Politics

Shapiro grows his donor network ahead of 2028

Published

2 months ago

February 13, 2026

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is using his book tour and 2026 reelection campaign to further build out a national fundraising network that could prove quite useful in a potential 2028 run.

The governor held a fundraising event over lunch while visiting Massachusetts for his book tour last month, two people familiar with the planning for it confirmed — making it at least the third fundraiser he attended in the last year in the deep-blue state with deep-pocketed donors who have long bankrolled presidential contenders. One of the others was held at the home of Jewish philanthropist and New England Patriots president Jonathan Kraft in April, details of which have not previously been reported. Shapiro attended another on Nantucket, a summer fundraising mecca, in July, according to an attendee and invitations obtained by Blue Light News.

They add to an extensive list of networking events for the possible White House aspirant who’s long been a prolific fundraiser within and beyond Pennsylvania.

He amassed $23 million in 2025 with the help of $2.5 million from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; $1 million from a Soros family PAC, $500,000 from James and Kathryn Murdoch, the left-leaning son and daughter in law of Rupert Murdoch; and over $120,000 from Kraft and his father, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. That’s helped him build a $30 million war chest to unleash this year against his likely GOP opponent, state Treasurer Stacy Garrity, who raised nearly $1.5 million last year and had $1 million in the bank to start 2026.

His book tour side-hustle comes as several of Shapiro’s would-be rivals for the Democratic nomination in 2028 take donor meetings across the country as they navigate their own reelection bids and start laying the groundwork for White House runs.

Shapiro routinely dismisses talk of 2028 in public, keeping a laser focus on his reelection bid and on his efforts to help Democrats down the ballot.

“No one should be looking past these midterms,” the governor recently told reporters in Washington, D.C., who were peppering him with hypotheticals.

Sources say he is just as disciplined behind closed doors: Shapiro has kept his pitch focused on his leadership in purple Pennsylvania and how Democrats should be centering pocketbook issues in the midterms, while declining to engage with questions about his future beyond 2026, according to two people who attended donor events with Shapiro last year.

“The smartest thing Shapiro and other folks on the ballot in 2026 can do right now is say ‘I’m running for reelection right now and I’m in the middle of the fight.’ [It] makes ‘26 a nice little audition for their eventual 2028 runs,” said Alex Hoffman, a Democratic strategist and donor adviser.

His out-of-state networking is already paying off. Shapiro raked in over $700,000 from prominent donors in Massachusetts alone in 2025, including $260,000 from construction magnate John Fish and $50,000 from telecommunications tycoon Robert Hale. He also hauled in cash from Hollywood bigwigs and tech titans, including $100,000 from Sony film executive Tom Rothman and $200,000 from Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen.

But the governor’s expansive donor pool is also drawing scrutiny. Garrity has called on Shapiro to return over $2 million his campaign has taken over the years from billionaire LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who is referenced repeatedly in the Jeffrey Epstein files. Hoffman gave $500,000 to Shapiro last year. Shapiro also received $50,000 from New York Giants co-owner Steve Tisch, who is also mentioned in the Epstein files, as is Robert Kraft. Both Hoffman and Tisch have issued statements distancing themselves from the late convict.

“Stacy Garrity should stop playing politics with the Epstein files. Donald Trump is mentioned in the files over 5,000 times. Is she going to ask him to rescind his endorsement?” Shapiro spokesperson Manuel Bonder said in a statement. Bonder declined comment on the governor’s fundraisers.

He’ll need to keep building out that network. Shapiro has benefited from what longtime Pennsylvania Democratic strategist Neil Oxman described as “institutional donors” in the state who’ve given to successive Democratic governors. But of “the thousands of people who raise money nationally, he probably knows a fraction of them. He has some [national] recognition, but he’s not Gavin Newsom. He’s not the Clintons.”

Shapiro also won’t be able to use the gobs of money he’s raised for his state campaign account to fund a run for federal office, leaving him at an initial disadvantage against other potential 2028ers who are already squirreling away millions of dollars into federal leadership committees, super PACs and congressional campaign accounts that can be converted when the time comes.

“That’s why sometimes it’s hard to run for office when you have to run for another office,” Oxman said.

A version of this article first appeared in Blue Light News Pro’s Morning Score. Want to receive the newsletter every weekday? Subscribe to Blue Light News Pro. You’ll also receive daily policy news and other intelligence you need to act on the day’s biggest stories.

Politics

Trump’s white supremacy refugee policy is in full effect

Published

4 hours ago

April 12, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Apr. 11, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

The United States once prided itself on being the final destination of people around the world seeking refuge from war and strife. The State Department reports that America has welcomed a total of more than 3.1 million refugees to its shores since the U.S. refugee program was established in 1980. But President Donald Trump has decimated the number of applicants who were granted refugee status — and those who made it through are overwhelmingly the beneficiaries of an insidious shift in policy to favor white South Africans.

Of the 4,999 refugees admitted, 4,496 were from South Africa; the remaining three newcomers were from Afghanistan.

Last November, the Trump administration announced it would be putting the lowest cap on the number of refugees that would be admitted in the refugee program’s decadeslong history. Only 7,500 applicants will be provided refugee status in fiscal 2026. That’s a 94% drop from the 125,000 cap the Biden administration had in place for each of the two fiscal years before Trump’s second term began.

The latest numbers from the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration only add insult to injury. As of March 31, there have been 4,499 refugees admitted to the U.S., more than half the annual cap. Of those, 4,496 were from South Africa; the remaining three newcomers were from Afghanistan.

“The largest share of South African refugees — over 500 — have arrived in Texas, followed by Florida and California,” The Christian Science Monitor reported last week. The bureau’s data doesn’t include race or ethnicity. But the memo in the Federal Register establishing the 7,500-person cap also required that those slots “primarily be allocated among Afrikaners from South Africa … and other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands.” It’s no great leap then to presume the South African arrivals this year are all white.

While Trump’s war on undocumented immigrants has hogged the spotlight since January 2025, the administration’s campaign against legal immigration has been no less pernicious. The White House’s chief anti-immigration hard-linerdeputy chief of staff Stephen Millerhas been busy both removing protections for those who have already made it to the U.S. and discouraging those who are hoping to gain entry.

The Guardian reported last fall that Miller, who is also the White House homeland security adviser, has made significant inroads into influencing operations at Foggy Bottom. A top anti-immigration ally, Christopher Landau, is second-in-command at the State Department. Much like his past calls haranguing Department of Homeland Security staffers about deportations and arrests, Miller has also reportedly instated daily calls “to drill the diplomats on visa and immigration issues.”

White South Africans have been one major loophole to Miller’s immigration gatekeeping. Trump has been yelling about the supposed plight of the country’s minority for years now, buying fully into far-right claims that a “genocide” is being carried out against Afrikaner farmers. The truth is that white farmers control about 75% of the country’s farmland and still make up the vast majority of senior positions in South African corporations. As the Rev. Nontombi Naomi Tutu wrote for MS NOW last year“If white South Africans are experiencing genocide, then it is truly an enviable genocide.”

Concerned for white South Africans’ imagined hardship, in the face of a new law that replaced an apartheid-era ruleTrump issued an executive order in February 2025 cutting off foreign aid to South Africa. He also directed his government to “prioritize humanitarian relief, including admission and resettlement through the United States Refugee Admissions Program, for Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.” Three months later, even while busy stripping parolees awaiting asylum claims of their legal status, the first several dozen white South Africans landed in the U.S.

The cruelty of this racist policy is only exacerbated when you consider the compounded effect of the other actions Trump has taken.

The cruelty of this racist policy is only exacerbated when you consider the compounded effect of the other actions Trump has taken. The administration slashed the foreign aid budget to ribbons, leading to a projected spike in deaths worldwide. Thousands of applicants from the Global South who were told to wait in line have been shunted to the back in favor of an unoppressed minority whose skin just happens to be the right color for this administration.

None of this is meant to directly shame the white South African immigrants who have taken advantage of this policy. The opportunity to emigrate to the U.S. is a dream shared by millions across the world, so it is hard to fault them for taking an opportunity when presented to them. Their new communities should welcome them with open arms, as all newly arrived immigrants should be. It’s hard not to hope, however, that there is a twinge of introspection in the back of their minds when they tell the story of how they came to be so fortunate as to find themselves in America.

Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.

Politics

2028 Democrats say anyone can win. Voters aren’t so sure.

Published

1 day ago

April 11, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

NEW YORK — A fear of losing again is already shaping how Democrats think about 2028.

Chants of “run again!” reverberated through the packed room as Kamala Harris spoke Friday at the National Action Network convention, a gathering of Black voters, lawmakers and power brokers that saw drop-ins from a steady stream of potential presidential candidates. But several Black attendees openly questioned whether anyone other than a straight, white man can win the White House.

“The Democratic Party, they’re going to have to consider … who can win? Who can win, Black, white, who can win?” the Rev. Kim Williams, 63, a New Yorker and registered independent said in an interview.

“I don’t think [the country is] ready for another different type of person,” said Annette Wilcox, a 69-year old New Yorker.

It’s an open question the party is grappling with in the wake of Harris’ decisive 2024 loss to President Donald Trump. Conversations with a dozen people on the sidelines of the Rev. Al Sharpton’s gathering found some lingering concerns that America remains too bigoted — and that as a result, the desire to diversify the highest reaches of government is in tension with the desire to win.

In interviews, several of the prospective 2028 Democrats themselves argued that anyone can win. They poured into the midtown Manhattan ballroom over the week to build their relationships with Black voters for what became a barely-hidden shadow primary.

Sen. Ruben Gallego, a first-term Democrat who won statewide in Arizona despite Harris losing the state, told Blue Light News on the sidelines of the convention that the party shouldn’t let fear narrow who ultimately runs.

“If you got stuck into this idea of what an ideal character is … you could potentially miss some really great talent,” said Gallego, who leaned intohis identity as a Latino veteran in his 2024 campaign.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, another possible 2028 candidate, said that he doesn’t “know many people back in 2022 who thought that an African American who had never held political office in his life was gonna be the next governor of Maryland.”

“People want to know, does your message meet a moment,” he added.

On stage with Sharpton on Friday, Harris seemed to agree. She made her most explicit overture at running again for the presidency, telling the audience she was “thinking about it” — to loud cheers and applause. Her appearance at the convention energized an otherwise largely staid event.

But even Harris, the first Black and South Asian woman to become vice president, has tacitly acknowledged the limitations of the country.

In her latest book, she divulged that former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg — another 2028 contender who also made a pit-stop at NAN — was her top vice presidential pick in 2024. But she didn’t select him because she didn’t believe the country was ready for both a woman of color and a gay man in the White House.

A spokesperson for Harris declined to comment.

Some women, from former first lady Michelle Obama to various convention attendees disappointed by Harris’ 2024 loss, have said the U.S. isn’t ready for a female president.

“I believe the current climate of this country is not ready for a Black woman as president,” Aaliyah Payton, 30, a middle school teacher in the Bronx, said while waiting to see Harris speak on the third day of the convention in a line that spanned far outside the convention room.

“If Kamala Harris is running as a Democrat, and there is another white man also running as a Democrat, she would have a tough time winning,” said 60-year-old Donna Carr, who lives in New Jersey. “It’s a man’s world.”

“I’m not going to lie, it may be too soon,” said 27-year-old New Yorker Justina Peña when asked if Harris should run again.

The same handwringing roiled the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, and voters ultimately selected Joe Biden — a more moderate straight white man — to block Trump from winning a second consecutive term.

The debate within the Democratic Party over what kind of candidate is electable played out again most recently in Texas, where the Democratic Senate primary was defined by tensions over race and concerns over which candidate could unify enough Democrats, independents and disillusioned Republicans to flip the red state. Voters chose seminarian James Talarico, a white man, over political firebrand Jasmine Crockett, a Black woman, in the end.

“We saw it with the race with Crockett, and I saw a woman say she wanted to vote for Crockett, but she knew she could not win against [a] white male Republican,” said Williams, the 63-year-old reverend.

Now, those conversations are already emerging for 2028 before a single Democrat has officially announced a bid for the White House. The question over 2028 ambitions hovered over Moore, Gallego, Harris, Buttigieg, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and California Rep. Ro Khanna this week — and while nobody said they officially are, nobody ruled it out. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly are slated to speak on Saturday.

Buttigieg has dismissed concerns over his viability, including in a direct response to Harris’ revelation of why she didn’t choose him as a running mate in 2024.

“My experience in politics has been that the way that you earn trust with voters is based mostly on what they think you’re going to do for their lives, not on categories,” Buttigieg told POLITICO in a September interview.“Politics is about the results we can get for people and not about these other things.”

Some of the Black voters at the conference similarly expressed frustration with the idea that candidates’ identities should be a consideration in the looming 2028 primary.

“My concern — biggest concern — is when we get into a crisis like this in this country, people want to go to the ‘center,’ which usually is right of center in my view. A lot of people get kind of left out,” said Wilcox, the 69-year-old New York voter.

“In my experience, or history I’ve had with the Democratic Party, I feel like when that happens, Black people get tossed to the side.”