A member of the Democratic National Committee admitted that so-called nonpartisan voter registration schemes were always, in fact, partisan.
The New York Times’ Shane Goldmacher and Jonah Smith concede in an analysis on Democrats’ cratering voter registration numbers that “For years, the left has relied on a sprawling network of nonprofits — which solicit donations from people whose identities they need not disclose — to register Black, Latino and younger voters. Though the groups are technically nonpartisan, the underlying assumption has been that most new voters registering would vote Democrat.”
But it’s Democrat strategist and member of the Democratic National Committee Maria Cardona who admits the underlying strategy of these supposedly non-partisan organizations: It was never about engaging voters; it was about engaging voters who would vote Democrat.
Now, with President Trump’s gains among minority voters, “you can’t just register a young Latino or a young Black voter and assume that they’re going to know that it’s Democrats that have the best policies,” Cardona told Goldmacher.
In other words, as pointed out on X by investigative researcher Parker Thayer, “All of the sudden the ‘nonpartisan’ voter registration nonprofits don’t seem to care about the civic participation of minorities any more.”
These supposedly nonpartisan registration groups only cared about registering minorities when they assumed those voters would be reliably Democrat. Now that President Trump and Republicans are making inroads with demographics that once seemed safely Democrat, the party is worried its “nonpartisan” efforts could backfire.
Of course such an admission is not surprising. Just after taking office, then-President Joe Biden issued an executive order mandating federal agencies register and mobilize voters “with the express intent of increasing election participation among minority groups that tend to vote disproportionately Democrat,” as Ben Weingarten explained in these pages. The order instructed agencies to enlist the help of “nonpartisan third-party organizations … to provide voter registration services on agency premises.”
In analyzing “Bidenbucks” recipients who participated in a July 2021 “listening session,” The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project found that “Every participant whose party affiliation or political donation history could be identified by the Oversight Project was identified as a Democrat except for one Green Party member.”
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As The Federalist’s Matt Kittle reported, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service, which provides meals in K-12 schools, “was involved in a left-wing group’s efforts to get voting-age students in Milwaukee Public Schools to the polls.”
“In New Mexico and Kansas, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) schemed to use students in bureau-operated American Indian K-12 schools to carry voter registration cards home to their parents,” Kittle reported, noting that the move may have violated the Hatch Act, which bars “executive branch employees from overt political activities on the job.”
Meanwhile an investigation by the House Committee on Small Business discovered that the Small Business Association (SBA) Bidenbucks voter registration events in the swing state of Michigan were held “mainly in Democratic strongholds.” And as Minnesota Rep. Pete Stauber noted, “roughly 91% of Michigan voters are registered to vote, with small business owners more likely to vote than the general population.”
With such high registration rates, a nonpartisan organization expending resources on such a state would make little sense — unless these organizations wanted to push one party over the edge in the key swing state.
Critical observers have long understood that leftist activists weaponize “nonpartisan” voter registration schemes to tilt elections in Democrats’ favor. What’s different now is that Democrats themselves are saying the quiet part out loud: These efforts were never about civic participation — they were about manufacturing an electoral advantage for one party.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
