Michael R. Bloomberg’s gun control group plans to spend $10 million to help elect Democratic attorneys general this year and in 2026, an investment it says is meant to help protect the rule of law and democracy while President Trump holds the White House.
The group, Everytown for Gun Safety, will back Democratic candidates in 10 competitive states, including Virginia this fall and Arizona, Georgia, Minnesota, Nevada and Wisconsin, among others, next year, according to John Feinblatt, the organization’s president.
The pledged spending by Mr. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor and a Democratic megadonor, is notable because of his apparent reluctance to put his money behind Vice President Kamala Harris last year. He spent months resisting entreaties to donate, though fellow billionaires persuaded him to give $50 million in late October to a nonprofit group supporting her campaign.
Everytown has for years spent money on down-ballot efforts to elect Democratic candidates for state legislatures, particularly in places where gun control measures had a chance of being enacted and where smaller sums of money could have an influence on races.
Mr. Feinblatt said that his group’s push to support attorneys general, which will be called the Everytown Rule of Law Fund, would focus on defending states from actions by the Trump administration more than on serving as an offensive playbook for enacting gun control measures.
Attorneys general “are trying to protect the rule of law,” Mr. Feinblatt said. “They’re trying to protect the things that are in every basic textbook of American democracy.”
He added: “We want to make sure that the A.G.s know that groups like us will support them if they do the right thing, and we want them to know that we have their back today and we’ll have their backs in 2026.”
Democratic attorneys general have filed a series of lawsuits against the Trump administration’s efforts to shutter federal agencies and withhold funding to states. With Democrats in the minority in both chambers of Congress and the Trump administration staffed by loyalists aiming to root out public and private dissent, the courts are liberals’ main venue for meaningful opposition to the president.
Mr. Bloomberg’s recent spending on politics pales in comparison to his past outlays.
In the 2020 general election, he spent $173 million to elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. — $100 million in Florida alone. Earlier that cycle, Mr. Bloomberg spent more than $1 billion trying to win the Democratic presidential primary race for himself, a failed effort in which he won just 59 delegates and placed first only in the American Samoa caucuses.
Mr. Feinblatt said he did not have any regrets about Mr. Bloomberg’s limited level of investment in the election last year.
“There was a ton of money spent in 2024,” he said. “I don’t think money was the issue.”
Everytown has spent about $5 million backing attorneys general since 2017, Mr. Feinblatt said, including $500,000 each in 2022 to back the re-election bids for Dana Nessel and Aaron Ford, the Democratic attorneys general of Michigan and Nevada.
This spring, the group spent $553,000 to air television ads backing the liberal candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court in the final month of that $100 million campaign. The candidate, Susan Crawford, won a decisive victory to keep liberals in control of the battleground state’s top court.
