Crowdpac

Crowdpac is a for-profit website founded in 2014, with the purpose of helping unknown Democrat political outsiders raise money and run for office, and to track political data from across the United States. While it was originally marketed as a non-partisan political fundraising site, the platform is currently only open for fundraising to select political ideologies.[1]

Crowdpac
Type of site
Crowdfunding
Created bySteve Hilton, Adam Bonica, Gisel Kordestani, Paul Hilder
URLhttps://www.crowdpac.com/
CommercialYes
Launched2014
Current statusActive

History

Crowdpac was co-founded in 2014 by Steve Hilton, a former political advisor to British Prime Minister David Cameron,[2][3] along with Adam Bonica, Gisel Kordestani, and Paul Hilder. The website is based in San Francisco, and Hilton served as its CEO until 2018.[4][5] One of the company's most successful crowdfunding campaigns was for Kathryn Allen, who raised three times as much money as incumbent Congressman Jason Chaffetz, before Chaffetz announced that he would not run for re-election.[3][6] The website also uses an algorithm built by researchers at Stanford University to track political candidates' sources of funding to predict how ideologically partisan they are.[7]

In May 2018, Crowdpac announced that it was suspending fundraising for Republican candidates on its platform because of issues with "hate speech and the rhetoric and actions used to stir up racial animosity legitimized by the President of the United States".[8] At the same time, Hilton was fired as CEO due to his relationship with Fox News as a conservative political pundit and his conflicting values with the company, with Jesse Thomas appointed as acting CEO.[8]

The website suspended all donations and closed on June 19, 2019.[9] The site was acquired by Prytany and relaunched in November 2019.[10]

Criticisms

Crowdpac was criticized for promoting endorsements by Ron Conway, one of its investors and a candidate for office, in a 2015 election in San Francisco.[11]

Although launched with the aim to be a non-partisan platform, in 2018 the company acting CEO Jesse Thomas decided to block Republican candidates from raising on the platform, stating "This decision has been a hard one for our company, but as Trumpism has spread through the Republican Party we’ve started to see an increase in campaigns for Republican candidates that we cannot allow on our platform."[12][1] Thomas cited an example of a neo-Nazi candidate, whom was kicked out of the Republican convention, attempting to raise money through the website.[12]

See also

References
  1. Thomsen, Jacqueline (2018-05-15). "Campaign fundraising site suspends Republican accounts in effort to reject 'Trumpism'". TheHill. Retrieved 2018-05-15.
  2. Payne, Sebastian (3 September 2014). "Steve Hilton, a Brit out to disrupt American politics with Crowdpac". The Washington Post. Retrieved 26 June 2017.
  3. Garcia, Eric (9 May 2017). "Crowdpac Helps Candidates Test the Waters". Roll Call. Retrieved 26 June 2017.
  4. Garofoli, Joe (31 May 2017). "Could this San Francisco tech CEO's show pull Fox to the middle?". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 26 June 2017.
  5. "About". Crowdpac.com. Retrieved 26 June 2017.
  6. Johnson, Eric (19 April 2017). "To fix politics, you have to fix fundraising, Crowdpac CEO Steve Hilton says". Recode. Retrieved 26 June 2017.
  7. Moody, Chris (14 January 2015). "Rating 2016 candidates by donors busts conventional wisdom". CNN. Retrieved 26 June 2017.
  8. Jesse Thomas (May 14, 2018). "A stand against Trumpism, a stand for democracy". Medium.
  9. "The end of the Crowdpac experiment". Medium. May 21, 2019. Retrieved Aug 19, 2020.
  10. Manchester, Julia (Nov 20, 2019). "Progressive fundraising platform Crowdpac relaunching after shutting down in May". TheHill. Retrieved Aug 19, 2020.
  11. Martin, Jay (2015-11-03). "Community View: Crowdpac's Not So Nonpartisan SF Endorsements". MissionLocal. Retrieved 2018-05-03.
  12. Tani, Maxwell (2018-05-15). "Fox News Host Exits His Company Over Support for Trump". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 2018-05-15.
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