Overview: Stephen and Susan Mandel have been consistent donors to the party for decades—with a notable uptick in giving in the last few years. The couple donate to a variety of liberal PACs and organizations and their non-political giving focuses on education.
Location: Greenwich, CT
Giving Focus: Education, Climate Change
Top Recipients: Priorities USA Action, AB PAC, DSCC
Profile: He had a reputation around Wall Street as one of the best traders around, but Stephen Mandel has largely kept a low profile throughout his career. Starting at Goldman Sachs, then Tiger Management, Mandel formed his own hedge fund, Lone Pine Capital, in 1997. He had massive success with the firm before leaving in 2019 and is now worth an estimated $2.8 billion, according to Forbes. Mandel’s philanthropic efforts focus on education and his charitable giving flows mostly through his foundations: the Lone Pine Foundation, which aims to fight poverty through education, and Zoom Foundation, focused on combating climate change and funding education. He has also served on the board of directors for Teach for America and has been a major backer of charter schools through his foundations.
As political donors, Mandel and his wife Susan have long been committed Democrats, but they jumped to the ranks of top individual donors in the 2020 cycle. The couple gave $15 million to liberals this year, according to Open Secrets, with their largest gifts going to anti-Trump groups like The Lincoln Project ($1 million from Stephen) and American Bridge PAC ($2.5 million from Stephen), while also giving to a variety of liberal PACs like the Environmental Defense Fund’s PAC ($2.5 million from Susan). The couple each gave $2.5 million in 2016 to Priorities USA Action, which was supporting Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign at the time. Before that, the couple regularly gave relatively modest gifts to Democrats running for office throughout New England and around the country, while routing most of their money into various liberal PACs and organizations.
The Mandels are notably low-profile, so it’s difficult to know what their plans are beyond 2020. The incoming Biden administration has already indicated it wants to move away from charter schools, so that might force the Mandels to change their giving strategy and their relationship to the Democrats.
Takeaways: When you’ve got the money, you can make yourself invaluable to a party as a donor. BT readers can see this for themselves in the Madel’s donor records. The pair regularly make million-dollar-plus gifts to leading Super PACs, spreading their money across different national liberal orgs with the clearest throughline being simply supporting Democrats running for office. Theirs is the kind of record you’d expect to see from a couple long dedicated to a party and its goals.