The Education Minnesota teachers union and oil-heiress Alida Messinger continued to dominate the DFL money game last year. You will recall my Minnesota For Sale series of years past, tracing the flow of dollars in the 2021-22 election cycle.
I’ve updated that work for 2024, tracking the dollars flowing into the state’s Democratic (DFL) party last election year. In contrast to the national stage, not as much was going on here at the state level in 2024, with no statewide races (Governor, Attorney General, etc.) or the state senate (with one exception) on the ballot. The real contest was for the state House of Representatives (all 134 seats) and one special election for a single state senate seat.
Long story short, the immediate election result was a one-seat, temporary House Republican majority, which allowed for the election of a Republican speaker. Eventually, a Roseville-area special election resulted in a 67-67 tie in the state House.
But the big money operations who dominated in 2022 (the Democratic Governors Association (DGA), and equivalent groups for AG, SOS, and Auditor) sat out 2024. As a result, I’ve tracked only $34 million in 2024 DFL money, just over 1/3 of the dollars I tracked in the previous, busier election cycle.
The full spreadsheet can be found here and is also included at the bottom of this post. Here are the top few entries for 2024,
The entities in italics–State DFL Party, House DFL Caucus, and Senate DFL Caucus–are the main Democratic-party fundraising vehicles. They receive money, they do not provide money to politics.
Money is provided from, basically, only two sources: individuals and corporations (for profits and nonprofits, including labor unions).
To avoid double-counting, I’ve subtracted donations to one entity that are accounted for in another line item. Democrat-leaning organizations love to donate to each other, in a money-laundering operation that makes it appear they have more resources than really exist. Every dollar that enters Democratic-party accounts is laundered at least once, on average.
As you can see at the bottom of the full list below, some entities exist as merely pass-through accounts.
The largest source of DFL money in 2024 was the Education Minnesota teachers union, providing nearly $2.9 million. The National Education Association (NEA) union added another $400,000.
Alida Messinger (Rockefeller-oil heiress and ex-wife of former DFL Gov. Mark Dayton, himself a department store heir) regained her crown this cycle as the state’s biggest individual donor at $1.7 million. She narrowly beat out Barry Munger of Greenwich Village, New York City, at $1.5 million.
What’s also remarkable about the full list is how many big-money donors reside outside of Minnesota. That’s the premise of the Minnesota For Sale series: the state’s Democratic politics are controlled by entities outside the state, sometimes outside the country.
Labor unions, local and national, dominate the rest of the list. After the public-school teachers union, the government workers union AFSCME (Federal, State, County, Municipal) ranks fourth, overall.
A little further down the list are three out-of-state “dark money” outfits that successfully hide their original source of funds: State Victory (out of Raleigh, NC), and the DC-based Our American Future and the 1630 Fund.
To illustrate how the game is played, we begin with an entity called The Minnesota Family Prosperity Project, a “527” registered campaign-finance entity. It is exclusively funded by a “dark money” 501c4 nonprofit under the name North Star Prosperity. North Star’s campaign donations are exclusively funded by 1630 and Our American Future. There the money trail gets much harder to follow.
But, I’m sure that they have nothing but your best interests in mind.
