 | |
| Formation | 2015 [1] |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Washington, D.C. |
President and executive director | Tiffany Muller [2] |
| Website | endcitizensunited |
End Citizens United (ECU) is a political action committee in the United States. [3] The organization works to reverse the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission , which deregulated limits on independent expenditure group spending for or against specific candidates. [4] It is focused on driving larger campaign donations out of politics, with the goal of electing "campaign-finance reform champions" to Congress by contributing to and raising money for these candidates, as well as running independent expenditures. [5] End Citizens United was founded in 2015, operating in its first election cycle during 2016 with more than $25 million in funding. [6]
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The organization has endorsed Democratic candidates such as Zephyr Teachout, [7] Hillary Clinton, [8] Russ Feingold, [1] Beto O'Rourke, [9] Elizabeth Warren, [10] and Jon Ossoff. [11] For the 2016 election, it was one of the largest outside groups funding the campaigns of U.S. Senators Maggie Hassan and Catherine Cortez Masto, spending a combined $4.4 million on the races. [12] By mid-2017, End Citizens United had raised more than $7.5 million from grassroots donations, and planned to raise $35 million for the 2018 election cycle. [11] In 2020, End Citizens United spent 41% ($16.1 million) of its income on media, 17% ($6.5 million) on staff salaries, and 15% ($5.7 million) on contributions to candidates and strategy and research work. [13]
As Huffington Post explores, campaign reform groups have said Citizen's United emails are manipulative and make it harder for others in the field. [14] In early 2018, an anonymous U.S.-based contractor paid at least 3,800 micro job workers to manipulate search results when people searched for the PAC via Google, to remove the Huffington Post article from the front page of Google's search. [15]
During the 2018 elections, End Citizens United organized a no corporate PAC pledge, and around 185 Democratic candidates agreed not to take corporate PAC money, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris. [16] [17]
Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica has criticized the political consulting group Mothership, which works with Citizen's United for spending most of the money it raises on the Mothership's network of political consultants, with only a fraction going to the campaigns. [18] [19]