Oakland is in the midst of one of its most contentious, and one of its most expensive, election cycles.
Campaign finance records show that in the past 10 months, hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent on the effort to recall Sheng Thao, the embattled mayor of the northern California city. Tens of thousands of dollars have gone into city council races, and to the effort to recall the local district attorney, Pamela Price.
Many of these donations came from just a handful of people: wealthy figures in real estate, finance and tech, some of whom have long funded political battles against progressives in nearby San Francisco.
And just like in San Francisco, many of the donations have been organized through a complicated web of non-profits and political action committees, a “gray-money” structure that helps obscure who is behind the contributions.
The efforts are tapping the real and deep frustrations of Oakland residents – a pandemic-era spike in violence and property crime that has only recently started declining, a looming budget crisis amid the growth of remote work and emigration, the departure of famed sports teams and an FBI raid on the mayor’s house as part of a corruption investigation.
But the donations have made for a lopsided playing field. To date, Thao and her supporters have raised about $117,000 to fight the recall, according to campaign finance documents. Her opponents hold a significant lead. The recall’s official coordinating committee, Oakland United to Recall Sheng Thao (Oust), raised at least $600,000 in 2024. The process of gathering enough signatures to qualify the recall petition for this fall’s ballot alone cost the campaign $350,000, according to records filed by Oust.
Ron Conway, a San Francisco investor who has long been a major donor in San Francisco politics, gave at least $15,000 to the committee organizing the mayor’s recall, according to campaign finance records.
But at least 80% of all campaign contributions to the effort came from one man: Philip Dreyfuss, a partner at the Farallon Capital hedge fund and a resident of the wealthy nearby city of Piedmont. Dreyfuss’ central role in backing the recalls was first reported by local news outlet the Oaklandside.
Dreyfuss is no stranger to political contributions. He was a major donor to the successful 2022 recall campaign against the San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin, and has donated more than $600,000 to this year’s effort to recall Price.
Dreyfuss did not respond to questions from the Guardian about his donations, nor has he responded to questions from other outlets. At a press conference earlier this month, Thao pointed at Farallon Capital’s coal interests as a possible motivation behind Dreyfuss’ support of the recall, and the many lawsuits over the construction of a coal export terminal at the Oakland port. But it’s unclear to what extent Dreyfuss is involved in the fund’s coal investments.
The reports that one wealthy figure is behind such a large share of donations has raised concerns in the region, including from prominent political figures like US congresswoman Barbara Lee, who has called the effort to recall the mayor “undemocratic, costly and chaotic”.
“The voters – through regular elections, not a few billionaires – are the ones with the power to ensure our democratic process remains strong and in place,” Lee has said.
An overlapping network of organizations
Dreyfuss has been the largest donor in the election cycle, but he’s not the only one.
Over the summer, Jesse Pollak, a cryptocurrency investor and executive at Coinbase, launched Abundant Oakland, an advocacy organization that funds “moderate” candidates running in Oakland races. The organization is explicitly linked to similarly named entities in San Francisco and Santa Monica.
Abundant Oakland has a related political action committee, Vibrant Oakland, which, campaign filings show, has received donations from Pollak ($115,000), the Oakland police officers association ($50,000), cryptocurrency executive Konstantin Richter ($60,000), the northern California carpenters regional council ($150,000) and a Pac controlled by Piedmont landlord Chris Moore ($100,000).
Through Vibrant Oakland, Abundant Oakland has put $100,000 via independent expenditure committees towards the campaign of Warren Logan, who is bidding to oust progressive Carroll Fife for the council seat representing downtown and west Oakland, where Pollak and his wife lived before relocating to neighboring Berkeley.
Campaign finance records show Pollak has also poured at least $50,000 into another organization, Empower Oakland.
That ‘voter education’ organization was created last year by Thao’s main opponent in the 2022 mayor’s race, the city councilman, Loren Taylor. Founding personnel from Abundant Oakland sit on the organization’s endorsement committee. Other donors to the organization, campaign finance records show, are personal finance executive Ryan Graciano ($50,000) and tech entrepreneur Gagan Biyani ($50,000).
Empower Oakland is rallying for both Thao and Price to be recalled. The list of candidates the group has endorsed is a who’s who of the mayor’s critics: Brenda Harbin-Forte, a former Oakland police commissioner and the current chair of the Thao recall committee, who’s running for city attorney; and LeRonne Armstrong, who was fired by Thao in 2023 as Oakland police chief for for failing to discipline a politically connected sergeant and publicly attacking the mayor. He’s running for the at-large city council seat.
As of early October, Harbin-Forte’s campaign had received more than $149,000 worth of support from Vibrant Oakland in the form of advertising and campaign literature. A different Pac that is paying for Harbin-Forte’s campaign advertisements received $24,000 from two executives at a company seeking to develop the controversial coal shipping terminal, the Oaklandside reported.
Responding to questions from the Guardian, Pollak referred to a recent interview with the Oaklandside in which he said he decided to set up Abundant Oakland and Vibrant Oakland because he realized that “our current approach as a city isn’t working” during his years as a west Oakland resident, and that his decision to move to Berkeley was driven by pandemic-era concerns about violence and public safety. “When you look at the outcomes that have been driven in the city over the last three to four years, we’re not heading in the right direction,” Pollak said.
Real impact of monied campaigns
Dreyfuss’ contributions to the Thao recall were revealed over the summer, in the campaign finance disclosures of the recall’s official committee (Oust) and a Pac called Foundational Oakland Unites. The July disclosures show Dreyfuss had donated nearly $600,000 to the Pac by June, and was its only donor. OUST separately reported receiving $480,000 from the Pac.
The interlocking nature of Oust and FOU is under investigation by the city’s public ethics commission, which is seeking records from Oust to determine whether the financial maneuvers were carried out with the intent of concealing the source of donations to the recall campaign.
Simon Russell, the watchdog’s chief of enforcement at the time, said in the lawsuit that public records available to his team show “a pattern which suggests that OUST solicited contributions to itself via Foundational Oakland Unites, and that Foundational Oakland Unites raised money with the purpose of contributing it to OUST”, the recall’s fundraising committee.
Financial disclosures show that Oust spent $6,000 this summer fighting the lawsuit.
Russell resigned in September, lamenting what he sees as the persistent underfunding of his office. His recent casework had an outsized impact on Oakland politics. One investigation led to a $21,000 fine for Thao’s predecessor Libby Schaaf for violating campaign finance laws. Another uncovered a straw-donor campaign by one of the city’s waste haulers that is now at the heart of an FBI investigation into municipal corruption.
Meanwhile, the sheer amount of money being spent to push the messaging of the campaign to recall Thao – much of which centers around public safety – is having a real impact on the East Bay’s political culture, said George Bisharat, a former public defender and professor emeritus of law at UC San Francisco.
“There are some real shifts going on now in Oakland, and we won’t know until we have the results of the recall how significant they are,” Bisharat said. “But I think Sheng Thao is in a lot of trouble.”
• This story was edited on 28 October 2024. An earlier version said that Empower Oakland had received $150,000 from both Ryan Graciano and Gagan Biyani when it should have said they had each given $50,000. It was further amended on 30 October 2024. The earlier version had said Jesse Pollak had given at least $125,000 which had been amended to $115,000, but this should have said $50,000.
