Future Now is an American political organization founded in 2017 to win state legislative majorities and hold them to a shared policy platform, on the premise that state government decides most of what shapes daily life.
Future Now believes that "the solutions to our country's problems have one thing in common: your state." It was founded by businessman 📝Adam Pritzker, the economist Jeffrey Sachs, and Daniel Squadron, who resigned his New York State Senate seat in 2017 to start it. The organizing wager is one of leverage: legislatures set most of the policy governing schools, health coverage, elections, and courts, yet individual seats are contested at a fraction of the cost of federal races and are often decided by margins in the hundreds of votes.
The structure separates advocacy from spending. Future Now Action, the advocacy entity, pursues three related lines of work — the States Project, its electoral arm; the Lawmaker Network, which supplies policy research and drafting support to sitting legislators; and the PAC for America's Future, the hybrid political action committee originally named Future Now Fund. America's Goals is the platform binding them: a published set of outcome targets that candidates and seated legislators sign a pledge to pursue, adopted by legislators from every state. As of 2022 the States Project concentrated its electoral work on eight states — Arizona, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
Future Now Fund wins state legislative majorities by:
The organization is commonly described, including by itself, as a progressive counterweight to the American Legislative Exchange Council, which has supplied model legislation to conservative state lawmakers since 1973. Conservative research groups characterize it instead as a dark-money vehicle for capturing statehouses, a contested framing that turns on the disclosure rules governing 501(c)(4) advocacy rather than on any dispute about what the organization does. Its public-facing operation now runs primarily under the States Project name.