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Friday, December 23, 2016

Election 2016: Donors Want to Know

Election 2016: Donors Want to Know
By James Baxley

Even though the election is over and the recount is over, Hillary Clinton is still in the news. What we are reading and hearing from the alternative media is, the voters aren’t buying the Democrats reasons for losing the election. Not everyone is buying into the left’s lies and misinformation. Clinton keeps insisting that she lost the election because of Russia, Putin, fake news, hackers, James Comey, and Clinton's bumbling staff.

Clinton’s donors also aren't buying her excuses for losing the election. Clinton’s fallout is causing an internal revolt among her largest donors. Clinton’s biggest backers are urging local finance staffers, state party officials, and campaign aides to provide a more thorough explanation of how she lost the election. They want a “campaign autopsy,” which could expose how the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Clinton lost the election.




The donors are demanding to know where Clinton spent the near $1.5 billion in campaign resources she collected in the closing months. Until the donors get answers, they are cutting off all donations to the Democratic Party. It isn’t just the donors who are cutting off donations, foreign governments have been cutting off funds also to the Clinton Foundation.

Who are these donors? They range from leaders in the tech industry, hotel giants, hedge fund managers, and investment firms. I've listed just a small sample of Clinton's donors:

Facebook (FB) co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna: $35,000,000; Jay Robert Pritzker and Mary Pritzker, the heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune: $12,600,000; Haim Saban and Cheryl Saban, Saban Capital Group, Chairman of Univision Communications: $10,000,000; billionaire George Soros, Soros Fund Management: $9,525,000; and the brains behind Slim-Fast and the founder of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, S. Daniel Abraham, SDA Enterprises: $9,000,000. 

According to New York Review’s Simon Head, the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiatives has led to many friendships such as their “most important, and lucrative, business friendship” with Canadian energy billionaire Frank Giustra. Head writes, “Giustra became a member of its board and since 2007 has been co-sponsor of the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative, or CGGI. In turn, Bill Clinton’s political influence and personal contacts with foreign heads of state have been crucial to Giustra’s international business interests.”

 In an interview in the September 2006 issue of the New Yorker, Giustra described to David Remnick how his ties to Clinton could work for him and his interests. Giustra told Remnick that “all my chips, almost, are on Bill Clinton. He’s a brand, a worldwide brand, and he can do things and ask for things that no one else can.”



Clinton’s donors (at least some of them) want the receipts and an honest investigation of how she failed to read the mood in swing states and how her Brooklyn operation misread polling data. They want an investigation like the Republicans’ 2012 "Growth and Opportunity Project."

 The Republican National Committee's (RNC) "Growth and Opportunity Project" is a densely packed 100 page document which details what the party is doing wrong and suggestions on how to fix it.

 The "Growth and Opportunity Project" tackles 12 issues in which the GOP needs to fix. A sampling of these issues are how the GOP is a two-party system in itself, listening to the Hispanic community, and the need for fewer debates. We saw these three suggestions at work in the 2016 election and they resulted in the Republicans not only winning the Presidency, but reclaiming the Senate.

 I suspect we will see something comparible to the "Growth and Opportunity Project" from the Democrats such as “Learning from 2016: Strategy, Policy, and Building a lasting winning Coalition” or “Campaign Tactics of the future: Polling, Social Media, and Targeting.”

According to longtime Clinton friend and donor Alan Patricof, not everybody is expecting a “campaign autopsy.”

“There’s a lot of people expressing the feeling that the campaign had not been run as well as it could be, but I have a different approach,” he said. “There’s always a Monday morning quarterback: She should have gone to Wisconsin, she should have done this, she should have done that."