Melinda French Gates in 2021. She has emerged from her divorce from Bill Gates as an ascendant Democratic megadonor. Photo / Getty Images
After her divorce from Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates came into her own billions of dollars, with which she could do whatever she chose. She used to insist on appearing nonpartisan, but no more.
When Melinda French Gates was running the world’s biggest philanthropy with her husband, Bill Gates, she insisted on staying on the sidelines of politics. She was half of one of America’s most celebrated couples, and she did not want to invite backlash from governments around the world, to say nothing of getting crosswise with Washington by endorsing someone who could lose.
Then, in 2021, that well-ordered life blew up.
Her divorce from Gates was a bombshell – and its consequences still ripple three years later. She suddenly came into her own billions of dollars, with which she could do whatever she chose. This year, she decided to resign from her namesake foundation, which meant she could set her own agenda. And, after decades of carefully scripted neutrality, she did what she had wanted to do ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade: She dove headfirst into politics.
At 60, French Gates has reinvented herself, surprisingly, as an ascendant Democratic megadonor. She has endorsed political candidates, given more than US$13 million ($21m) to groups supporting Vice-President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, had her team talk to Harris’ advisers about a joint event, and publicly championed abortion rights, an issue she downplayed for decades because it was too politically fraught.
French Gates’ transformation, people close to her say, is because of less to a eureka moment and more to a response to the changing circumstances in her home and in the world. Her split from Gates and the foundation gave her independence, and the overturning of Roe spurred her to act.
“Now I do get to make whatever decision I want to make about endorsing or not endorsing on my own,” she said in a brief interview last month. She downplayed the role of the divorce, but she conceded that beforehand, “there were more considerations because I was the head of a foundation”.
French Gates has not always been as fierce a defender of liberal values as she styles herself today. Her new zeal for seven-figure political contributions is not part of her natural disposition. As one of the leaders of the risk-averse Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, she stressed the need for the appearance of bipartisanship. Today, some Democrats privately complain that she did not come to her new viewpoint earlier – during the rise of former President Donald Trump and as abortion rights receded.
While French Gates had a strong relationship with Hillary Clinton, for instance, she did not endorse her for President in her race against Trump.
“Bill and I always keep private who we are voting for in elections,” she said when asked before the 2016 election whether she wanted to see Clinton win.
French Gates has even donated modestly in the past to some female politicians who opposed expanding abortion access, such as Representative Elise Stefanik, R-New York, and Senator Shelley Moore Capito, R-West Virginia.
But over the past few years, French Gates has greatly increased her giving to liberal dark-money groups that largely support Democrats, according to two people with knowledge of the gifts. And in this election cycle, the people say, she has grown increasingly comfortable with doing so openly, making megadonations to Democratic super political action committees, which are publicly disclosed.
Asked if she had second thoughts about not helping Democrats resist Trump more in previous election cycles, French Gates said she did not, saying that “the only regret” she had was not funding more candidates who were pushing for guaranteed paid family leave before President Joe Biden’s unsuccessful push to include it in a 2021 bill.
That effort was a turning point for French Gates, said Sondra Goldschein, the executive director of the Campaign for a Family Friendly Economy, whose super PAC received US$3m from her this cycle. French Gates and her team “saw that we had a political problem and that political problems require political solutions,” Goldschein said.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion, came a year later.
French Gates started expanding her political footprint, for instance this year hiring a former political aide to Biden, Natalie Montelongo, to help her with political giving. More important, she has been influenced by two of her children, who have asked her to dig even deeper to support Democrats in this election, including in a recent conversation with them, according to a person with knowledge of the discussion.
Her son, Rory, is an ambitious Democratic donor who has consulted experts in political technology and attended one meeting of the Democracy Alliance, a network of progressive megadonors who coordinate their donations. French Gates recalled that he had, since high school, “helped me open my eyes and educated me more”.
Her youngest daughter, Phoebe, recently graduated from Stanford University and has a large social media following centred on abortion rights. She makes her own six-figure political contributions, with the help of personal political advisers.
As French Gates made her moves, word got around. Democratic fundraisers over the past couple of years have sought out introductions to her team in what some Democratic fundraisers described as a “frenzy”. Few other new liberal megadonors had emerged since the early days of the Trump era, so Democratic fundraisers began to see French Gates as one of a few new sources of capital.
After Harris ascended to the Democratic nomination, French Gates grew even more involved. She donated close to the legal maximum US$929,600, to the Harris campaign in July, according to two people with knowledge of her activities. French Gates has also had discussions with the Harris campaign about doing a campaign event with Harris about the care economy – policies aimed at helping parents and other caregivers – according to two people with knowledge of the talks.
French Gates and Pivotal Ventures, her de facto family office with a mission to expand women’s power and influence, have disclosed more than US$10m in contributions to federal groups and candidates in this cycle. Most of the money has gone to groups centred on women’s issues such as Goldschein’s CFFE PAC and Women Vote!, a super PAC affiliated with EMILY’s List, which backs Democratic female candidates who support abortion rights. Two years ago, French Gates had never made a disclosed federal donation of more than US$35,800. She then made 14 of those over the next two years.
Pivotal Ventures has also made undisclosed major contributions to some political nonprofits. Her firm gave US$1m each to the nonprofits of CFFE, Care in Action and Galvanize Action, a pro-Harris nonprofit focused on female voters, according to a person with knowledge of the gifts, plus an unknown amount to a nonprofit affiliated with Future Forward, the main pro-Harris super PAC.
Asked how much money she would spend on the 2024 election, French Gates said she was “not going to put a number on it”.
She has similarly undergone a late-in-life reinvention on the issue of abortion.
Back in 2012, she delivered a high-profile speech on women’s issues at a TED conference, pushing for expanding access to contraception around the world but pointedly minimising the topic of abortion. “If we’re going to make progress on this issue, we have to be really clear about what our agenda is,” she said. “We’re not talking about abortion.”
Former Gates Foundation officials said the speech caused some angst among her staff, some of whom wondered if French Gates, who is a practising Catholic and was raised in the South, privately opposed abortion rights. In a blog post in 2014, which has since been removed from the Gates Foundation’s website, French Gates said that she herself “struggled” with the issue and had “decided not to engage on it publicly”.
Some feminist leaders have had trouble squaring the reputation she was cultivating – as a defender of women and women’s health – with her unwillingness to directly confront the issue.
“She was an iconic example of abortion stigma and how it manifested in people who identified as feminists,” said Erin Matson, who runs an abortion-access organisation called Reproaction. “It really was truly a slap in the face to see her punch down on abortion at the time.”
Even today, French Gates fastidiously avoids using the word “abortion”.
French Gates evinced little regret about not pushing more vocally for abortion rights given what was to happen with Roe.
“I believe that the decision we made at the foundation was absolutely the right decision, and the way I used my voice on that issue,” she said. “I believe a woman should have the decision whether or when to have a child, but when you have a gap of hundreds of millions of dollars in contraceptives around the world, a young girl doesn’t even get the choice.”
Even since Roe was overturned, French Gates has not poured money into efforts to help individual women have abortions but has rather funded services such as litigation aimed at broadening access more generally, which has frustrated some leaders in abortion rights.
“She is concerned about rights – she is not concerned about access,” said Tracy Weitz, who used to oversee abortion-focused philanthropy at the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation. “She’s upset that her grandkids have fewer constitutional rights than she did. That’s a far cry from wanting to help someone access an abortion.”
French Gates has been candid about what she called an “evolution,” said Daniella Ballou-Aares, the head of the Leadership Now Project, a pro-democracy business group that received money from Pivotal Ventures. Earlier this year, French Gates arranged to hear from a dozen female business leaders who stressed to her the need to use political giving to complement their non-partisan philanthropy.
“It is a change,” Ballou-Aares said, “and I think a necessary one.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Theodore Schleifer
Photographs by: Rebecca Smeyne
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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