As promised earlier, there’s more from Theodore Schleifer today, although only tangentially connected to the FTX case. The connection concerns how Hakeem Jeffries put together of dark money coalition to defeat progressive candidates. Aside from Sam Bankman-Fried and AIPAC, venture capitalist, Jeffrey Epstein crony and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, also an AI and crypto advocate, was one of the participants. His goal, through his Mainstream Democrats SuperPAC was— like Jeffries’— to defeat progressive candidates and to bolster corrupt conservative Democrats, particularly Blue Dogs Henry Cuellar (TX), where he was succeasful, and Kurt Schrader (OR), where he failed. Hoffman spent big against progressive women Delia Ramirez (IL), Jill Tokuda (HI), Jamie McLeod Skinner (OR), Nina Turner (OH), Yuh-Line Niou (NY) and Jessica Cisneros (TX).
Today’s question involves why Hoffman is offering unlikely assistance to Meatball Ron. Schleifer looked at “an explosive rumor coursing through Democratic big-money circles has Hoffman spending millions supporting Ron DeSantis. Schleifer: “kinda true” with “a few key caveats. Hoffman is indeed planning to get involved in the Republican presidential primary, I’m told, and his top adviser Dmitri Mehlhorn has communicated that plan in closed-door conversations as a top 2024 priority. The logic, according to a person familiar with the strategy, is pretty simple: Democrats have two shots to take out Donald Trump next year, first in the primary and then in the general, and it would be foolish to waste one of those chances.
He claims the conservative billionaire “remains a Democrat, and he shares the belief of many Democrats that Biden would have a slightly better chance of defeating Trump than DeSantis.” Schleifer wrote that “the line between beating Trump and boosting DeSantis can be thin. Hoffman’s team is currently studying early voting states— party registration requirements, demographic groups, state GOP nominating rules, media ecosystems, etcetera— to see where they can move the needle. And if they do inadvertently elect a President DeSantis? I’m told that Hoffman and Mehlhorn, at a high level, don’t view the Florida governor as an existential threat to democracy, unlike Trump, and believe he may even have the ability to successfully govern.”
Hoffman, and especially Mehlhorn, have become bogeymen in recent years among some elements of the left who see them as overly-influential center-right operators who are all-too-excited to piss on the Democratic base. But their DeSantis strategy puts them at odds with most establishment Democrats, too, and it speaks to an interesting high-level intellectual divide between Hoffman and other party elites. Many leading Democrats— not just those on the party’s left-most flank— view Trump as a symptom of America’s problems, and DeSantis as another avatar of Trumpism. Hoffman and Mehlhorn view Trump more narrowly as the disease itself. And that means they are willing to do whatever it takes to excise the cancer, even if it means electing DeSantis instead. Hoffman declined to comment, but he hinted at his perspective in an interview Monday with my old boss Kara Swisher. “The short answer is I will spend as much as I possibly can and it takes and is effective [to beat Trump],” he told Kara. Hoffman said he would “absolutely” support Biden against Trump. But if DeSantis was the nominee? Hoffman was just a touch more tentative. “DeSantis— I’m almost certainly in the Biden camp. Like 99.99999 percent. Unless an asteroid passes close to the Earth.”