Don Treeger/The Republican via AP
Rep. Richard Neal smiles during a sound check before the start of a Democratic primary debate in Springfield, Massachusetts, August 17, 2020.
Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA) has had a strategy for beating back a challenge in next Tuesday’s Democratic primary from Holyoke mayor Alex Morse. It begins with dollars and ends with cents. Neal’s campaign has spent $4.3 million this cycle as of the middle of August, and still had $2.7 million left for the stretch run, nearly ten times as much as Morse, who has spent around $1 million. Much of that money—nearly $2 million—has come from corporate political action committees, though Neal’s lawyers want you to know that is in no way equivalent to funding from corporations.
But that apparently wasn’t enough to make Neal comfortable with his political standing. He is also getting support from over $1.5 million in independent expenditure campaigns. The American Hospital Association PAC is running close to $500,000 worth of television ads. And two other super PACs, Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), which has spent money defending several incumbents from insurgent primary challengers this cycle, and American Working Families (AWF), have dropped over $1 million combined.
What’s curious here is that the latter two, DMFI and AWF, appear to have significant links to one another. Both firms each reported spending $100,000 on anti-Morse ads that ran last week, using the same consulting firm, Jackson Group Media, to produce and place the ads. DMFI reported an in-kind contribution from AWF worth $4,000 for “TV ad production.” That may indicate that AWF funded the production of the ads DMFI is running.
“It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on,” said Brendan Fischer of the Campaign Legal Center. “It looks very much like a joint effort between these two groups.”
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It would be illegal for super PACs to coordinate with the candidate they’re supporting. But super PACs coordinating with one another is not necessarily illegal, as long as it’s disclosed. It’s just strange, and unusual. It also makes it more difficult for voters to understand who is actually behind the ad blitz. It certainly creates the impression that many groups are coming together to back Neal, even if the support is coming from effectively the same source. “It could raise questions to the extent to which this is a coordinated effort between some of the different entities that are spending money under different names,” Fischer said.
While DMFI has established itself as a go-to repository for supporting establishment candidates in the 2020 cycle, AWF has only spun up recently. Before the Neal-Morse race, it had not spent anything this entire cycle, after sitting out the entire 2018 cycle as well, neither raising nor spending money. But it has now spent $996,125 on the race, capped by a $501,675 expenditure earlier this week. That’s more than double the $442,517 the super PAC had spent in the previous four years combined.
It’s not uncommon for larger super PACs to spawn pop-up PACs just for use in one specific race, but that’s not what’s happened here. Rather, AWF appears to be something of a shell super PAC, just sitting around dormant and waiting to be deployed. The last major race it was involved in came in Texas’s 29th Congressional District way back in 2016, when it put over $200,000 into negative messaging against progressive challenger Adrian Garcia, onetime sheriff of Harris County, who ended up losing handily to incumbent Gene Green.
AWF is doing the heavy lifting in the MA-01 race. DMFI has spent a token $104,000 on anti-Morse ads.
Only donors up through the August 12 pre-primary deadline have been disclosed, leaving out more than half of the funding AWF has made in this race. Donors listed include the American Society of Anesthesiologists PAC ($75,000) and the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers PAC ($10,000). Several local government and trade unions have contributed as well, including the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LiUNA) PAC, which gave $100,000. DMFI has largely been funded this cycle by a handful of wealthy individuals.
Morse has received his own super PAC support, from Fight Corporate Monopolies and Justice Democrats.
It certainly creates the impression that many groups are coming together to back Neal, even if the support is coming from effectively the same source.
It’s possible that one of these PACs is behind a push poll voters have been receiving in the district, which plays off an ugly smear of Morse’s sexual orientation concocted by local college Democrats. A robocall sent to voters asks if their support for Morse would change if they learned he had “sent sexually explicit emails to college-aged students.” There is no evidence that this has happened whatsoever; Morse, 31, has had consensual relationships with college students he connected with online. A leader with the UMass College Democrats peddled the story to multiple news organizations and plotted the smear for a year, and state party leaders assisted in the release of an open letter that broke the story wide open.
The LGBTQ Victory Fund has condemned the push poll calls, calling them “orchestrated political attacks meant to weaponize” Morse’s sexual orientation. The robocall does not indicate who funded the push poll, and caller ID only shows the name “Mister Poll.” Neal’s campaign has denied involvement with the poll.
A Case for Women, a class action law firm based in Texas, earlier ran Facebook ads seeking local gay men who received text messages from Morse, seemingly trolling for something to substantiate charges of predatory conduct.
A poll released on Thursday by Jewish Insider gave Neal a 49-40 lead in the race, with the rest not sure. An incumbent polling under 50 percent at this late stage in a campaign is usually not a great sign, but the lead is beyond the margin of error.
Neal on Thursday received an endorsement from Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker, a Republican, while earlier in the week the PAC for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Courage to Change, endorsed Morse. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, another Neal supporter, said on Thursday that if Neal was returned to Congress he would go after Donald Trump’s tax returns. He’s had every opportunity to do so before the election, but failed.
