Progressive facilitators say Senate Republicans deserve space to grieve after Wyoming billionaire Timothy Mellon stepped back from their races.
Wyoming billionaire Timothy Mellon has pulled back his money from Senate Republicans. A progressive collective has responded by sending grief facilitators to Republican campaign offices to process the abandonment. Its fix is consent-based philanthropy, billed on a sliding scale.
The bagels stopped on Tuesday. A Senate Republican campaign office cancelled its standing breakfast order. As a trauma-informed reporter, I cannot look away from that.
The cause is Timothy Mellon, the reclusive Wyoming billionaire and grandson of the Gilded Age industrialist Andrew Mellon. He has pulled back his money from Senate Republicans. Most outlets are covering this as a midterm story. I am covering it as an attachment rupture.
By noon, the Cambridge-based Collective for Reparative Fundraising Justice had sent fourteen facilitators to Republican campaign offices. Each carried a talking stick, a box of tissues and a sliding-scale invoice.
"These campaigns built their whole sense of self around one very large, very quiet source of validation," said Dr. Juniper Oyelaran-Hollis, the Collective's director. "When that source withdraws without processing, you get cancelled bagels. That is not strategy. That is grief."
The Collective's model centres what it calls consent-based philanthropy. No billionaire may fund or defund a candidate without first naming their feelings in a facilitated session. Donors must also check in every quarter to confirm their enthusiasm is ongoing.
"Money is not consent. Money is a relationship."
I support this completely. For too long, we have let the ultra-wealthy ghost entire political parties. The early sessions have been hard to watch, in the good way. Facilitators asked staffers to write letters to the donor that they would never send. One staffer wrote a single word: "Why." Facilitator Rowan Achterberg-Liu called it "a brave, unpunctuated start." Another staffer drew a bar chart of his feelings. It went down and to the right.
Resistance to healing
Not everyone welcomed the help. A Republican strategist, who asked to be identified only as a man in a fleece vest, said campaigns need cash, not closure. "We don't want to talk about how it made us feel," he said. "We want a television ad buy."
Dr. Oyelaran-Hollis nodded warmly when I read her the quote. "That is exactly what someone with an avoidant fundraising style would say," she said.
The Collective also sees the wider economy through this lens. MarketWatch has reported that inflation could cost Republicans the Senate. "Inflation is just the economy setting boundaries," Achterberg-Liu said. "We have to respect that it no longer wants to be cheap."
The Collective has invited Mr. Mellon to a restorative session. He has not replied, which the Collective has chosen to honour as a boundary.
The campaign office has not restored its bagel order. The facilitators now bring their own. They are gluten-free, ethically sourced and billed to the campaign at fourteen times cost, which Dr. Oyelaran-Hollis calls "a donor relationship built on honesty."
