Earlier this week I wrote about two dark money groups trying to influence several primary races. Accountable New Mexico and New Chapter New Mexico are examples of pop-up groups — organizations that appear quickly before elections and most often, just as quickly disappear when they’re over.
They have innocuous names designed to appeal to voters, functioning both as brands and as collection vehicles for cash that pays for political advertising and in some cases, more direct campaigning like phone banks and canvassing.
The transient nature of these types of groups doesn’t change that their donors are pretty consistent from one year to the next. Big industries in New Mexico are mainstays, with oil and gas the biggest but you also see realtors, attorneys, land developers, health-related companies like Presbyterian, and more. There are also big individual donors who are mainstays, the biggest from the oil and gas industry.
Then there are the outside political groups and nonprofits. It’s here that dark money usually enters.
Many are mainstays in their own right. Planned Parenthood is a good example. We don’t know the original source of its money, but when we see it on a donor list, because it’s a known entity it tells us something about the advertising or the group it’s funding.
Far murkier are the outside nonprofits whose names mean nothing to the public. When a pop-up group reports that a donor is one of these obscure nonprofits — to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars — it is reporting hidden money. That’s because nonprofits generally aren’t required to disclose their donors.
The reasons people give through dark-money nonprofits vary. Some donors simply don’t want the public to know they’re trying to influence an election, for a variety of reasons. Or simply, they think their true identities will hurt the candidates they want to see win. Others are strategic: perhaps affiliated with one party but hoping to shape the outcome of the other party’s primary, betting that voters won’t recognize the ads they’re seeing as opposition interference.
Accountable New Mexico and New Chapter New Mexico are the clearest current examples of attempted manipulation of voter preferences. What does “accountable” mean? We might know more if we knew who was funding it. And “new chapter”? If we knew the donors, we might understand what they find so objectionable about the current chapter — and that would make us better judges of the advertising they’re paying for.
But they’re not alone. Other hidden money groups are active in New Mexico right now. And still others are operating with donor lists fully disclosed — but their own names are disingenuous.
Here are three examples. Let’s start with the one that best illustrates the latter.
New Mexicans for Responsible Public Lands.
What New Mexicans? The name implies a local, grassroots concern for New Mexico’s public lands. But the funders are a Louisiana contractor and a Florida energy company. The PAC is headquartered in Washington, D.C.
MMR Group, Inc., headquartered in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, gave $50,000. NextEra Energy, headquartered in Juno Beach, Florida, gave the other $50,000.
Both companies have New Mexico business interests but could not reasonably be called, “New Mexicans.”
These companies may have a business presence in New Mexico. That is not in dispute. What it does not make them is New Mexican. They have a financial relationship with the state. That doesn’t equate to a civic one.
Their money, so far reported, has almost entirely been spent on research and polling.
This group is an independent expenditure PAC we have documented for years. It receives donations from individuals, many of them New Mexicans and has an ongoing presence in New Mexico. But it also receives large infusions of national money from nonprofits that don’t disclose their donors. This year, that source so far is The North Fund, a Washington DC-based nonprofit that gave $250,000 in December.
The North Fund has been operating in New Mexico and across the country for several years. National reporting has established that it funds progressive causes and organizations. That doesn’t make it any less opaque. We still don’t know who is ultimately writing the checks.
Better Future has routed its money so far this year to three main places: $53,811 to Dream Train Consulting, $25,000 to No Corporate Democrats PAC, and $20,000 to ProgressNow New Mexico Votes. The first is a consulting firm. The latter two are progressive political organizations active in New Mexico primaries. Better Futures had a substantial balance before the North Fund contribution and will likely raise more.
This group is running ads against Sam Bregman. The name is not accidental — it echoes Deb Haaland’s own campaign language about being fierce for New Mexicans. One function of an independent expenditure PAC is that it does the negative work, while candidates stay positive. Given that Accountable New Mexico has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to attack Haaland, it is not surprising that a counter-operation has emerged.
But what makes Be Fierce dark? After all, it has a donor list. The question is what that donor list tells us.
One donor — Lutz and Carr CPAs, LLP, a New York accounting firm — gave $150,000. That is the great majority of the PAC’s fundraising. Education Reform Now Advocacy, a Washington D.C. group, gave $50,000. Presbyterian Healthcare gave $10,000.
Haaland’s campaign told the Albuquerque Journal that Haaland has no relationship with Lutz and Carr. That may be true in both a personal and legal sense. But $150,000 from a New York accounting firm with no visible footprint in New Mexico politics, flowing into a PAC whose sole apparent purpose is to help one specific candidate, is not exactly a profile in transparency. We know who wrote the check. We don’t know why, or who asked them to.
That is kind of dark.
Childress can be reached at marjorie@nmindepth.com