All posts tagged "Political Money"

This story was originally published by OpenSecrets.

Timothy Mellon, heir to Gilded Age industrialist Andrew Mellon, has continued to pour tens of millions into the campaigns of former President Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Republican congressional candidates in 2024.

Mellon has pumped over $165 million into the 2024 election, making him the top donor fueling outside spending groups this year. Mellon is known as a “guardian angel donor,” a term given to contributors who are a political group’s top donor and account for more than 40% of the group’s funding....

WASHINGTON — Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has raised historically massive sums of money since President Joe Biden announced on Sunday he’d not stand for reelection.

But political money hasn’t always been easy for Harris.

Federal records indicate that Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign, which she abandoned in late 2019 before a Democratic primary or caucus vote had been cast, experienced a most messy financial ending — one that didn’t officially arrive until less than a year ago....

The Federal Election Commission on Thursday voted 5-1 to approve new rules allowing more candidates to pay themselves a salary while running for office, including recent caregivers and workers suffering from an unexpected job loss.

Under existing regulations, only candidates who earned an income during the 12 months immediately before running for office qualified to receive compensation from campaign funds, putting stay-at-home parents, recent college graduates and workers with gaps in employment at a disadvantage.

In 2021, Nabilah Islam Parkes — a former federal candidate and now Democratic state senator in Georgia — filed a petition urging the commission to revise its regulations on campaign salaries, arguing that the restrictions favored the wealthy and left many working-class candidates “out in the cold.”...

A largely unused government fund intended to pay for presidential elections continues to grow with monthly taxpayer infusions — adding $327,000 last month, according to a Raw Story analysis of U.S. Treasury records.

The Presidential Election Campaign Fund has accumulated $400.9 million in taxpayer-funded money as of Nov. 30 — funds that will likely continue to sit in a bureaucratic black hole for years, Treasury records show. The fund ballooned to more than $445.6 million as of June 30, but a nearly $47.5 million disbursement for pediatric research at the National Institutes of Health of money formerly used to put on party conventions decreased the pool of idle dollars.

A once-popular resource for White House aspirants, the Presidential Election Campaign Fund hasn’t been used regularly in 15 years — but taxpayers continue checking a $3 check box that they encounter when filing their annual tax returns by the April deadline....