Who’s Behind the Progressive Turnout Project?

By Liam Sturgess, The Kennedy Beacon

Late last month, The Kennedy Beacon published an investigation into the super PAC behind the campaign to ban Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from appearing on the ballot in his run for president. In particular, we dove into the background and agendas of Dustin Moskovitz, the single largest donor to the PAC.

But there is more to the Progressive Turnout Project than meets the eye. Beyond simply examining its funding, we decided to dive deeper into its founders and leadership in order to further expose the institutional ties that help explain attempts to censor, suppress and marginalize Kennedy. While our discoveries provide some answers, they also leave questions. 

What we do find is an excellent example of how modern politics appears largely shaped by an ideological class that has no reason to sympathize with the average American voter. This, rather, is a class that fears losing its power, influence and way of life if Kennedy should win the White House.

The Progressive Turnout Project was founded in June 2015 by Harry Pascal and Ram Villivalam. 

According to his biography on PTP’s website, Pascal worked for “more than 35 years” as an accountant, after which he “began working in progressive politics, bringing his expertise to help campaigns budget and plan more strategically.” His first foray into politics was as campaign treasurer for Dan Seals, an Illinois Democrat running for Congress in 2010. He then served in the same role for Brad Schneider, who won the Democratic seat for the House of Representatives in 2012. 

Villivalam is the less-credited co-founder of the PAC, receiving no mention on the website’s Team page. Villivalam is also a longtime Democratic campaign organizer, with Democratic State Senator Laura Murphy telling NBC News in 2017 that she had “known Ram for 10 to 12 years” and “watched him work campaign, after campaign, after campaign.” 

After briefly working as Program Director for Experience DC (which seems to be a tourism organization for Washington, D.C.), Villivalem became Field Director for Dan Kotowski’s State Senate campaign. He then jumped over to hold various leadership positions in the aforementioned Brad Schneider Congressional campaign including Political Director, working alongside Pascal. After Schneider’s victory, Villivalem became his Outreach Director in the House of Representatives. In February 2015, Villivalem took a job as Legislative Coordinator with SEIU Healthcare Illinois & Indiana, the states’ largest union representing “healthcare, child care, home care and nursing home workers.” Finally, in 2017, Villivalem sought and won his own seat in Illinois’ State Senate. 

While his role as co-founder of the Progressive Turnout Project is obscured, at least one of Villivalem’s biographies lists his membership on the board of the Gun Violence Prevention PAC and the Indo-American Democratic Organization – both of which appear to have been relatively dormant in recent years.

Beyond its two establishment Democrat founders, the PTP’s more recent leadership presents an even more intriguing set of resumes and political interests. 

Alex Morgan is PTP’s President, and is also credited as helping Pascal launch the PAC in 2015. He started his political career in 2008 as the Michigan State Coordinator for Students for Obama. He then held a series of student-centered positions with the Michigan Federation of College Democrats, Kalamazoo College and Teach For America. 

Teach For America is a non-profit teacher placement and training organization. Originally founded to “help close the achievement gap between rich and poor students,” the organization has been criticized for having “fully enlisted… in the culture war” by focusing entirely on “left-wing causes.” Its corporate partners include Northrop Grumman, a manufacturer of “advanced weapons” and a key part of the military-industrial complex; 3M, a large manufacturer of personal protective equipment (PPE) that made a fortune off of America’s COVID-19 response; SurveyMonkey, which collaborates on the “Outbreaks Near Me” COVID-19 tracking platform; and Infosys, a leading proponent of the normalization of COVID-19 vaccine passports and digital ID through a “global biometric ID system” (and which happens to be owned by family members of Rishi Sunak, current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom). 

In 2014, Morgan worked as a Regional Field Director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, described by InfluenceWatch as “the official party organ supporting the campaigns of Democratic candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives.” 

He took a job at the Sierra Club as an Organizer in 2014. The Sierra Club is one of the nation’s oldest and most prolific environmental non-profits. Crunchy on the outside, its origins are actually quite dark. Its founder and 20-year President, John Muir, held openly racist views towards Indigenous and black people. It gets worse. David Starr Jordan, who was on the club’s board during Muir’s presidency, was a “kingpin” of the eugenics movement, including advocating for the forced-sterilization laws that affected predominantly Black, Latina and Indigenous women. He also co-founded the Human Betterment Foundation, which produced research later taken up by the Nazis. 

Today, the Sierra Club Foundation is supported by a wide variety of corporate and political interests which include Apple, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, BlackRock, BP Oil, the Center for American Progress (see my recent piece on Media Matters), Chevron, Coca-Cola, ExxonMobil, GlaxoSmithKline, Google, Halliburton, Honeywell, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan Chase, Merck, Microsoft, MoveOn.org, PayPal, Pfizer, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Shell, State Street, Thomson Reuters, Time Warner, and Vanguard.

Morgan isn’t the only Sierra Club alum on the PTP team. Julio Guzmán, Manager of PTP’s Fellows Program, previously worked as a Campaign Manager for the Sierra Club in between stints with the PAC. The rest of Guzmán’s resume is full of work to protect the environment and local natural spaces, leading one to wonder why he and the rest of his team would oppose RFK Jr. despite being so aligned on this key issue.

Examining the work history of Colleen Martin, PTP’s Vice President of Politics, may provide some clarity. In addition to holding early jobs in half a dozen congressional and state-level campaigns, including for Chet Walker, Dick Durban and Brad Schneider, Martin also worked for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (where PTP President Alex Morgan had worked four years prior). 

Martin’s final position before joining PTP was as Political Director of a Montana-based consulting firm called williamsworks. The firm was founded in 2003 by Whitney Williams, a former staffer in the Bill Clinton White House. She later served as Travel Director for Hillary Clinton, and Washington State Finance Co-Chairperson for Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. She is also a member of the Clinton Global Initiative, and of the influential Council on Foreign Relations. 

Furthermore, she describes traveling the world with Bill and Melinda Gates––officially, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was williamworks’ second ever client. The firm’s other clients include the Clinton Foundation, Google, the Program for Appropriate Technologies in Health (PATH, funded by Gates, Pfizer, Microsoft and J&J), the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia.

In brief, the Progressive Turnout Project’s founders and leadership are representative of a permanent political class, the likes of which is threatened by the possibility of a Kennedy presidency. 

If most of one’s career is spent campaigning for candidates of the Democratic establishment, it stands to reason that loyalties to that establishment will be forged and solidified. Any challenge to the establishment will trigger even its best-meaning activists to act counterintuitively – for example, the ostensibly pro-environment PTP aggressively seeking to ban their most genuine pro-environment ally from the ballot –– Kennedy.

Then, of course, there are corporate ties. Each leadership figure within the Progressive Turnout Project cut their teeth working with non-profit organizations that greatly benefit from the financial support of Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Banking, and so on. 

Case in point –– the Sierra Club. Its donors include Chevron, ExxonMobil, Halliburton and Shell. These are among the biggest players from Big Oil –– an industry Kennedy previously argued should no longer be subsidized by the government. What’s more, he accused Coca-Cola of putting profits over public health through racist advertising campaigns targeting young black Americans. And GlaxoSmithKline, Honeywell and Pfizer, which support PTP, represent the pinnacle of corporate capture of America’s regulatory agencies, profiting immensely off under-tested, ineffective and unnecessary medical products – both prior to and during the COVID-19 era. Such companies are no friend to Kennedy. In fact, they fear him, for among his repeatedly stated top priorities as president is to unravel such corporate capture.

There’s even more players behind PTP that are motivated to ban RFK. There’s the ever-present “philanthro-capital” machine, represented by consulting firms such as williamsworks, whose clientele include many of the same corporate interests as described above, yet working behind a facade of building and strengthening “public-private partnerships.” And readers of The Kennedy Beacon will likely not be surprised that once again the Clinton political dynasty had more than a light hand in supporting the PTP since its inception, incubating its staff.

While the PTP will likely continue its political attacks against Kennedy as the election cycle marches on, it has acknowledged that its efforts to ban him from the ballot have not achieved the desired result. On August 19, the Kennedy Campaign revealed through its mailing list that the PTP PAC had warned donors that Kennedy had “SURGED in the polls” while “Biden is TANKING.”

Indeed, support for Kennedy continues to surge as he meets with communities across the country, most recently in South Carolina. To put it bluntly, it’s no wonder the PTP is running scared.