Soros financing plays outsize role in a Pennsylvania district attorney race
Salena Zito
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PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania — An organization financed by international left-wing billionaire George Soros is playing a large role in the complicated race for Allegheny County district attorney. Incumbent Steve Zappala is a Democrat now running as a Republican because of his Democratic primary loss to progressive Matt Dugan, the county’s former public defender. Plenty of eyebrows were raised over the weekend when campaign finance reports showed nearly all of the money Dugan received came from the Pennsylvania Justice and Public Safety PAC, which is funded by Soros.
The filings, reported by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, showed Dugan raised under $67,000 between June 6 and Oct. 23. Ordinarily that would be an abysmal amount for a Democrat in a countywide race. But Dugan received a whopping $1.1 million in “in-kind contributions” from PJPS and, according to the filings, the money is being used to run his entire campaign from advertising on-air and in mailers as well as polling.
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PJPS PAC gave Dugan more than $700,000 in in-kind donations for his May primary challenge against Zappala, used almost exclusively in ads to take down the sitting Democratic district attorney who has held the seat since 1998. At the time, the PJPS PAC donations were nearly all of the money Dugan raised, with disclosures showing at the time that Soros was the sole contributor to the PAC before his primary.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported late Friday it was still unclear in the filings if Soros was his group’s only donor or if others had contributed through the PJPS PAC.
Zappala is one of the state’s longest-serving district attorneys. He was upended by Dugan in the May Allegheny County primary that saw traditional Democrats left in the dust by progressive activists, with many of them having previous ties with the Pittsburgh chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. They include Sara Innamorato, who is seeking the powerful Allegheny County chief executive office.
Soros’s bottom-up funding of local races has been going on for nearly 10 years. His candidates often run in low-turnout closed primary races on social justice platforms, a tactic that has caught traditional Democrat counties and state parties off guard and created disruption in local Democratic parties when they win. They ultimately cause even more disruption once they are handed power, when they discard tough-on-crime tones.
Campaign finance disclosures show Soros started donating in 2015, and by 2016 he had given at least $5.6 million to PACs supporting district attorney candidates from Arizona to Wisconsin, according to campaign filings.
By 2017 Soros placed his money on the candidacy of Larry Krasner, a then little-known defense attorney, who, in a crowded primary, splintered the vote to become district attorney in Philadelphia thanks to a $1.7 million infusing of cash from the Soros-backed PAC.
Despite the city having rising crime rates, voters in yet another low-turnout race reelected him by wide margins in 2021.
While Krasner has blamed COVID-19 for the historic increase in murders brutalizing the residents of Philadelphia — murders hit over 500 in 2021 for the first time since 1990 — his critics, including the police union, blamed his decision to end cash bail for low-level offenses and no longer requiring bail at all for drug-related charges, resisting arrest, and criminal mischief. Critics say this policy places repeat offenders right back on the street.
Voters, mostly Democrats, shrugged and voted him in again.
Soros-backed candidates have also won in many larger cities including Chicago. In the Windy City, the state’s attorney of Cook County, Kim Foxx, who was backed by Soros, announced in May of this year she would not seek reelection in the Democratic machine-run city. Her decision was in direct response to her relationship with the Chicago Police Department, which deteriorated rapidly in response to her focus on “racial equity” and not on prosecuting career criminals.
Dugan, like Krasner, wants to reduce cash bail. He said he also wants to create a one-court system with only one judge to handle criminal cases for Pittsburgh’s downtown. That system has caused deep concern as city officials have turned a blind eye to open-air drug use, aggressive panhandlers, and a sea of homeless camps engulfed in litter, with the scent of urine and feces pervasive.
If Dugan wins, it will cement Allegheny County’s surge to the left in the past four years from the fringe into permanency. It was a surge that began in 2017 and has had a remarkable run in electing far-left Democrats into office.
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As one elected Democratic official put it, if Dugan wins, or Innamorato for that matter, the far Left hasn’t disrupted the Democratic Party, they have upended it — and they’ll do the same to Allegheny County.
“You may as well change the sign,” he said, “from welcome to Pittsburgh to welcome to Portland.”