When Melinda French Gates was running the world’s biggest philanthropy with her husband, Bill Gates, she insisted on staying on the sidelines of politics. She was half of one of America’s most celebrated couples, and she did not want to invite backlash from governments around the globe, to say nothing of getting crosswise with Washington by endorsing someone who could lose.
Then, in 2021, that well-ordered life blew up.
Her divorce from Mr. Gates was a bombshell — and its consequences still ripple three years later. She suddenly came into her own billions of dollars, with which she could do whatever she chose. This year, she decided to resign from her namesake foundation, which meant she could set her own agenda. And, after decades of carefully scripted neutrality, she did what she had wanted to do ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade: She dove headfirst into politics.
At 60, Ms. French Gates has reinvented herself, surprisingly, as an ascendant Democratic megadonor. She has endorsed political candidates, given more than $13 million to groups supporting Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, had her team talk to Ms. Harris’s advisers about a joint event, and publicly championed abortion rights, an issue she downplayed for decades because it was too politically fraught.
Ms. French Gates’s transformation, people close to her say, is due less to a eureka moment and more to a response to the changing circumstances in her home and in the world. Her split from Mr. Gates and the foundation gave her independence, and the overturning of Roe spurred her to act.
“Now I do get to make whatever decision I want to make about endorsing or not endorsing on my own,” she said in a brief interview last month. She downplayed the role of the divorce, but she conceded that beforehand, “there were more considerations because I was the head of a foundation.”
Ms. French Gates has not always been as fierce a defender of liberal values as she styles herself today. Her new zeal for seven-figure political contributions is not part of her natural disposition. As one of the leaders of the risk-averse Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, she stressed the need for the appearance of bipartisanship. Today, some Democrats privately complain that she did not come to her new viewpoint earlier — during the rise of former President Donald J. Trump and as abortion rights receded.
While Ms. French Gates had a strong relationship with Hillary Clinton, for instance, she did not endorse her for president in her race against Mr. Trump.
“Bill and I always keep private who we are voting for in elections,” she said when asked before the 2016 election whether she wanted to see Mrs. Clinton win.
Ms. French Gates has even donated modestly in the past to some female politicians who opposed expanding abortion access, such as Representative Elise Stefanik of New York and Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, both Republicans.
But over the past few years, Ms. French Gates has greatly increased her giving to liberal dark-money groups that largely support Democrats, according to two people with knowledge of the gifts. And in this election cycle, the people say, she has grown increasingly comfortable with doing so openly, making megadonations to Democratic super PACs, which are publicly disclosed.
Asked if she had second thoughts about not helping Democrats resist Mr. Trump more in previous election cycles, Ms. French Gates said she did not, saying that “the only regret” she had was not funding more candidates who were pushing for guaranteed paid family leave before President Biden’s unsuccessful push to include it in a 2021 bill.
That effort was a turning point for Ms. French Gates, said Sondra Goldschein, the executive director of the Campaign for a Family Friendly Economy, whose super PAC received $3 million from her this cycle. Ms. French Gates and her team “saw that we had a political problem and that political problems require political solutions,” Ms. Goldschein said.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion, came a year later.
Ms. French Gates started expanding her political footprint, for instance this year hiring a former political aide to Mr. Biden, Natalie Montelongo, to help steer her political giving. More important, she has been influenced by two of her children, who have asked her to dig even deeper to support Democrats in this election, including in a recent conversation with them, according to a person with knowledge of the discussion.
Her son, Rory, is an ambitious Democratic donor who has consulted experts in political technology and attended one meeting of the Democracy Alliance, a network of progressive megadonors who coordinate their donations. Ms. French Gates recalled that he had, since high school, “helped me open my eyes and educated me more.”
Her youngest daughter, Phoebe, recently graduated from Stanford and has a large social media following centered on abortion rights. She makes her own six-figure political contributions, with the help of personal political advisers.
As Ms. French Gates made her moves, word got around. Democratic fund-raisers over the past couple of years have sought out introductions to her team in what some Democratic fund-raisers described as a “frenzy.” Few other new liberal megadonors had emerged since the early days of the Trump era, so Democratic fund-raisers began to see Ms. French Gates as one of a few new sources of capital.
After Ms. Harris ascended to the Democratic nomination, Ms. French Gates grew even more involved. She donated close to the legal maximum $929,600, to the Harris campaign in July, according to two people with knowledge of her activities. Ms. French Gates has also had discussions with the Harris campaign about doing a campaign event with Ms. Harris about the care economy — policies aimed at helping parents and other caregivers — according to two people with knowledge of the talks.
Ms. French Gates and Pivotal Ventures, her de facto family office with a mission to expand women’s power and influence, have disclosed over $10 million in contributions to federal groups and candidates in this cycle. Most of the money has gone to groups centered on women’s issues such as Ms. Goldschein’s CFFE PAC and Women Vote!, a super PAC affiliated with EMILYs List, which backs Democratic female candidates who support abortion rights. Two years ago, Ms. French Gates had never made a disclosed federal donation of more than $35,800. She then made 14 of those over the next two years.
Source: https://dnyuz.com/2024/10/07/indias-modi-receives-maldives-muizzu-in-bid-to-boost-ties/
