Story time: In 2008, before the Democratic primary even started, Hillary Clinton recruited a number of individuals to be superdelegates to the Democratic Primary.
At the time I had the same question that you might have right now: WTF is a superdelegate? It is a delegate to the Democratic convention that is seated automatically. Superdelegates represent about 15% of the total delegates at the convention. (In 2008 it was more like 20%). They are basically party bigwigs—Elected leaders and former elected leaders, state chairs, donors, etc. As of 2018, superdelegates cannot vote until after the first ballot at the convention.
ANYWAY, as Barack Obama began to amass a huge lead in delegates from caucuses and primaries, Obama supporters began to eye the superdelegates who pledged to vote for the candidate who was trailing in delegates from the primary process but might still win with the addition of superdelegate votes. It seemed, in a word, undemocratic of them to not vote for the elected winner. And so a campaign to contact each superdelegate who had pledged themselves to Hillary Clinton, to interview them, and to record their responses (or anything we could find from public information) in a Wiki. This campaign to shine sunlight on superdelegates resulted in many superdelegates switching their votes to Obama, who took the lead in superdelegates in May 2008. Hillary Clinton dropped out of the race soon afterwards.
That brings us to the present moment, where it is being reported by Forbes and other outlets that donors are withholding about $90 million in pledges to the Future Forward Superpac, which up until the debate was devoted to re-electing the president.
Who, exactly, are these donors? Since it is a Superpac, which is considered a dark money source, I was not able to find out the exact names of those withholding their funds, but I did find names of 2020 donors to this PAC on Influencewatch.org. Apparently they spent about $100 millionish in the Fall of 2020 attacking Donald Trump.
Apparently this suspension of pledges is seen as having a negative influence on the campaign. I hate that Superpacs are allowed to exist and to operate, but this is the world we live in, and I don’t see a way to make superpacs go away before November.
What we can do, however, is let the leader of this PAC (and possibly some previous donors) politely know that we don’t think their holding the Democratic presidential campaign hostage is a very (what’s the word I’m looking for?) DEMOCRATIC thing to do.
According to Influence Watch,
Chauncey McLean is the president of FF PAC. Prior to joining FF PAC, he was the director of media tracking for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) from 2011 to 2012. McLean worked on the 2012 Obama presidential campaign and was instrumental in developing data-mining and analytics as common practices in political campaigns.
Influence Watch includes a list of individual and institutional donors. It is unclear whether any of these are part of the campaign to withhold funds.
IMHO it would not do any harm to contact Mr. McLean and these donors and very politely ask if they are part of this campaign, and then create a wiki that records their responses (or lack thereof) and any other pertinent information. We would of course allude to the creation of the wiki as part of the questioning.