023, Demos opposed the Biden administration’s resuming student loan payment collection following a temporary pause due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors. In a statement, Demos president Taifa Smith Butler demanded that the federal government unilaterally cancel all student debt. She also claimed that collecting loan payments was disproportionately harmful to ethnic minority populations, connecting this alleged disparate impact to the Supreme Court’s ruling against race-based preferences in higher-education admissions. ¹⁸

Israeli-Hamas Conflict

Following the attack on Israel by the terrorist organization Hamas and the subsequent Israeli military campaign in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip in October 2023, Demos issued a statement aligning itself with the large number of left-wing activist groups which had called for a ceasefire. The statement claimed that Demos stood with both Israeli and Palestinian civilians affected by the escalating conflict. ¹⁹

Elections Policy

Demos has consistently opposed voting integrity measures. In April 2020, Chiraag Bains, the organization’s legal strategies director at the time, wrote that scrutiny of expanded mail-in ballot use amounted to voter suppression. Since then, Bains and several other top Demos personnel have received positions in the Biden administration to work on election policy. ²⁰

According to the Washington Examiner, in July 2021 the Biden White House hosted a Zoom call with representatives of Demos along with several other left-of-center voter advocacy groups to discuss increasing voter registration within the United States. Topics discussed on the call included “registering illegal immigrants and integrating voter registration into public housing as a requirement under federal law.” ²¹ Notes on the meeting were provided by the Washington Examiner through the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) and the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. Other groups involved in the call included the Open Society Policy Center, End Citizens United, Democracy Fund, League of Women Voters, and the Sentencing Project. ²¹

Supreme Court Expansion and Reform

In a policy brief from August of 2024, Demos argued for the increase in the number of Supreme Court seats in order to “mitigate the damage done through decades of conservative court capture.”  Demos explained that the number of seats in the Supreme Court has been altered 6 times in American history. Demos is in favor of the Judiciary Act of 2023, which was introduced by Representative Hank Johnson (D-GA) and Senator Ed Markey (D-MA). This act proposes the introduction of four new seats in the Supreme Court. Demos also claims that the Supreme Court has overstepped its role, concentrating power and undermining rights related to racial justice, workers, consumers, and reproductive health. They assert that Congress has the constitutional authority to regulate the Court, including changing its size, implementing term limits, and enforcing ethical standards. ²² 

Leadership

President

Taifa Smith Butler is the president of Demos, replacing K. Sabeel Rahman and beginning in July 2021. ²³ Butler has been a member of Delos’ Board of Trustees since 2017 and was formerly the CEO of left-of-center policy advocacy group Georgia Budget and Policy Institute (GBPI). Prior to this, she served as policy and communications director for the nonprofit organization Georgia Family Connection Partnership. ⁵

K. Sabeel Rahman replaced Heather McGee as the president of Demos in 2018. Rahman previously served as a fellow at New America Foundation, a progressive advocacy organization, and a fellow at Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning anti-free-market organization that has close ties to Democracy Alliance, a group of left-leaning billionaires and donor organizations. Rahman also worked at the Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning think tank with links to Tides Foundation, Proteus Fund, and other center-of-left donor organizations. ^{24 25 26} In January 2021 Rahman left his position when named as Senior Counselor at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Biden Administration. ²⁷

Vice President

Brenda Wright, the vice president of legal strategies, is a former managing attorney for the National Voting Rights Institute in Boston. She was also the director of the voting rights project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, an organization that frequently partners with Demos on electoral policy issues.⁶

Operations

Joseph DiNorcia is the chief financial and operations officer at Demos. Previously, he was the president and chief executive officer of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). SIECUS pushes for more detailed sex education in schools and opposes programs which encourage abstinence until marriage, while also attacking efforts by parents to increase the transparency of school curricula and policies. DiNorcia played a lead role in expanding the organization’s international activism and in setting up a policy advocacy office in Washington, D.C. Prior to that, DiNorcia worked for an organization which operates residential facilities for vulnerable children and teenagers. ²⁸

Communications

Aoife Toomey is the chief of development and communications at demos. Prior to this, she spent six years at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), serving positions as state network fundraising manager and vice president for development. Aoife also worked in  held frontline fundraising roles at Carlow University, Pew Charitable Trusts, the Bipartisan Policy Center, and the Smithsonian Institution. She has also served on the board of the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) Western Pennsylvania chapter and as a mentor for AFP DC’s mentoring program. ²⁹

Board of Directors

Demos’s board chair is Rupa Balasubramanian, who serves as vice president at the Pop Culture Collaborative. She has managed private and family foundations in Los Angeles and helped create the Women’s Heart Alliance with Barbra Streisand and Cedars-Sinai. She previously worked at Hill & Knowlton, the White House Press Secretary’s office, and serves on the boards of Vote.org and Planned Parenthood Los Angeles.³⁰

Xavier de Souza Briggs is the vice chair of the board, and serves as Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution. He previously served as a senior policy official in the Obama Administration, vice president of the Ford Foundation, and a faculty member at both Harvard and MIT. His work focuses on economic opportunity, housing, democracy, and government effectiveness. He also serves on the boards of Just Capital and the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences and is a National Academy of Public Administration fellow. ³⁰

Other notable board members include Sabrina Stratton, senior vice president of Amalgamated Bank, Andrea Cristina Mercado, executive director of Florida Rising, and June Wilson executive director of the Compton Foundation. ³⁰

Among Demos’s former board members is former President Barack Obama.⁶

Funding

Since 2015, the annual revenue of Demos has fluctuated between just under $7 million and more than $19 million. in 2023, Demos saw revenue of $5,659,255 and expenses of $9,583,841. The group’s net assets amounted to $8,427,423. ³¹

Demos has refused to make public its donors and has been classified as a “dark money group” by the Center for Public Integrity. In 2014, the organization’s tax forms showed that it obtained $7 million of funds, half of which came from only seven contributors that ranged between $250,000 to $1.425 million. In the same year, $3 million was given towards salaries and wages including then-President Heather McGhee’s salary of $240,000. ³²

Demos has been associated with the progressive donor consortium Democracy Alliance, which lists Demos as a “recommended organization.”³³ The Democracy Alliance also listed Demos as part of its “2020 Vision Investment Portfolio.”³⁴

Demos has drawn considerable financial support from a number of left-leaning foundations. Those foundations include the Tides Foundation ($1,246,469 since 2002); Ford Foundation ($1 million since 2000); W.K. Kellogg Foundation ($470,000 since 2008); Surdna Foundation ($370,000 since 2010); Rockefeller Brothers Fund ($268,000 since 2007); Rockefeller Family Fund ($190,000 since 2002); Nathan Cummings Foundation ($180,000 since 2009); Arca Foundation ($154,050 since 2010); and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ($150,000 since 2005). The relatively more centrist Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has also provided support ($850,000 since 2009).⁶

Demos has received substantial contributions from labor unions, including $75,000 in 2015 from the Service Employees International Union.³⁵ Other unions contributing to Demos include the United Auto Workers; the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME); the Communications Workers of America; the United Steelworkers, the American Federation of Teachers, and the United Food and Commercial Workers.³⁶