Senators Warnock, Hassan, Cortez Masto, and others have opened themselves to charges of hypocrisy.
Campaign finance reform has been a core plank of many Democrats’ campaign rhetoric for years, and the incumbent senators up for reelection in the 2022 midterms are no exception.
Across the swing state seats that guarantee the Democrats’ slim majority, lofty promises have been made and scathing indictments have been leveled against opponents.
In the days before last year’s Georgia Senate run-offs, Raphael Warnock told one crowd that “Washington is so filled with corrupt politicians who stand there representing the wealthy and the well-connected. And they are responding to their donors.”
“That’s why I’m not accepting any corporate PAC money,” he finished.
Warnock has carried that message through since taking on the title of senator, at various points claiming to have “never taken a dime of corporate PAC money. Period,” and promising not to take a “cent of corporate PAC money.“
Warnock has undoubtedly broken the spirit, if not the letter of his pledges. In 2021, Warnock accepted $317,900 from PACs that run on the engine of corporate contributions — but are organized and run by congressional leadership or other politically interested groups — including from pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer and Merck, tobacco grower Altria, Walmart, H&R Block, and Google, among many others
That formal PAC money came in addition to over $430,000 in accepted personal contributions from corporate executives — including $17,400 from George and Alexander Soros — and $6,000 directly from corporate lobbyists.
But the junior senator from Georgia is far from the worst offender in his party. Like Warnock, New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan has frequently returned to denouncing the corrupting influence of money in politics as a campaign strategy. In 2016, Hassan attacked her opponent, incumbent Republican Kelly Ayotte, asserting that Ayotte is “bought & paid for by corporate special interests.” Fast-forward five years and Hassan has not dropped the rhetoric — she’s a supporter of the “For the People” Act, which she claimed would stop “corporate special interests that dictate our elections — but she’s happy to continue to let them dictate hers for now.
In 2021, Hassan accepted $429,150 in contributions directly from Amazon, BlackRock, Intel, Deloitte, Barclays, Nike, and other corporate PACs, and an additional $264,000 through the same loophole Warnock took advantage of. Hassan was similarly at peace with hauling in $522,138 and $77,250 in corporate executives’ and corporate lobbyists’ money, respectively. Notably, Hassan had no issues taking $1,500 from current and former lobbyists for ZTE: A Chinese technology company that’s been fined for exporting U.S. technology to Iran and North Korea and has been designated a national-security threat by the Federal Communications Commission.
Speaking of Chinese campaign contributors, Arizona senator Mark Kelly has also accepted money from lobbyists for a controversial Chinese enterprise. Kelly, despite having made an opposition to corporate contributions a major part of his young political career, was happy to take $1,000 from Thomas Green, a lobbyist for Huawei, another Chinese telecommunication company which, according to the Justice Department, has unseemly ties to the rogue regime in Iran. Headquartered in China, the firm is also obligated to hand Americans’ data over to Beijing at the Communist Party’s request.
Kelly has a longstanding interest in Chinese money dating back to his days in business, when he solicited money from Tencent Holdings, a firm with well-documented ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Kelly’s 2020 campaign also accepted a $5,000 from Tencent’s chief exploration officer, David Wallerstein. The junior senator from Arizona has called his experience at CCP-run conferences “one of the absolute highlights of my life, second only to flying in space.”
Besides the Chinese money, Kelly has also made use of the same loophole as Warnock, using corporate money funneled through leadership and association PACs to the tune of $243,500 in 2021. The bulk of his corporate money — $880,042 — came from executives, however. Four thousand eight-hundred and fifty dollars was tacked on by lobbyists.
None of that quite tracks with Kelly’s campaign-trail assertion that “Folks want change, I think they want independence. They want people who are independent from corporate PACs and corporations and their political parties.” He also claimed on the trail that his candidacy was “fueled” by “grassroots donors like you.”
Nevada senator Catherine Cortez Masto is yet another Democratic senator whose rhetoric does not align with their political operations. Cortez Masto has professed to believe that “democracy belongs to the people — not massive corporations,” and decried those colleagues of hers who take “their marching orders from corporate special interests.”
And yet, Cortez Masto has welcomed $342,700 in contributions directly from corporate PACs and $353,500 smuggled through leadership and association PACs. Corporate executives donated a whopping $507,736 and $49,550 came from lobbyists, including for Altria, Duke Energy, BP, Goldman Sachs, and Facebook.
Under current campaign finance regulations, none of the above Democrats — all of whom are classified as running in “toss-up” or “lean Dem” races in 2022 — have done anything wrong in the technical legal sense. And yet, their willingness to dance around their stated opposition to corporate money to accept millions of combined dollars in the lead-up to the midterms alone — including from the United States’ chief geopolitical rival — may open them up to charges of hypocrisy, and worse.