Organizations on the right are raising concerns about the fate of conservative donors and nonprofits under Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. From The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board to America First Legal, Harris’s controversial actions targeting nonprofits as California’s Attorney General are receiving fresh scrutiny as she campaigns for president. At the same time, Democratic leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer have pledged to seize on a potential Harris victory by advancing legislation aimed at deterring donations to conservative groups (among other things). 

To recap the relevant history, Harris sent letters to every nonprofit registered in California in the early 2010’s demanding that they reveal their major donors to the state Attorney General’s office. Despite promising to keep these sensitive records confidential, more than 1,700 forms listing donor names, addresses, and donation amounts were publicly exposed online. Organizations that refused were threatened with fines and the suspension of their nonprofit registrations. This effectively denied them the ability to solicit donations in California, the nation’s most populous state.

Several organizations sued Harris to protect the privacy of their supporters, including Americans for Prosperity Foundation, the Thomas More Law Center, and the Institute for Free Speech. As Jerry Rogers noted in RealClearPolicy, many liberal organizations also felt betrayed by California’s broken promise to keep their donor records safe. When the matter finally reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2021’s Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, nearly 300 groups from across the ideological spectrum filed briefs in support of donor privacy.

The Court ultimately struck down California’s demand as unconstitutional under the First Amendment. The 6-3 ruling re-enforced the famous civil rights era decision, NAACP v. Alabama, which remains the keystone precedent protecting Americans’ privacy when joining or supporting nonprofit advocacy groups. The Court’s decision in AFPF v. Bonta also relied, in part, on the failure of California officials to demonstrate a need for collecting nonprofit donor lists in the first place.

“Given the amount and sensitivity of this information harvested by the State, one would expect [donor list] collection to form an integral part of California’s fraud detection efforts. It does not. To the contrary, the record amply supports the District Court’s finding that there was not ‘a single, concrete instance in which pre-investigation collection of a [donor list] did anything to advance the Attorney General’s investigative, regulatory or enforcement efforts,’” the majority opinion explains. 

The exposure of Americans’ personal information and donations to advocacy groups can result in harm to innocent people. That’s why courts have generally limited the reach of donor disclosure laws to full-time campaign entities – groups like candidate campaign committees, political parties, and super PACs. In the New York Post, Howard Husock illustrated the danger of nonprofit donor disclosure by pointing to California’s own troubled history with name-and-shame campaigns against donors to ballot initiatives:

“In 2008, a public shaming campaign spotlighted the identities of those who had financially supported Proposition 8, a ballot referendum that, when it passed, briefly banned gay marriage in California. Disclosure of his $1,000 donation was used to force the 2014 resignation of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, unceremoniously ousted from the company he helped to launch in the key role as chief technical officer. Even small business owners who had supported the referendum for religious reasons faced blowback. The owner of a Sacramento dairy told NPR that he ‘soon started getting very nasty emails and letters and phone calls by the hundreds’ after being outed as a Prop 8 donor. Leaks of the names of charitable donors would expand those risks.”

Conservatives are not alone in taking note of Harris’s record on donor privacy issues. While Harris has not addressed the controversy herself, other Democratic leaders have hinted that nonprofit donor disclosure legislation could be a top priority for Congress in 2025. The Washington Post reminded readers that Harris “has long embraced” the so-called Freedom to Vote Act, which includes nonprofit donor disclosure mandates. That legislation would force nonprofit advocacy groups to choose between self-censoring during elections or exposing their members.

The Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive organization that opposes privacy rights for nonprofit donors (but supports them for politicians), also appears eager to seize the moment. A recent blog post on the organization’s web site proclaims, “we’re proud that so many of the policies in these bills draw on our research and work over two decades. Here’s our commitment: if there is a chance to enact this legislation in 2025, we will do everything we can to make it happen.”

In an era of doxing and rising political violence, the dangers of disclosure are high. Instead of exposing everyone’s private business, the current moment calls for a different solution: privacy for all. A growing chorus of American citizens, donors, nonprofits, and state and local lawmakers have called for – and in 20 states, passed – strong legal protections for donor privacy. It is long past time for our political leaders to hear them.