Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) leads the field of nine Democratic presidential candidates in the amount of money he's raised from people wealthy enough to donate $2,000 each, according to a recent report in The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C. But the floppy-haired Tarheel has also led the field in another, less heralded area, according to a line-by-line analysis the Prospect conducted of his July 15, 2003, report to the Federal Election Commission (FEC): the number of campaign staffers who gave to the campaign on the final day of the last quarter.
The second-quarter FEC report showed that 30 Edwards staffers, advisers and individuals at firms consulting on the campaign donated money to the Edwards effort -- as did the candidate himself -- during the final five days of the filing period; what's more, 22 of them gave on the final day. Without these donations, the Edwards campaign, which fell short by $500,000 of its second-quarter goal of $5 million, would not have reached $4.5 million.
Donations to the campaign on June 30 included $2,000 from "not employed homemaker" Elizabeth Anania Edwards, the candidate's frequently traveling wife, and another $2,000 from "US Senator" John Edwards, the candidate himself. Edwards earned a considerable fortune during his time as a trial lawyer and has yet to publicly say whether he'll tap that fortune in amounts larger than $2,000 in the future. For the short term, though, he seems to be restricting his giving to the FEC maximum, just like regular people.
Thanks to the support of his top aides and field staff, Edwards made it over the $4.5 million hump. Edwards' press secretary, Jennifer Palmieri, fund-raising director, E. Scott Darling, campaign manager, Nick Baldick, and attorney, Jennifer Anne Kinder, were among 16 campaign operatives, three advisers and two consultants who gave to the campaign on June 30 -- as were Iowa press secretary Kim Rubey, Iowa field director Jennifer O'Malley and Iowa aides Brad Anderson and Aaron Pickrell. Even youngster Hunter Pruette, recently hired as Edwards' traveling chief of staff, ponied up on June 30 -- despite a listed profession of "not employed college student."
Baldick declared his affiliation as the "Dewey Square Group" on the FEC forms, and deputy campaign manager David Ginsberg went on record as a "Ginsberg Lahey consultant," making their names difficult to find in the FEC database during cursory checks based on campaign affiliation. "That really is misleading, to put the 'Dewey Square Group,'" says Sheila Krumholz, research director at the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks staff contributions to all of the campaigns.
Several campaign-finance experts said they found the sudden outpouring of staff support for Edwards on June 30 surprising. "I'm unaware of this as an established practice, but it would certainly make sense -- for employees of a campaign who want the campaign to appear to be doing better in the wealth primary than it is -- to give money in the days preceding the FEC disclosure date," says Nathaniel Persily, a campaign-finance expert and law professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
"It's not something you normally see, and I've followed the numbers for 16 years," adds TomPaine.com publisher Ellen Miller, the former director of the Center for Responsive Politics (as well as a former senior fellow at the Prospect). "It suggests a last-minute, desperate attempt to raise the overall total."
FEC spokeswoman Kelly Huff, however, says there is nothing untoward about campaign staffers giving money to the campaigns for which they work. "Anybody can give of their own money to whoever they want to," she says. "Obviously contributions in the name of another aren't allowed. I would assume they're doing it on their own because they like the candidate they work for and they want to support him."
Others who've worked on campaigns say that the practice of internal donation is commonplace, and, indeed, there is plenty of evidence from the other presidential campaigns to support that view. "What that [donation picture] says to me is that the people who work for that candidate are people who feel very strongly about their boss. You're talking about such a small percentage of his receipts that I just don't think it's significant," says Jennifer Steen, a political scientist at Boston College who studies campaign financing. "Most papers would round that [$4.49 million number] to $4.5 million anyway."
The Edwards campaign's Palmieri is quick to draw a link between staffers' enthusiasm for their boss and their decisions to donate. "This is a campaign of the truly committed," she says, of "people who picked up their lives to move down to Raleigh. We're hardcore." As for the burst of donations, "I'm proud to learn that we have that but there was not any sort of coordinated effort at the end," she says.
Other campaigns that have seen a high number of staff and consultant donations include the Joe Lieberman for President campaign, to which nine staffers donated on the final day of the last quarter, and the Dean for America campaign, which experienced a number of internal donations during the first quarter of 2003.
Sen. Lieberman (D-Conn.), who involves his family members in all aspects of his campaign, has seen them return the favor in recent weeks. His son Matt Lieberman, hired by the campaign as a fund-raiser at a salary of around $100,000 per year, and daughter-in-law April Lieberman decided it was time to give back and donated $2,000 each to the campaign on June 26. Marcia Lieberman, the candidate's octogenarian mother, donated $500 on June 30, but, alas, the FEC did not record whether it had included a greeting card. Press secretary Jano Cabrera forked over $1,000 on June 30, as did finance director Shari Yost, who recently left the campaign in a post-FEC-report campaign reorganization. Deputy finance director Jennifer Yocham gave $500.
The Gephardt for President campaign saw a flurry of internal donations during the first weeks after Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.) announced his candidacy, with chief of staff Steve Elmendorf donating $2,000 on Feb. 21 and campaign manager Steve Murphy donating $2,000 on March 10. Five Gephardt staffers donated on June 30, including press secretary Erik Smith, who gave $250.
Five senior Dean for America staffers gave to the campaign on June 30, though three of them gave less than $300 each, and one of them, longtime Dean adviser Tom McMahon, gave $500. Most internal donations to the Dean campaign seemed to have been geared toward keeping the campaign afloat during Dean's stint in the cash-poor wilderness last winter. Fund-raiser Steve Grossman donated $1,000 last December and another $1,000 in January, while campaign manager Joe Trippi gave $250 in January and $1,999 on March 20, putting him $249 over the legal limit, according to FEC records. Trippi says the first donation was from his wife on a shared credit card, and attempts to have it labeled as such in the FEC database are ongoing.
The campaign with the fewest internal donations in either quarter was that of Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). Of the few senior Kerry staffers who gave to the campaign, most worked on the financial side of the effort, where such donations are routine; most of those donations came in the first quarter. No one donated on the final day of the second quarter.
Steen says she thinks a lack of internal donations can also signal something about a campaign. "I would think it was sort of strange if you had a candidate and a very small percentage of that candidate's staff had contributed. . . . I would assume they are not super enthused," she says. But, she adds quickly, "Kerry may have decided these people work so hard, 'I'm not going to ask them to contribute financially.' I have known candidates who have felt weird about their staff contributing to their campaigns, but those are usually people who are doing really, really well in fund raising."
Kerry currently leads the pack with more than $10.9 million in cash-on-hand. "Shaking down staff for money just simply isn't in our fund-raising plan," sniffs Kerry spokesman Robert Gibbs. "We encourage staff to show their devotion to John Kerry through their hard work each day to get him elected president."
One Kerry adviser, the Dewey Square Group's Minyon Moore, decided that charity begins at home but needn't end there: She donated $500 in the first quarter to the Kerry campaign, but gave $500 to Edwards, for whom many of her colleagues at Dewey Square work, on June 30.
Says Palmieri, "The senator has a great deal of respect for Minyon and appreciates her support."
Garance Franke-Ruta is a Prospect senior editor.