Larry Lessig's Anti-SuperPAC SuperPAC Already Halfway To $1 Million Initial Target

Politics

from the into-orbit,-next-stop,-the-moon dept

Last Thursday, we wrote about Larry Lessig launching the MAYDAY Citizens’ SuperPAC, an attempted “moonshot” to crowdfund a SuperPAC with the long term goal to elect politicians to Congress who will be dedicated to ending the power of money in politics. It is, as we noted, the SuperPAC to end all SuperPACs. The structure of the plan is interesting in that it’s a staged approach explained on the Mayone website. The first two “test” stages happen this year, with the first goal being to raise $1 million by the end of May, at which point Lessig will get someone (who almost certainly is already lined up) to donate another $1 million. Then they launch stage 2 for June, which is an attempt to do the same, but at $5 million (with a further matching $5 million). If both of those work out, the SuperPAC will then have $12 million, which it will use in 5 races for the mid-term elections this year. And, with that in place, the goal will be to launch a much bigger crowdfunding effort for 2016. Many people seemed to misunderstand the original plan, thinking that this $12 million part was the moonshot. It’s not. It’s a test flight.

Anyway, the first stage of the test flight is just to get to that $1 million mark, and it’s worth noting that here we are on May 6th, just five days into the effort, and the MAYDAY Citizens’ SuperPAC is already more than halfway to its goal. That is, they’ve already hit the $500,000 mark less than a week into the effort. Will that be enough to hit both of the 2014 goals? That’s tough to say, but as an initial effort, it sure seems like a very nice start, and almost certainly goes way beyond what many people expected would happen. Still, this is just the start. A moonshot is inherently risky, but the first week has been tremendously encouraging.

Filed Under: larry lessig, mayday, moonshot, superpac