Maura Sullivan raked in nearly $1 million dollars for her campaign in the first two quarters and very little is coming from New Hampshire

It is that time of the year again, the quarterly FEC reporting deadline. With so many people running for Congress in the First Congressional District (NH-01), I thought now would be a good time to take a look back at last quarter’s FEC reports and see where the candidates started their fundraising, and where their money is coming from.

The big winner last quarter was: Maura Sullivan. She has raised 916,000 dollars in her campaign for Congress. The next closest in the Democratic Primary is Chris Pappas with $425,000 followed by Mark MacKenzie with $159,000. But looking closer we can see some serious differences between the fundraising being done by these candidates. It also gives a glimpse into who truly supports each candidate’s run for Congress.

In her statement announcing the $475,000 she received in the first quarter of 2018, Maura Sullivan said, “Grassroots contributions from across the Granite State made up 20% of the campaign’s fundraising this quarter…Overall, over half of the campaign’s contributions were under $250.”

A cursory glance at OpenSecrets, a division of the Center for Responsive Politics, tells a very different story of Sullivan’s fundraising. As of her first quarter filing, she had raised a total of $27, 573 from New Hampshire and another $3,150 that has “no state data.” Her in-state donations (including “no state data”) total less than four percent (4%) of her overall donations.

Compare that to the other Democratic and Republican campaigns in the first district. Pappas has 76% from in-state donations. Andy Sandborn has 86% in-state donations. Though Mindi Messmer has not raised a lot of money, what she has raised comes from New Hampshire with 89% in-state donations.

I should also point out that Deaglan McEachern also has some big outside investors. He raised $21,000 in-state and $92,000 from out of the state, with a large portion coming from Boston (where he went to school) and Chicago. At least McEachern has nearly 20% coming from New Hampshire.

OpenSecrets also found that less than 15% of Sullivan’s donations came from small donors who gave less than $200 dollars. So I guess it is possible that another 5% of her overall donations came in between $200 dollars and $250, but that seems unlikely as she has tons of donors who have maxed out contributions. That is $2,700 for the primary and $2,700 for the general election for a total of $5,400 dollars.

Here at the Labor News, we have discussed at length the corrupting influence of Money in Politics. We have also published numerous articles from Republicans and Democrats about how Wall Street funnels millions of dollars into our political system.

One of those companies is Bain Capital, the company that was at one time run by Mitt Romney before he left to become a full-time politician. The same company that made hostile takeovers a common phrase. The company that shuttered factories and shipped thousands of good paying union jobs to sweatshops overseas.

“Bain Capital, with Romney at its head, epitomizes the Gilded Age capitalism of the last decades, the casino finance that eventually brought the economy to its knees,” wrote Bob Borosage at Campaign for America’s Future in 2013.

Mother Jones wrote about how Bain Capital was spending millions lobbying and fighting for tax cuts that benefited the ultra-wealthy, like Bain’s CEO Mitt Romney.

“In [2007], lobbying expenditures for the industry practically tripled. The spike was the result of an industry-wide effort to preserve a number of tax giveaways for the finance industry and its CEOs—including the carried interest rule, a tax loophole that allows Romney and other private equity mavens to reduce their taxes by millions of dollars.”

Read NH Labor News coverage of Bain Capital here.

In the first two filings by Sullivan, Bain Capital gave over $58,000 to her campaign.

In the infographic on the right, you can see the breakdown of how much money she has received from California, how much money she has received from New York, how much she received from Illinois, how much money she has received from Bain Capital, compared to how much she brought in from NH through the end of the 1st quarter of 2018. From New Hampshire, Sullivan brought in $17,000 from 6 donors in the last quarter of 2017 and around $10,000 in the first quarter of 2018.

She has received more than twice the amount of money from Bain Capital than she has received from New Hampshire residents.

She also has a number of high powered donors from investment firms pushing tens of thousands of dollars into her campaign. Some include McKinsey & Co, Rally Ventures, Greylock Partners, Trident Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Goldman Sachs.

So the real questions are: who is pushing Maura Sullivan to run and funding her campaign? And what are these wealthy donors looking for in return?

In our previous article, we highlighted the connection between Sullivan and Emily’s List, the powerhouse DC fundraising group. But there is no way to know from FEC reports who is pushing these Big Money donors to Sullivan’s campaign. All we know is that she is getting boatloads of cash like we have never seen in NH before.

There is no doubt that whoever is funneling money from Wall Street directly into Sullivan’s campaign are expecting something in return. This is what our corrupt political system has become: ultra-wealthy elites funding candidates on both sides of the aisle to enrich themselves.

“People are sick and tired of thinking that our politicians only represent the big donors, and that our government doesn’t belong to the people anymore,” said Dan Weeks, then Executive Director of the NH Rebellion, during the 2016 Presidential Primary.

We have not heard any more news about Chris Pappas’s “Homegrown Campaign Pledge” to limit outside money in the primary. All we know is what John Distaso reported last month: that Sullivan basically said “No” without actually saying it.

Weeks is a strong supporter of Pappas’ efforts to limit outside money. He said, “Understanding that this is not going to be fixed overnight, I want to see candidates get creative and do as much as they can under the existing laws to demonstrate a commitment to being accountable to their own constituents and not folks across the country…”

We reached out to the Sullivan campaign, twice, to ask for a response to some of our questions about her fundraising in and out of the state. We asked about how much she received from Bain Capital and other investment firms.

We received no response to our questions.

What we did receive was a press statement that stated she raised another $600,000 dollars in this most recent quarter. The FEC reports aren’t available yet, so she has yet to release the details on who or where the money came from. Her campaign did tell me that they would get back to me with details about the donations.

Matt Murray is the creator and an author on the NH Labor News. He is a union member and advocate for labor and progressive politics. He also works with other unions and members to help spread our message. Follow him on Twitter @NHLabor_News

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