38 new york | september 16–29, 2019
lation segments they were targeting.
“Okay,” said Mehlhorn. “Well, I think of
the prehistoric megafauna.” The political
veterans in the room were confused, so
Mehlhorn continued. “White college
women on campuses in Florida—they all
voted for Trump because they have guns
in their purses because they think black
athletes are going to rape them.”
The operative froze, stunned. Mehlhorn
appeared to be asking them to target rac-
ist white college women worried that
Democrats would take their guns. The
group’s leader cut in: “Dmitri, two things
we will never do—foment hate against
persecuted groups and send the wrong
election date to people.”
“Okay, well, agree on the first; agree to
disagree on the second,” Mehlhorn replied,
according to multiple participants in the
meeting. (Mehlhorn says this recounting
of the exchange is “flatly misleading”: “One
participant made a remark about GOP
dirty tricks such as mailers and robocalls
articulating false election dates. In
response, I made an unfunny joke, and the
room laughed—not because it was funny
but because it wasn’t. None of us suggested
or even considered that idea as one our
side would undertake.”)
The conversation continued, pivoting to
Alabama. But first Mehlhorn wanted to
know if the super-pac had a scif (a “sensi-
tive compartmented information facility”)
in the office. When told no but that there
was another conference room if the current
one wasn’t good enough, they moved to the
second space. There, he had the political
team unplug all the electronics in the room,
including the TV monitor, and asked his
hosts to put their phones in pouches to
block surveillance. (He didn’t seem to
notice the Apple Watches on his counter-
parts’ wrists.) He then pitched them on
using billboards to advertise out-of-state
events to white supremacists on Election
Day and on boosting a conservative third-
party candidate. He left the office with no
collaboration agreement, though the New
York Times later reported that a $100,000
Hoffman donation did go to a group experi-
menting with Russian-inspired social-
media tactics meant to tank the candidacy
of Republican Roy Moore. Hoffman apolo-
gized, saying he’d been unaware of the proj-
ect, and promised to track his political
investments more closely.
After the midterms, Mehlhorn’s team
prepared a 15-page slide presentation out-
lining its work, a copy of which New York
obtained. It is called “The Promethean Proj-
ect,” and the slides detail the breadth of the
group’s investments, listing 30 organiza-
tions it had funded or worked with, divided
into categories like “New, Innovative Tech-
nology Tools,” “Changing the Culture of Vot-
ing and Increasing Turnout,” and “Fueling
Resistance Energy: Candidates and Volun-
teers.” Among them are well-known and
emerging partners like MoveOn and Black-
PAC; some were helping redefine the mod-
ern Democratic Party in the Trump era, but
others, like MotiveAI, got into trouble dur-
ing the midterms for their unconventional
work. (MotiveAI was found to be tied to
Facebook groups including one page called
“The Keg Bros” that both attacked Trump
donor Rebekah Mercer
and wrote that Represen-
tative Tulsi Gabbard
“makes us want to go
Democrat,” labeling her a
“certified C.W.I.L.F.,” a sex-
ist acronym for “congress-
woman I’d like to ...”) The
presentation says the
experiments “communi-
cated with” over 20 million
voters in 53 House districts
during the midterms.
But the deck offers no
mention of the Hoffman-
funded initiative causing
the most agita in some
D.C. circles. Before news
broke of the unseemly
electoral experiments Hoffman had paid
for in Alabama, the team began telling
allies about a $35 million project they
called Alloy, an attempt to build a voter-
data venture outside the DNC run by
three former Obama aides: Mikey Dicker-
son, Haley Van Dyck, and former U.S.
chief technology officer Todd Park. At
first, party officials feared the undertaking
would interfere with their own centralized
efforts to reinvent the Democrats’ data
program. More than once, they sat down
with Hoffman’s team members to make
the case that building a parallel voter file
would lead to a logistical and political
nightmare for Democratic groups and
candidates. By mid-2019, it sounded to
Democratic officials as though the plan
had shifted slightly—it would now be
more of a data warehouse for party-affili-
ated groups—and as the year progressed,
Mehlhorn met often with party officials to
keep them posted. At times, said people
who’ve met with his team, he expressed
exasperation about their animus toward
Hoffman, and when asked why his group
wouldn’t just invest in the party’s existing
centralized data program, he said this out-
side work was more efficient and allowed
his team to avoid difficult party officials
and campaigns.
Leaders of top Democratic groups mused
privately about no longer taking Hoffman’s
money, but conversations between the sidescontinued and hope of a data collaboration
persists, particularly among those who
readily acknowledge the success of some of
the groups he has funded. On June 25, the
DNC received just its third check this year
for the legal maximum, $865,000. It was
from Hoffman. Within a month, he sent
over 40 state Democratic parties $10,000
each. And in August, Democratic operatives
started hearing about Mehlhorn’s next
plans. Among the projects: researching
various voter groups, including “softer”
white nationalists.ACEBOOK’S ENTRY into
Democratic politics was consid-
erably more cautious but per-
haps no more self-aware. Mark
Zuckerberg had first tried en-
gaging a bit with politics by
funding FWD.us, an immigra-
tion group, starting in 2013, but
it was Sheryl Sandberg, a Trea-
sury Department alum, who
had first pushed the company
to build up its presence in
Washington. No one ever
thought Zuckerberg would do
much lobbying; he was too busy
and preferred to limit his few
interactions to heads of state. But eventu-
ally he came to see the use of a positive
relationship with the White House, since
his and Sandberg’s primary political con-
cern was executive-branch audits or over-
sight. They maintained a solid working
relationship with Obama, and Sandberg
courted Hillary Clinton’s inner circle.
Throughout 2016, Sandberg had the ears
of both Clinton and her top aides, advis-
ing them on everything from tech policy
to the candidate’s image.
Election Night upended this strategy, not
only because of Facebook’s scant ties to
Trump but also because its leaders suddenly
found themselves in the middle of a historic
political hurricane. Rattled, Zuckerberg
insisted two days after the election that it
was “a pretty crazy idea” that fake news
shared on the platform had “influenced the
election in any way.” But Obama, still the
president, was watching from Washington,
and he told his staff to make time for him to
speak with Zuckerberg when they were
both in Lima for a conference a week later.
In Peru, Obama looked Zuckerberg in the
eyes and told him, “It’s not crazy,” insisting
the CEO treat fake news, disinformation,
and Russia seriously. Taken aback, Zucker-
berg insisted it was a complex problem but
not a particularly widespread one.
Back in California, Zuckerberg stewed.
He was shaken, questioning his once-strong
relationship with the powerful and well-