Category Archives: campaign finance

“A Fundraiser Convicted of Defrauding ‘Vulnerable’ Victims Is Back — and Making Millions From Republican Campaigns”

campaign finance, chicanery

Dave Levinthal for Notus:

Jack Daly, who was convicted and sent to prison last year after pleading guilty to defrauding thousands of conservative political donors out of money, has emerged from federal custody to quietly re-establish himself as a top Republican Party campaign fundraiser.

A NOTUS investigation found that dozens of federal-level Republican political committees — including the Republican National Committee, numerous congressional committees and campaign operations tied to President Donald Trump — have together spent nearly $18 million on digital fundraising, donor lists and other services from Daly’s latest political consulting firm, Better Mousetrap Digital, according to Virgin Islands corporate filings and Federal Election Commission records.

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“New polling illuminates how the Supreme Court got Citizens United wrong and shows bipartisan momentum for money-in-politics reforms, including proposed Montana ballot measure”

campaign finance

Issue One release:

New polling commissioned by Issue One and conducted this month by YouGov reveals that overwhelming majorities of Americans — and Montanans — broadly believe that large-scale political spending by corporations, dark money groups, and wealthy donors undermines democracy, creates the appearance of corruption, and reduces trust in government.

The results show that voters across the political spectrum, both nationally and in Montana specifically, reject key assumptions made by the U.S. Supreme Court in its controversial 2010 decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which unleashed a deluge of big money in elections.

Montanans were polled because a new proposed 2026 ballot measure would eliminate corporate and dark money spending in elections by amending state law governing corporate charters.

Overall, Issue One’s new poll found that nearly 8 in 10 Americans (79%) agreed that large independent expenditures (the technical name for political ads that are not coordinated with a candidate) by wealthy donors and corporations in elections give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. This included 84% of Democrats, 74% of Republicans, and 79% of independents.

Relatedly, more than 3 in 4 Americans (76%) — including 84% of Democrats, 68% of Republicans, and 77% of independents — agreed that “the appearance of wealthy donors or corporations gaining influence over or access to elected officials causes me to lose faith in this democracy.”…

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“Constitutional common sense absent in 6th Circuit’s HB 1 ruling: Mark Brown”

campaign finance, direct democracy

Mark Brown oped in Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Democracy in Ohio suffered a setback when the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati last month refused to block Ohio’s House Bill 1 ban on “foreign nationals” “[m]ak[ing] a contribution … or independent expenditure in support of or opposition to a statewide ballot issue.” Unlike its federal counterpart, Ohio’s ban extends to “issue advocacy” (ballot measures) and criminalizes speech by lawful permanent residents (green card holders) living in Ohio. Further deviating from the longstanding federal prohibition – which allows criminal penalties only when violations are “willful” — Ohio’s new prohibitions criminalize innocent mistakes.

As then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh explained a dozen years ago, Congress chose not to apply the speech restrictions placed on foreign nationals to green card holders because the latter “stand in a different relationship to the American political community …., [and] have a long-term stake in the flourishing of American society.” Kavanaugh also noted that punishing “issue advocacy — that is, speech that does not expressly advocate the election or defeat of a specific candidate” (which federal law does not do) — could cross the constitutional “line drawn by the Supreme Court in [FEC v.] Wisconsin Right to Life,” a precursor to its better-known holding in Citizens United v. FEC (extending First Amendment protections from nonprofits to for-profit corporations).

House Bill 1 ignores all of this by both prohibiting green card holders’ speech about ballot issues and then criminalizing domestic nonprofits’ speech about ballot issues when they “us[e] any funds [they] know were received from a foreign national,” including green card holders. Under HB 1’s reach, an editorial printed by a church in a parish bulletin opposing an abortion amendment could be criminal if a green-card parishioner dropped a $1 bill in the Sunday collection plate. The same goes for Ohio’s Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which accepts dues from green card holders and often voices opinions on citizen initiatives.

House Bill 1 threatens just about every charity and membership organization that uses the marketplace of ideas in Ohio with a criminal investigation. Of course, those that fall into the Attorney General’s and Secretary of State’s good graces will have nothing to fear. The rest, however, will effectively be forced either to take complex, expensive and tedious measures to segregate money that is received from lawful permanent residents or simply not speak….

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Dan Weiner on the Brennan Center’s Interesting Amicus Brief in the NRSC Case

campaign finance, political parties, Supreme Court

I asked Dan Weiner of the Brennan Center to write a bit about the interesting position they’ve taken in the NRSC campaign finance case. Here is his guest post:

On Monday the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law filed an amicus brief in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC, a First Amendment challenge before the Supreme Court over longstanding federal limits on coordinated spending between national party committees and candidates. The Brennan Center worked with Steptoe LLP on the brief. Many thanks to Rick for letting us summarize our views here.

The brief argues that the Court should uphold these limits, while leaving questions about whether they constitute good policy to Congress. 

We have previously argued that Congress should consider eliminating these same limits as part of a reform package to strengthen political parties. Our view hasn’t changed. Parties, for all their faults, are essential to American democracy, and we should expect them to work closely with their own candidates. Parties can also be a significant vector for corruption, as the Court found when it upheld the coordinated spending limits several decades ago (then with the benefit of a substantial factual record, a practice the justices have since abandoned in campaign finance cases).

Given these competing factors, the best approach would be to put reasonable limits on contributions to both candidates and political parties and then let them coordinate as much as they want. But that isn’t the system we have. Instead, current law allows parties to raise more than 400 times the amount that individual candidates can raise per election cycle. Coordinated spending limits are an established way to prevent party donations from being used to circumvent the individual limits. That should be the end of the Court’s involvement.

What Congress should do is more complicated. We are skeptical that repealing the coordinated spending limits without other changes will have major benefits for American democracy, but reasonable people can disagree.

The real question is who should decide. At the heart of our brief is an accounting of how the Court’s interventions in campaign finance law over the last two decades have had unintended consequences that run directly counter to the justices’ own express assurances — including creating new avenues for corruption, undermining campaign transparency, letting more foreign money into elections, and fueling public cynicism with politics.  Congress, in representing the American people (who overwhelmingly want more, not less, campaign finance safeguards), is the body best placed to anticipate and weigh such risks against the benefits of undoing longstanding rules. They, and not the Court, should decide the future of coordinated spending limits.

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Very Excited to Announce My New Book Project, “Unbent Arc: The Rise and Decline of American Democracy 1964-2024”

authoritarian threats in US, ballot access, campaign finance, election administration, political equality, political parties, political polarization, Supreme Court, The Voting Wars, Unbent Arc, Voting Rights Act

I’m very excited to be working on this major project, bringing together my many strands of research on democracy and election law. Here’s the Publisher’s Marketplace announcement (the book itself won’t be published until early 2028):

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“The Secret Bundlers Behind Eric Adams’ Campaign Fundraising Revealed”

campaign finance

The City:

In October 2023, Mayor Eric Adams showed up for the opening of a new office of a big personal injury law firm, Morgan & Morgan, smiling and posing for selfies in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport. The firm made sure to post photos of the mayor’s seemingly random visit on social media.

The visit, however, was anything but random.

A few months earlier, Adams himself had recruited one of the firm’s lawyers to raise campaign donations for his re-election bid and had granted the lawyer an exclusive in-person sit-down arranged by his chief fundraiser. The lawyer then bundled $21,000 worth of contributions for the mayor.

None of this was in the public eye.

That’s because of a loophole in the law that says campaigns do not have to disclose bundlers as intermediaries — money-raisers who choreograph multiple donations to campaigns — if they’re doing this fundraising in connection to an event paid for, in part or whole, by the campaign. In this case, it was a performance of the musical “New York, New York” the Adams campaign had arranged at the St. James Theater off Broadway, forking over some $75,000 for seats.

The personal injury lawyer was hardly alone. An investigation by THE CITY has found that Adams did not disclose an army of these secret bundlers to the city’s Campaign Finance Board — a lapse that is legal, but ethically dubious, campaign finance experts say.

Hundreds of pages of texts with Adams’ chief fundraiser Brianna Suggs covering both the 2021 and 2025 campaigns that were released recently reveal the identities of these apparent bundlers as they exchanged detailed lists of potential donors they had identified for her and, in some cases, promised to raise six-figures worth of donations. 

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“U.S. Is Increasingly Exposed to Chinese Election Threats, Lawmakers Say”

campaign finance, cheap speech, chicanery

NYT:

Democratic lawmakers warned on Friday that severe staff cuts at an intelligence office that monitors foreign threats to U.S. elections would leave the country vulnerable to interference and subversion from Beijing, as Chinese companies use artificial intelligence as a new weapon in information warfare.

In a letter to Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, Representatives Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois and André Carson of Indiana cited a New York Times story about technology developed by the Chinese company GoLaxy that aims to use artificial intelligence to make influence and information operations far more effective.

The representatives, who both serve on the House China committee, said the cuts at Ms. Gabbard’s office were “stripping away the guardrails that protect our nation from foreign influence.”

In recent weeks, Ms. Gabbard announced staff reductions that all but eliminated the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which tracks efforts by adversarial countries to manipulate U.S. elections and warp American dialogue.

Documents uncovered by Vanderbilt University and examined by The Times detailed new technology developed by GoLaxy that aimed to improve China’s ability to influence public debate. GoLaxy, according to the documents, had done work in Hong Kong and Taiwan and collected information about American lawmakers.

GoLaxy, according to the documents, was using artificial intelligence to track large numbers of people in order to generate pro-Chinese propaganda that could shape public debates, promote the views of China’s government and drown out voices opposed to its policies…..

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“Millions of dollars in special-election redistricting TV ads scheduled to start airing Tuesday”

campaign finance, campaigns, redistricting

LA Times:

Millions of dollars worth of political TV ads are expected to start airing Tuesday in an effort to sway Californians on a November ballot measure seeking to send more Democrats to Congress and counter President Trump and the GOP agenda, according to television airtime purchases.

The special-election ballot measure — Prop. 50 — will likely shape control of the U.S. House of Representatives and determine the fate of many of Trump’s far-right policies.

The opposition to the rare California mid-decade redistricting has booked more than $10 million of airtime for ads between Tuesday and Sept. 23 in media markets across the state, according to media buyers who are not affiliated with either campaign. Supporters of the effort have bought at least $2 million in ads starting on Tuesday, a number expected to grow exponentially as they are aggressively trying to secure time in coming weeks on broadcast and cable television.

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“This early start is a bit stealthy on the part of the no side, but has been used as a ploy in past campaigns to try to show strength early and gain advantage by forcing the opposing side to play catch up,” said Sheri Sadler, a veteran Democratic political media operative who is not working for either campaign. “This promises to be an expensive campaign for a special election, especially starting so early.”

Millions of dollars have already flowed into the nascent campaigns sparring over the Nov. 4 special-election ballot measure that asks voters to set aside the congressional boundaries drawn in 2021 by California’s independent redistricting commission. The panel was created by the state’s voters in 2010 to stop gerrymandering and incumbent protection by both major political parties.

The campaign will be a sprint — glossy multi-page mailers arrived in Californians’ mailboxes before the state Legislature voted in late August to call the special election. Voters will begin receiving mail ballots in early October.

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“Silicon Valley Pledges $200 Million to New Pro-A.I. Super PACs”

campaign finance

NYT:

Silicon Valley corporations and investors, emboldened by President Trump’s embrace of the technology and crypto industries, have pledged up to $200 million to two new super PACs that are aimed at forcing out politicians whom they see as insufficiently supportive of the push into artificial intelligence.

One of the new PACs, Meta California, is funded by tens of millions of dollars from Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram and has been investing heavily in A.I. The second super PAC, Leading the Future, is backed initially with $50 million from the A.I. investor Andreessen Horowitz and $50 million from Greg Brockman, a co-founder of OpenAI, and his wife, Anna.

The first-of-their-kind groups reflect a new appetite for political combat from the A.I. industry, which is a relatively new policy area without clear partisan allegiances.

Meta, Google, OpenAI, Microsoft and others are shoveling tens of billions of dollars into developing A.I. models, building data centers, hiring top researchers and taking a lead in the technology. At the same time, the companies face questions over whether A.I. might take away people’s jobs and whether the technology is safe, as well as mounting concerns over the environmental effects of data centers….

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“A Dark Money Group Is Secretly Funding High-Profile Democratic Influencers”

campaign finance, campaigns, chicanery

Wired:

In a private group chat in June, dozens of Democratic political influencers discussed whether to take advantage of an enticing opportunity. They were being offered $8,000 per month to take part in a secretive program aimed at bolstering Democratic messaging on the internet.

But the contract sent to them from Chorus, the nonprofit arm of a liberal influencer marketing platform, came with some strings. Among other issues, it mandated extensive secrecy about disclosing their payments and had restrictions on what sort of political content the creators could produce.

In their group chat, influencers debated the details.

“Should we send a joint email (with all of our email addresses) … or, are we just going to send things separately and hope they change everything for everyone?” Laurenzo, a nonbinary creator in Columbus, Ohio, with over 884,000 TikTok followers, asked the group. Some joked about collective bargaining. “Any Newsies fans here?” Eliza Orlins, a public defender and reality TV star known for her appearances on Survivor, posted in the group. “‘We’re a union just by sayin’ so!’”

The influencers in the chat collectively had at least 13 million followers across social platforms. They represented some of the most well-known voices online posting in support of Democrats, and they’re key to wherever the party moves next. But ultimately, the group didn’t make much progress.

“Reading through this revised Chorus contract like: you win some, you lose some,” a reproductive justice influencer named Pari, who posts under the handle @womeninamerica, responded later in the thread. “I also think there’s at least 4 other things that should change 🤣but the vibe I got from their email was that there would be minimal, if any, changes.” (Laurenzo, Orlins, and Pari did not reply to requests for comment.)

“I don’t feel strongly about pushing tbh,” Aaron Parnas, a Gen Z news influencer who has been called the Gen Z Walter Cronkite and has been lauded in legacy media outlets, posted to the chat. “They aren’t going to modify it anymore. Seems like a take it or leave it.” (Parnas declined to comment.)

“I believe we are in Stage 5: Acceptance,” Pari responded. Creators began signing on to the deal….

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“How AOC built a Democratic fundraising juggernaut”

campaign finance, campaigns

CNN:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is building a fundraising juggernaut that is rivaling some of the Democratic Party’s core infrastructure, prompting questions about both her future and the party’s.

Small-dollar donations – contributions of less than $200 – are the lifeblood of campaigns and a key measure of voter enthusiasm. And on ActBlue, Democrats’ largest online fundraising platform, the New York congresswoman received the third-most small-dollar donations in the first half of the year.

That trailed only the Democratic National Committee and the party’s Senate campaign arm, key party infrastructure. Ocasio-Cortez beat the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the House campaign arm, and every other individual candidate.

Ocasio-Cortez raised nearly $15 million total in the first half of 2025 from 736,000 contributions, an average of $20 a donor. Notably, her fundraising spiked after the March announcement that she would join Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ national “Fighting Oligarchy” tour….

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