Last year, as Democrats were dealt big setbacks in federal races nationwide, a small crop of well-funded candidates in Florida picked up 15 school board seats that had been targeted by conservative groups in competitive counties.
Now, the obscure organization that backed those Florida candidates is planning a substantial expansion to cover more than half the country.
Pipeline Fund, a left-leaning group that helped funnel more than $1 million, plus support and training, into the Florida races, is vying to establish itself as a liberal counter to the sprawling downballot infrastructure on the right that has helped Republicans notch wins on school boards, in county offices and in local judicial races.
Those Florida victories “kind of wiped the floor with Moms for Liberty,” said Denise Feriozzi, the cofounder and executive director of the Pipeline Fund, referring to the conservative parents rights group that has focused intently on gaining influence at the hyperlocal level.
Her remarks were part of her keynote address this past week at the Pipeline Fund’s private conference in Philadelphia.
A spinoff from the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a network of liberal organizations funded by George Soros, the Pipeline Fund started on its own last year with a focus on downballot elections. The group is part benefactor and part matchmaker, identifying candidates for these races and connecting them with state and national organizations for funding and support.
At the conference, Feriozzi announced that her organization would expand into 21 states for the 2026 elections, in blue states like Massachusetts and Colorado and deep-red states like West Virginia and Alabama, looking to identify and recruit thousands of candidates to run for local races.
“Our path forward starts with great people running and serving in state and local offices,” Feriozzi said. “Because the fight for democracy does not stop at state lines. It has to be everywhere.”
To meet these bigger ambitions, the group has corralled the efforts of national liberal organizations like Demand Justice, Sister District and the National Democratic Training Committee with its own state-based organizations. The group said it raised nearly $6 million in 2024 and had raised more than $6 million so far in 2025, though its tax forms have not been released publicly yet.
The Pipeline Fund borrows some concepts from Steve Bannon’s precinct project, which sought to recruit and run far-right conservatives for local positions, like school boards, town clerks, county boards and county parties, to both take over local government and, eventually, the Republican Party. And the group is looking to counter the influence of organizations like Moms for Liberty, which have influenced education policy nationally through school board elections.
But that does not mean solely engaging in the culture war issues animating the right.
“The book bans and anti-LGBTQ sentiment, those things are all real, but while you’re going around and talking to parents and taxpayers and voters, they’re still primarily talking about baseline issues,” Louise Valentine, the executive director of Lead Ohio, a group backed by the Pipeline Fund, said during a panel at the Philadelphia conference.
She recalled talking to a candidate who had been knocking on doors. “She’s like, ‘I’m getting a lot of questions about why lunchtime is so short at middle school.’” Other candidates heard about bullying at school, or playing time on the school basketball team. “These are some of the things that are still on people’s minds,” she said
Valentine, who serves on a school board, acknowledged that running for such seats can be difficult, as candidates cannot expect to raise six figures or afford a campaign manager or staff.
One goal of the Pipeline Fund, which operates largely behind the scenes, is to help offset that burden by connecting local groups and candidates with established national organizations. Mary Kusler, a senior director at the National Education Association and a member of the Pipeline Fund board, said the Pipeline Fund helped the NEA, the nation’s largest teachers union, identify more than 5,000 current school board members who are also members of their union.
Local, state and national groups are always looking for promising potential candidates. The Pipeline Fund wants to be a one-stop shop for this kind of data, and it has built a national database to help identify and recruit people.
Easy access to this critical data has helped Lead NC, an affiliate in North Carolina, identify a “select set” of judicial races for 2026, and helped Lead PA identify 59 school board candidates in Pennsylvania for elections this year.
“This is something I’ve been dreaming of,” Oliver Truong, the executive outreach director of Lead PA, said in an interview. The database has over 12,000 prospects in Pennsylvania sourced from partner organizations. “It’s massive time savings,” he said. “I’m able to get to those conversations about running faster, as opposed to being mired down by list-management.”
With tens of thousands of school board races across the country, identifying candidates is only part of the challenge Democrats face in catching up to Republicans on these local races. But in Philadelphia, Kusler remained undaunted.
“If we are not stepping up and asking people to run,” Kusler told the crowd, “who is?”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2025 The New York Times.
