David Freedlander is senior political correspondent with The Daily Beast. Follow him on Twitter @Freedlander.

Imagine for a moment that you hail from one of the most famous families in international finance. Your father is worth $20 billion. And on account of his largesse, your last name is as synonymous with Democratic politics as Roosevelt or Kennedy.

Seeking your generosity, candidates come to you, hat in hand. Your concerns, they tell you, will be their concerns—so long as you contribute at their next fundraiser. And then, in your early 40s, you decide that this whole system is messed up. That it is you, and people like you, the rarest of the one percenters, who have warped our politics.


This, in essence, is the path recently trod by Jonathan Soros, the son of the financier George Soros, who, like his father, has given prodigiously to Democratic interests—more than $2 million in the last few years to various candidates and causes. But now he’s hoping his cash can buy him something more: He’s quietly bankrolling an effort to limit the very influence of rich donors like him.

Sitting on the 40th floor of the midtown Manhattan office tower that houses the private investment firm he runs, with Central Park at his feet and a cloud-covered city rolling behind him, Soros is aware of the irony—as well as the skepticism—that surrounds such an idea. But he has sketched out an ambitious plan to support candidates in congressional and state-level elections across the country who can help push the most sweeping campaign finance reforms in a generation, reforms that would include a national clean elections bill, which would mandate a robust public financing system for all federal elections. If all goes according to his ambitious plan, Soros sees this happening by 2021. “The path will not be straight, we know that,” he says. “But there is real momentum. We are serious about winning.”

Soros, 43, doesn’t fit the stereotype of the dowdy good-government scold. Wearing gray jeans and an open collared shirt, he smiles easily, flashing what seems like disregard for the long odds his effort faces. Soros began his mission to solve the problem of money in politics in 2012 when he founded Friends of Democracy PAC, a hybrid political action committee and super PAC with a staff of three. The group, which has an office in Washington, D.C, jumped into eight competitive congressional elections that year and spent more than $1.7 million backing candidates who pledged to support a series of campaign-finance principles, including proposals to strengthen election law enforcement and institute publicly financed elections. Seven of their candidates won office.

This year, the organization wants to ensure those seven stay in office, while getting behind another eight candidates yet to be determined. The group is also taking aim at lawmakers in state legislatures around the country who have been attempting to loosen regulations on campaign financing. This effort has involved a rather un-Soros-like strategy: Friends of Democracy has found a couple of Republican candidates in close contests willing to buck their party establishment and support clean elections. “The new McCains,” Soros calls them, and the hope is that they are willing to take a dollop of Soros cash in exchange for pledging to limit the role of the rest of the big money funders. The outfit is still scouting possible beneficiaries of its handouts, but Soros mentioned Rep. Walter Jones, the maverick North Carolina Republican, as a possibility—and he said the group is eyeing other candidates who hail from deep blue states. “We might be able to get away with it in Massachusetts,” he says.

But first, he has to take Albany.

The Empire State has been designated the initial domino in the Soros mission not because the place is uniquely corrupted by cash, but rather because that’s where campaign reform efforts have gained the most traction already. Talk of reform in New York caught Soros’s attention in 2011, just as he was preparing to leave his father’s hedge fund and strike out on his own. A self-described “democracy geek,” the younger Soros earned a degree at Harvard Law School, where he studied under the civil rights activist Lani Guinier, and then served as an election observer when democracy came to the former Soviet Republic of Moldova. In New York, he glimpsed an opportunity, he says, to encourage a fairer process. In 2012, Soros poured $250,000 into the campaign of Cecilia Tkaczyk, an upstate state Senate candidate who made campaign finance reform a key part of her come-from-behind victory, and helped lobby Gov. Andrew Cuomo to keep a campaign promise to push for campaign finance reform.

Now, Cuomo has included a fair elections proposal in his state budget—a measure that, among other things, would create a public financing system and lower contribution limits for donors—to nudge New York away from its pay-to-play political culture. But supporters of the measure are not hopeful. “There are members who say they support us, but they don’t really,” said one Albany political operative who requested anonymity. “They perceive it as not in their self-interest.”

Soros is holding out hope that Cuomo will make good on the promise to enact reform. “If you look at the things he campaigned on, this is the last one he hasn’t gotten done,” Soros says. “For a guy who likes to check the box, this is a big deal as he heads into his re-election campaign.” And for Soros—a guy trying to check some boxes of his own—New York’s reform measure could provide an invaluable example of what might be possible nationwide.

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It’s not lost on Jonathan Soros that the crusade he is now engaged in raises eyebrows for one very obvious reason. “I don’t want to make a big deal out of this, but I do need to be honest about the role my family has played on the other side of this,” Soros tells me as a secretary brings him a crystal decanter of water and a single shot of espresso in a paper cup. To be fair, Soros says, his father is less involved today in “partisan politics” than he was a decade ago, when he helped bankroll the Democrats’ presidential ambitions. Soros concedes that his family’s donations that year went a long way toward changing the relationship between politicians and big-money donors. “If Citizens United changed norms, so did 2004, in full honesty and full disclosure,” he admits.

The problem with the current regime, as Soros sees it, is not that people can spend unlimited amounts of money. Money, he points out, isn’t the determining factor in most elections; and besides, the Supreme Court, most recently in its Citizens United decision, more or less settled the question of whether or not rich guys can spend unlimited amounts in political campaigns. The problem, rather, is that some candidates don’t have enough of it to even get a foothold and become viable candidates. Public financing, Soros believes, will solve that.

“Getting money out of politics is not an achievable objective,” he says. “There is always a way. You can increase the transaction cost, you can make it harder, you can do all sorts of things, but if you have money and you want to influence an electoral outcome, there will be a way. You take it away from the candidates, it goes to the parties. You take it away from the parties, it goes to the independents. You take it away from the independents, and somebody buys Fox News or a newspaper or something that is subject to a different exemption. You can’t get the money out of politics, but you can reduce its influence significantly by breaking the dependence candidates have on big money.”

In other words, if a deep-pocketed donor wanted to give money to an interest group to support a cause, and then watch as the group advocates for a certain candidate, fine. But independent organizations need to remain independent from candidates, Soros says. And to ensure an end to the wink-wink methods by which super PACs work with candidates requires stronger election law enforcement, he says. Candidates themselves, Soros thinks, should be forced to raise small dollar contributions and have those funds matched with public money.

There is broad support for these measures, even among Republicans. But such plans have a tendency to run aground when it comes to the question of how to pay for them; the public seems to have very little appetite to shell out tax dollars to underwrite campaigns. “There is no support for this at all. Almost every time it goes to the ballot it loses,” says Bradley Smith, a professor of law at Capital University and a former commissioner with the Federal Election Commission. “Public polls that show support are very sensitive to how the question is worded.”

Smith points out that if the taxpayers end up financing campaigns, the nature of campaigning could be perverted. “It means every campaign decision becomes a public policy matter because you can’t have people wasting money. And you are going to get an ever-growing government grip on political debate that you don’t want.”

Friends of Democracy mostly soft-pedals the funding mechanism in favor of the benefits public financing would bring: a government more responsive to its citizens than to the influence of oligarchs. If rich people want to put money into political causes, Soros thinks, the law should be far more restrictive in keeping them from coordinating with specific candidates.

“I don’t think Shelly Adelson should be able to invite Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich to Las Vegas and tell them whatever and have them kiss the ring and then turn around and give $10 million to a super PAC that is endorsed by the candidate,” Soros says. “I think there is something wrong there. But if he wanted to spend his money independently the way [Michael] Bloomberg or [Tom] Steyer or whoever else is doing it—totally independently—then you really are just adding to the frame of ideas.”

Which is what Soros is trying to do with his pet cause. In 2012, the eight races his PAC got involved in were closely contested races where they drove home the message that their guy was for reform, and the other guy was not. In one typical television ad the Soros group paid to run, a family sits down by the dugout in an empty baseball stadium to watch a game, only to be told that those seats, and every other seat between the field and the nosebleed section are already in reserve.

Despite his passion for the project, Soros’s financial commitment to the cause is purposefully modest. He’s trying now to enlist other well-heeled donors to join him. “I said from the start that I will give no more than $1 million to the political work,” he says. “And the reason for that is that even if I had enough money, which I don’t, this can’t be a one-person issue. There are a lot of people who care about this issue, but they don’t see the possibility for change and the possibility of success.”

One curious potential bedfellow that Soros has hit up is Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate who spent around $100 million in the 2012 presidential election, and has more recently said he doesn’t think he should be allowed to spend as freely as he’s able to. Adelson insists he spends so much because George Soros does. According to Jonathan Soros, Adelson hasn’t committed to join him. (A representative for Adelson declined to comment.)

Getting conservative donors on board is a key part of the Soros plan—as is finding Republican candidates in contested primaries who are willing to join the cause. Since many would be leery of accepting money from anything with the name Soros on it, Friends of Democracy’s plan is to find other organizations on the ground that are less toxic to conservatives, and funnel the money to the candidates through them. “The thing we need to be cognizant of is, because of my association with this entity and my—whether true or not—the expectation of my political beliefs, we may not be the best messenger for these races,” Soros admits.

This will be hard. Campaign finance reform is widely perceived as a Democratic issue. Or at least, despite the non-partisan sheen, something that is often a front for one political party or another.

This is true in the fight in New York too, where Soros hopes that Cuomo keeps the reform measure in his budget despite pressure from Republican opponents in the legislature and pessimism about its chances of creating real change. “A lot of what we are facing is an obstacle of conventional wisdom,” Soros says. “It is one of the reasons that New York is so essential in this time frame. The sooner we have a win the better. We are trying to demonstrate that this affects candidates’ ability to get elected.”

Cuomo, he says, seems to be pushing the issue without fully embracing it: “He is at the very last place he can possibly go.” And now he can push no further. The deadline for a budget deal is next week.