A few weeks ago, I wrote that Senator Elizabeth Warren should not raise funds from millionaires at private fundraising events if she is the Democratic nominee, and argued that she “cannot spend a primary campaign proudly rejecting big donor money because she recognizes its dangerous influence on politics, and then turn around and take millions of that same money in the general election, without being a hypocrite.” Warren is clearly a faithful reader of my posts, because this week she changed her position. In an interview with CBS News, Warren was asked if she would commit to forgoing fundraising events “no matter how much money Donald Trump is raising,” and she affirmed that she would: “Yeah, I’m not going to do the big-dollar fund-raisers. I’m just not going to do it. The whole notion behind this campaign is that we can build this together.”

Hours later, the Warren campaign rowed back that statement, telling NBC News that Warren would “continue to raise money and attend events that are open to the press” for the Democratic Party itself. Fundraisers stacked with millionaires and billionaires still count as grassroots, apparently, as long as it’s for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and not her campaign.



It is surely better if Warren keeps her promise to only attend fundraisers that are open to the press—that at least reassures us that the events won’t include Warren standing up and promising a room of billionaires that she’ll go easy on them, offer up ritual sacrifices of the poor, or whatever else it is that rich people get up to in the privacy of their climate-change survival bunkers. It would be hard, though not impossible, for Warren to have back-slapping wink-and-nod conversations with rich donors with the Associated Press taking photos. Still, presidential campaigns lie all the time, and it’s very possible that the definition of “open to the press” may change; there are a lot more unanswered questions about the level of access these donors will ultimately get.



The distinction between raising money for her own campaign and raising it for the DNC is not as significant as her campaign makes it out to be.

The distinction between raising money for her own campaign and raising it for the DNC is not as significant as her campaign makes it out to be. In 2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign raised millions for the Hillary Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee with the DNC and state parties, though most of that money ended up back in the national DNC’s hands. Politico reported at the time that this setup allowed Clinton to “solicit checks of $350,000 or more from her super-rich supporters at extravagant fundraisers including a dinner at George Clooney’s house and a concert at Radio City Music Hall featuring Katy Perry and Elton John.” (Warren closed her own joint fundraising committee before she ran for president.) This addiction to big-dollar fundraising led to acidic headlines in The New York Times: One story, “Where Has Hillary Clinton Been? Ask the Ultrarich,” noted that Clinton had “been more than accessible to those who reside in some of the country’s most moneyed enclaves and are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to see her” during the summer of her campaign.



Clinton was always more at home palling around with the big donor network than Warren seems to be—though Warren’s Senate campaign saw her host intimate steakhouse fundraisers for big donors too, Clinton had many years more experience of floating amongst the moneyed elite. She was also personally wealthy, obscenely so. But the problem remains: Warren intends to make raising money from the elite an important part of her political project.

