Hoffman's Moonshot, Biden's Cold War, and Trumpism After Trump

Happy Wednesday and welcome back to The Daily Courant, our afternoon digest highlighting the latest and most urgent reporting on offer across Puck.

Today, we direct your attention to Teddy Schleifer's exclusive reporting on an unlikely Silicon Valley-inspired plan, conceived by a Wisconsin dairy scion and with funding from mega-connector Reid Hoffman, to radically rewire America's election rulebook. The changes, if they were implemented, would potentially handicap fringe right- and left-wing candidates—and, perhaps, launch a generation of Joe Manchins. 

Plus, below the fold, Tina Nguyen pulls back the curtain on the G.O.P. finishing school aiming to preserve Trumpism after Trump. And William D. Cohan explains how Jeff Bezos helped Wall Street dodge the regulatory bullet. 

Silicon Valley's $100 Million Plan to Completely Fix Washington

In 2017, a Wisconsin dairy scion wrote a Harvard Business School case study applying “industry competitive analysis” to party politics. The result is a $100 million plan to transform election rules. Reid Hoffman and one of the Bay Area’s wealthiest families have already signed on.

One afternoon earlier this month, a source sent me a note on Signal asking an unexpected question. They wanted my take on an invitation they had received to meet with a political group that had a name so inscrutable that it sounded like a new moonshot from Google X: The Institute for Political Innovation. Had I heard of it? I cover the world of Silicon Valley fundraising pretty closely, but no, I apparently was not read in on the Peninsula’s latest, greatest innovation. I’d figure it out and get back to him. After all, with a name like that, how lame could this be?

But the group, whose strategy hasn’t been reported, is one of the most ambitious, if quixotic, political attempts to come through Silicon Valley—a Grand Unified Theory to fix everything that is wrong with American politics. With heavyweight co-chairs including Reid Hoffman and the Sobrato family, the billionaire real estate dynasty, the Institute has all the right connections as it sets out to raise $100 million over the next year to run ballot initiatives and legislative campaigns in up to a dozen states across the country. Next week, the group will be introduced at a private event to some of Silicon Valley’s biggest donors, who, in the throes of Donald Trump’s takeover of the G.O.P., are grappling with whether they want to invest even more in tackling the fundamental problems in American democracy—or cut and run altogether. 

The group is not based in Silicon Valley, but make no mistake, it is very much of Silicon Valley, with its earnest recitations of Harvard Business School papers, its preachy nonpartisanship and its bedrock belief in the power of incentives. After all, there’s nothing that Silicon Valley’s handymen love more than a design flaw. 

The animating idea of I.P.I. is that the American election system is broken...

FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT