Acronym, the dark money group behind the Iowa caucuses app meltdown, Good read on app...📘📙💰

[Iamaartist]

This isn’t how Acronym wanted to rocket onto the national stage.

The Iowa caucuses debacle drew a lot of attention to a new app made by a company called Shadow that was at the center of many technical failures of the evening. And it’s also putting scrutiny on Acronym — the Democratic group that backed Shadow — has sought the spotlight in recent months, though probably didn’t hope for this situation.

Acronym is a relatively new Democratic group that launched in 2017 and got active around the 2018 midterms in digital organizing. Its structure is, in a word, complex. Acronym is a nonprofit, but it also has a political action committee — under its nonprofit are for-profit entities that its nonprofit sometimes pays into. It is brazen and ambitious, which is not unique for a political strategy group, but it’s also somewhat shadowy and secretive. And it’s been trying to distance itself from the Iowa debacle, even though it’s really at the center of the storm.
Acronym is a lot of things all at once

If you pay attention to political media, you’ve probably noticed stories about Acronym popping up here and there in recent months.

In November, the New York Times covered its plans to launch a $75 million digital advertising campaign to counter President Donald Trump in 2020, and the Wall Street Journal profiled a former Facebook employee who was embedded in the Trump campaign in 2016 and has since joined Acronym’s ranks. Bloomberg wrote about the Courier Newsroom, a for-profit media company under Acronym’s umbrella that runs multiple local sites that deliver left-slanted news, countering a tactic often employed by the right. Acronym’s CEO, Tara McGowan, has quickly become a high-profile figure in Democratic politics and digital strategy.

Acronym talks a big game when it comes to its political strategy prowess — though it’s new enough and opaque enough that it’s not entirely clear what the organization is actually delivering. Now that Shadow, one of the companies affiliated with Acronym is under the microscope, Acronym is too.

In the wake of the Iowa caucus debacle, Acronym has tried to distance itself from Shadow. In a statement, spokesperson Kyle Tharp said that Acronym just happens to be an investor in the firm, along with others. “Acronym is a nonprofit organization and not a technology company,” Tharp said.

Except it’s more complicated than that. Shadow is a tech company, and both Acronym and Shadow have described their relationship as an acquisition, not an investment, in the past and on multiple occasions. Acronym and McGowan in the past have touted their work with Shadow — McGowan has often touted it on Twitter and talked about it on a podcast as recently as last month. But now, it’s scrubbed its website of mentions of launching Shadow and says it’s just one of multiple investors along for the ride. Acronym’s decision to distance itself from Shadow — or perhaps lying about it altogether — is making the situation worse, not better.


“I don’t think they’re evil, but in their thirst to take over the world using a bunch of short-term donor money, they leveraged their political connections to get contracts that they didn’t have the expertise to fulfill,” one Democratic strategist told me.
"“There’s this whole group of organizations that are feeding each other, and they’re ultimately all controlled by the same group of people”"

But there’s a lot more to Acronym than Shadow. Under its nonprofit umbrella are multiple for-profit operations beyond Shadow, including the digital media operation Courier Newsroom and Lockwood Strategy, a digital strategy firm that McGowan runs. Acronym also operates a political action committee called Pacronym and publishes a podcast hosted by McGowan as well as a weekly newsletter.

“There’s this whole group of organizations that are feeding each other, and they’re ultimately all controlled by the same group of people,” another strategist said.

Acronym has for months been building itself up as one of the loudest players in the room in Democratic strategy. Now, people are starting to look under the hood.

Acronym did not return requests for comment for this story.A lot dark money in politics....


read more ,,,,,,here....


https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/5/21123009/acronym-tara-mcgowan-shadow-app-iowa-caucus-results