‘S&P Without the GOP’: Inside Brian Potts’ Democrat-Screened Core ETF

Brian Potts, a partner at Husch Blackwell, says he never expected to run an exchange-traded fund. “I didn’t even know what an ETF was in 2020. And then somehow we now have one,” he said, noting he has co-founded five companies alongside his legal career.

Potts and his wife launched DEMZ—the Democratic Large Cap Core Fund—as a data-driven way to express political preferences in a broad-market portfolio. The fund’s screen aggregates Federal Election Commission records for corporate donations to PACs and from C-suite executives. Eligible S&P 500 constituents must have given “75% or more Democrat over three election cycles,” Potts told AInvest, equivalent to six years. In parallel, Potts’s earlier app, Goods Unite Us, tracks the political giving of companies and has drawn “about two and a half million users this year,” he said. “It’s a rabbit hole, though, because if you’re a Republican, you’ll look at it and you’ll be like, shit, I don’t like that this company is donating to Dems or vice versa. And so you can’t unsee it,” he said.

Potts pitches DEMZ as a core, index-like holding rather than a narrow thematic bet. “We are a retirement asset for Democrats. So we are an SPY or a VOO alternative…[the fund] is designed to track the market as closely as possible using only the companies who have contributed more to Democrats,” he said. According to Potts, the fund’s beta “since inception is about 1.05.” He sums up the concept as “the S&P without the GOP.”

Investor appetite for politically oriented portfolios is real, Potts argues, but construction matters. He contrasts DEMZ with the MAGA ETF, describing MAGA as “the top 150 donors to Republicans” in an equal-weighted, energy-heavy portfolio, whereas DEMZ is meant to hew to broad-market characteristics. DEMZ has roughly 51 million assets under management versus roughly 30 million for MAGA. A quick comparison shows DEMZ just slightly beating the S&P 500 over five years. MAGA has performed just slightly under the S&P 500 during the same time period.

Questions about concentration and technology exposure have followed the fund. Nearly 42% of assets are in the top 10 holdings dominated by Big Tech. Potts responded that any apparent tech tilt reflects market performance between rebalances and that the portfolio must remain “within 5% of the sector” weights when it rebalances. “We’re actually not tech-heavy,” he said.

Pressed on whether Big Tech’s corporate leaders are cozying up to a Republican White House, Potts replied, “That’s true,” before adding that companies “placate the current administration always”—a key reason DEMZ evaluates contribution patterns over three federal election cycles rather than a single year. “We think that looking at who is in the C-suite and what their politics are is a much better indicator of a company’s values than any other data point that’s out there,” he said.

Potts also said the product’s flows haven’t been tied to election cycles—counter to what many might assume for a politically filtered vehicle. “Our flow, our volume hasn’t really changed based on elections,” he said, adding that, in his view, Republican investors currently show greater appetite for partisan products even if “the Democrats have outperformed the market.”

Performance remains central to Potts’s case. “We’ve been on the market for five years. We’ve been beating the market net of fees using only the democratic run companies…And before that, we back tested it…from 2016 to 2020,” he said, adding that, in their internal look, companies donating heavily to both parties “underperform.”

The founders may expand the concept. Potts emphasized that the approach is “a data strategy” and said they are “interested in also launching a GOP version,” underscoring his claim that DEMZ’s methodology avoids subjective “woke” or “anti-woke” screens in favor of disclosed contribution data.

In volatile markets where headlines and policy signals can whipsaw sentiment, Potts is pitching a left-wing rules-based way to stay broadly invested without abandoning your political convictions. He argues DEMZ’s design—tracking sector weights and screening on multi-cycle giving—can help investors who navigate the overlap of markets and politics without turning a core allocation into a partisan bet.

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