Everyone has a price.

With Roger Sollenberger, Political Reporter

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The Big Dig this week is…How the Sedition Caucus Had No Problem Raising Big Money

The group of 147 senators and representatives who objected to President Joe Biden’s victory, the so-called “sedition caucus,” faced immediate donor backlash after the Jan. 6 insurrection. But they still raised a staggering amount of money for the 2022 election cycle—nearly $200 million.

To put that in perspective, it’s about $60 million more than former President Donald Trump’s Save America apparatus raised during the same period. The national fundraising arms for House and Senate Republicans raised $262 million and $234 million, respectively.

About $77.7 million came from individual donors, with another $121.5 million from other federal committees, including campaigns, joint fundraising vehicles, corporate PACs, trade associations, and other special interest groups, according to The Daily Beast’s review of Federal Election Commission bulk contribution data for the cycle, covering through Oct. 31, 2022.

Leaders lead

The raw contribution data was compiled by Advance Democracy, an independent, non-profit organization that conducts public-interest research, and analyzed by The Daily Beast.

The sedition caucus also features some of the top congressional fundraisers overall.

In the House, six of the top 10 Republican money draws this cycle were election objectors, with Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy leading the pack, followed by Minority Whip Steve Scalise, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. Of the five candidates on that list who raised more than $10 million, only one voted to uphold Biden’s win: Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX).

Foghorn Leghorn

Only one of the seven objectors in the Senate was up for election this year, Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), who according to CRP pulled in $37.5 million for his successful re-election. Also on Tuesday, Rep. Ted Budd (R-NC) moved from the House to the Senate, winning his bid in North Carolina. (Budd’s Senate campaign raised about $12.6 million through Oct. 19, which puts him among the top 10 GOP fundraisers in the House, but doesn’t crack the top 20 for Senate Republicans, according to CRP totals.)

Things also get interesting on the donor side.

Pledge of allegiance

In the wake of the Jan. 6 attack, more than 120 corporations pledged to suspend political donations to Republicans who voted to overturn the election. But the data shows that, while many businesses kept that pledge, a number of major companies turned the spigot back on.

According to the data, as of Oct. 31, eight companies—Koch Industries, AT&T, Comcast, American Crystal Sugar Company, UPS, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Valero—had given more money this cycle to committees affiliated with election objectors than the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. All but one of those eight companies had promised to pause donations in some form after the insurrection, with American Crystal Sugar being the outlier.

In all, the data shows that 68 private companies contributed at least $100,000 to committees connected with lawmakers who rejected Biden’s victory. (The dataset includes leadership PACs and other officially affiliated groups in addition to campaign committees.)

Out of line

The largest private donor on the list is billionaire GOP megadonor Dick Uihlein. The Uline shipping mogul fanned out about $405,000 to the sedition caucus, spread across more than two dozen committees, with his wife Elizabeth throwing in another $280,000. Other notable megadonors include hedge fund honcho Ken Griffin ($280,800), Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus ($266,300), and Boston Celtics co-owner Rob Hale, who handed over $260,500 to the Scalise Leadership Fund.

But the largest individual donor on the list was himself an election objector. That would be Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), who dumped nearly $445,000 of his own money into his re-election bid, which collapsed spectacularly under the weight of scandal and mismanagement this May. As Pay Dirt previously reported, Cawthorn has personally invested a total of $817,000 into his political efforts since 2019. He has so far recovered only $261,000, leaving him on the hook for $556,000.

While it’s clear that the sedition caucus did pretty well at the bank, the political outcome is still uncertain.

Money in the bank, voters what you thank?

Voters shot down election-denying Republican candidates for governor, secretary of state, and attorney general in a number of key races this week, part of a more broad repudiation of what many conservatives believed would be a red wave. But as of Wednesday night, more than three dozen candidates who rejected Biden’s election had themselves claimed victory, according to The New York Times, with 180 of the House winners—more than a third—having questioned or denied the 2020 results.

But as of Wednesday night, a number of key contests remained unresolved—most notably Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), who was still slightly underwater in a surprisingly tight race. Not counting Budd, Boebert is the 10th-strongest Republican fundraiser in the House.

Read the whole story here.

From Roger’s Notebook...

The Devil Went Back Down to Georgia. Again. With the Georgia Senate election heading to a runoff, be on the lookout for a swarm of new PACs to funnel cash from around the country into a state that could, once again, decide which party controls the Senate.

While Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) hasn’t yet logged any new additions to his intimidating joint fundraising fleet (more than $100 million raised for this election), Republican challenger Herschel Walker quickly added the “2022 Georgia Victory Committee.” The new committee is a team effort between the Walker campaign, the Georgia Republican Party, and the NRSC.

Elsewhere in the state, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s treasurer created two “pop-up” super PACs days ahead of the election, “For The People By The People PAC” and “Justice Tranquility Defense Welfare PAC.” But filings show the pop-ups never popped during the general election. Look for them to come online in the coming weeks.

Jersey Boy. Dr. Mehmet Oz lent his failed Senate campaign a staggering $22.8 million, but apparently the Federal Election Commission is limiting his ability to pay some of it down.

On Tuesday, the FEC sent a notice to Sen. Susan Collins’ Dirigo leadership PAC, rejecting a $5,000 donation to help Oz pay himself back for loans incurred during the primary and “insufficient debts to warrant such a contribution.” Problem is, Oz appears to have loaned himself about $12.5 million for the primary.

The notice comes at a strange time, after the FEC was loath to act on a landmark Supreme Court ruling this May in favor of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-GA), in which the conservative justices said that the limits on the amount of time and money governing repayments were unconstitutional. The FEC only recently approved a final rule to implement the decision, however, and it hasn’t officially taken effect—it kicks in on Nov. 30, 2022.

Amway to the Rescue. In two notices, the FEC flagged hundreds of thousands of dollars in what it says are impermissible donations to Nevada GOP Senate hopeful Adam Laxalt’s campaign. Some of the donations date back to this summer, including about $38,000 from the DeVos family—the AmWay dynasty which counts former Trump education chief Betsy DeVos. Both of the notices came the day after the election, and Laxalt definitely benefited from the extra cash; his race against incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez-Masto is still too close to call.

Dysfunction junction. This week, left-leaning publication Mother Jones published an article highlighting the FEC’s long track record of failing to enforce campaign finance laws, almost always driven by obstinate GOP commissioners. The publication spoke with two commissioners who defended the agency, one of them the new Democratic appointee, Dana Lindenbaum, who defended the interests of committees, saying “they are the ones who are actually affected by the rules and regulations and the ambiguity.”

Will he or won’t he? Former President Donald Trump has taken heat for the GOP’s failure to produce its much-ballyhooed midterm red wave, so much so that advisors are telling him to delay his expected 2024 candidate announcement later this month. This sharpens questions about when Trump decided to explore the possibility—the length of the “testing the waters” period—and when his donations and spending started qualifying as campaign-related.

It could create a number of accounting headaches, and depending how broad the period is defined, could put a real cramp on how much Trump can raise in the future from his small-dollar army, which is already feeling the pinch.

Straw Man. On Nov. 4, the FEC fined a company fittingly called Tomfoolery LLC $25,000 for an unlawful $75,000 “straw” contribution to the Lone Star Forward super PAC—pretty hefty by FEC standards. In the ruling, the agency acknowledged ongoing investigations into “the allegation that unknown persons made contributions to IEOPCs using an LLC as a straw donor.”

In August, watchdog group Campaign Legal Center identified nearly a million dollars in super PAC straw donations—contributions made under an LLC allegedly to conceal the identity of the donor. While the FEC is citing further investigation, the pending case identified in the recent decision appears to involve LLCs that are legitimate businesses, not companies created explicitly to obscure the source of the funds.

More From The Beast’s Politics Desk

It looks like Republicans will claim the slimmest of majorities in the House, and that means knives are already out for Kevin McCarthy’s presumed speakership. Read our tag team insider coverage of the brewing internal fight here.

If you’re looking for an explanation of the Democrats’ midterm success, look no further than abortion rights, which carried liberals across the line in key races across the country. Read Jake LaHut unpacking the movement here.

Georgia’s runoff will be different than in 2021, thanks to the state’s restrictive new voting laws, which among other changes have cut the timeframe in half. Sam Brodey helps you understand how the new rules could impact the critical contest.

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