In 2020, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated more than $400 million to state and local governments to boost election administration funding. Since then, more than a dozen states, nearly all controlled by Republicans, have passed laws banning such private contributions.
The funds, which were administered by a pair of nonprofits, were used to train poll workers, purchase protective gear and upgrade election equipment amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. The money covered gaps in states’ limited budgets for elections.
Since 2021, 15 states have instituted prohibitions on private funding for elections, according to the Capital Research Center, a right-leaning think tank. Similar bills are awaiting the governor’s signature in Alabama and Missouri, while Texas and West Virginia have created regulations instead of bans.
All of these states have Republican governors, except Kansas and Kentucky. Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed the Kansas bill, but the Legislature overrode her action. And in Kentucky, the bill allows state officials to make exceptions for some outside funding instead of instituting an outright ban.
The National Institute for Civil Discourse noted in a recent report that “a consensus exists within the election administration community that elections are underfunded nationwide, even if they are more underfunded in some places than others.”
According to that report, states spend about the same amount on elections as they spend on public parking facilities. And with the federal government only sporadically contributing funds, private donations played a key role in closing the gap during the 2020 cycle.
But with some states banning private funding (plus Zuckerberg and Chan saying they will not be donating again this year), election officials may be hard-pressed to cover all their costs.
A group of Democratic senators introduced a bill last week that would provide $20 billion in federal funds for election administration. But the legislation faces a difficult path to approval in the Senate.
But conservatives have been fighting against private funding almost since the announcement from Zuckerberg and Chan, arguing that such “privatization” undermines elections. The Thomas More Society is still trying to get the court system to declare the use of Zuckerberg-Chan funds illegal in Wisconsin, although so far they have failed to win their case.
With legal battles failing, legislation has proved to be a more successful path for people trying to cut off private funding.
Georgia and Kansas were the first to enact bans, in March 2001, followed a month later by Arizona, Arkansas and Georgia.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.