Mystery Warren super PAC funder revealed

By Alex Thompson
·2 min read

The vast majority of the super PAC millions backing Elizabeth Warren in the final days of her presidential campaign came from one person: Karla Jurvetson, a wealthy doctor based in the Bay Area who donated a massive $14.6 million to the main group that supported Warren.

In the last weeks of Warren’s struggling presidential bid, a super PAC called Persist PAC hastily formed and then swooped into Nevada, South Carolina and Super Tuesday states to run over $14 million in ads trying to resuscitate Warren’s campaign. Warren was in trouble after third and fourth place finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Jurvetson is one of the biggest donors in the Democratic Party and has spoken openly about what she feels is her obligation to support female candidates. "I feel like it’s our moral duty, if we’re not going to run ourselves, to support the women who are brave enough to put their name on the ballot,” she told the Mercury News in 2018. Jurvetson also hosted a fundraising luncheon for Warren in 2018 — before the Massachusetts senator disavowed in-person fundraising events altogether during her presidential run.

Through a spokesperson, Jurvetson declined to comment on her involvement in Persist PAC, which only collected a half-million dollars from other sources in February, according to a new campaign finance filing. Warren did not respond to a request for comment.

After spending much of her campaign denouncing the corrupting influence of big money, Warren tried to justify the existence of the super PAC rather than demand that it take its ads off the air. Persist PAC was the biggest-spending outside group airing TV ads on Super Tuesday.

“If all the candidates want to get rid of super PACs, count me in,” Warren said in Nevada, before she placed fourth in the caucuses there. “It can't be the case that a bunch of people keep them and only one or two don’t.”

Warren’s message was noticeably different than just a few months earlier in the campaign, when a group affiliated with Jurvetson took out an ad in the Des Moines Register in Iowa. Warren spokesperson Chris Hayden told POLITICO in November that that the “campaign was not aware of this and asks that those involved immediately stop purchasing advertisements of any kind.”