Earlier today I wrote about the layoffs happening at Ibram Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research. More than half of the staff is now gone at a group that launched three years ago with more than $13 million in funding from big donors.

But the situation at the Center for Antiracist Research is part of a larger pattern. The institutional left in general has been laying off people in droves. Last month Justice Democrats laid off half its staff. Back in May, Planned Parenthood laid off 10%-20% of its national workforce. The Sierra Club laid off workers in April. And the Sunrise Movement laid off workers last year.

NY Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg reports that all of this is leading to a level of heightened panic as progressive organizations realize donors just aren’t giving they way they used to give.

As we stumble toward another existential election, panic is setting in among some progressive groups because the donors who buoyed them throughout the Trump years are disengaging. “Donations to progressive organizations are way down in 2023 across the board,” said a recent memo from Billy Wimsatt, executive director of the Movement Voter Project, an organization founded in 2016 that channels funds to community organizers, mostly in swing states, who engage and galvanize voters. He added, “Groups need money to make sure we have a good outcome next November. But. People. Are. Not. Donating.”

The memo that Goldberg cites was just a cover letter to a much larger document. Rather than skip over this, let’s take a look at more of what Wimsatt had to say:

A few weeks ago, I got off the phone with an Executive Director from a well-respected organization in a battleground state. The organization, which has a very strong track record, had hit an unexpected funding shortfall, and was in danger of having to lay off its entire staff in the coming month unless they raised over a hundred thousand dollars.

This is one of more than a dozen calls I’ve gotten in recent weeks from leaders describing desperate financial situations: painful layoffs, tapping reserves, cutting impactful programs, Executive Directors going without pay or needing to step away from the work entirely, due to extreme stress.

2022 saw an historic drop in US charitable giving — 10.5% after inflation — and it appears to have continued in 2023, especially for political organizations.

An especially concerning indicator: The Movement Cooperative (TMC) just put out a memo with anonymized stats on financially-driven cutbacks of its member groups. TMC, a backbone institution for the entire progressive ecosystem that provides more than 1,000 organizations with data infrastructure, support staff, and tech tools including access to the voter file, is itself facing a multi-million dollar shortfall.

These aren’t isolated anecdotes. There is a growing chorus of data points that this is happening across the progressive movement, even for groups working on hot-button issues like LGBTQ rights and reproductive justice, whose constituencies are suffering high-profile attacks in the news every day…

A lot of organizational leaders are experiencing a sense of failure, isolation, self-judgment, and fear right now. And it’s much harder on BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) leaders and staff from marginalized backgrounds, who already have to swim upstream to prove themselves within the racist and sexist cultures of politics and philanthropy….

How much money would stem the drought? $100-300 million, deployed strategically to grassroots voter engagement groups for the remainder of 2023, would go a long way.

That’s a lot of money for the remaining four months of the year. Getting back to Goldberg, she offers a series of reasons why this might be happening. First, she suggests it’s because Trump is no longer president and therefore progressives aren’t as motivated as they were in 2020.

It was probably inevitable that left-leaning fund-raising would fall once the immediate crisis of Donald Trump’s presidency ended. Activism, like electoral politics, is often thermostatic: There’s more energy on the right when Democrats are in power, and more on the left during Republican administrations. After a pandemic, an insurrection, and innumerable climate disasters and mass shootings, people are burned out and maybe even, as Ana Marie Cox argues in the New Republic, traumatized, a state that can lead to hypervigilance but also avoidance. And, of course, there’s inflation, a big part of the reason that charitable giving is down overall.

There may be something to this in the sense that although Trump is the current frontrunner for the GOP nomination, we don’t see nearly as much of him as we did in, say, 2020. He’s not president, he’s not on Twitter and he has skipped the debates. He still generates a lot of news but he’s not as omnipresent as he was. But all of that could change if he gets the nomination. At that point, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the financial floodgates open again.

Goldberg also argues part of the problem is the constant tone of desperate and depressing emails that Democratic fundraisers use to appeal to donors. Maybe that’s a factor, I really don’t know. But she completely skips over another factor which I suspect plays a role.

The word is out about what is happening behind the scenes at many of these groups. It’s open warfare between the old-school leadership and the young, woke employees who are making all sorts of demands that have little to do with the reason the group exists in the first place. That was what happened at the Sierra Club. It’s what has happened at lots of progressive groups since 2020.

I’m not part of the left-wing circles where stuff like this gets discussed behind the scenes but you can bet the big donors hear all about it. They know what is going on inside these organizations. I suspect that’s one reason they are refusing to donate. But, again, that doesn’t mean they won’t start up again.

As the prospect of Trump redux moves from looming horror to daily emergency, Gavito expects people to throw themselves into politics once again. “I have faith in the anti-MAGA coalition, that we will not go back,” she said. I hope she’s right, and democratic forces can rouse themselves one more time. It’s a depressing paradox: We need politics that are about more than just the miserable business of stopping Trump, but unless Trump is stopped, we’re not going to get them.

Progressive groups are starving for funds and in a panic. They are counting on one person to turn that around and help fill their coffers. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if that works out for them.