A new super PAC placing seven-figure ad buys for Sen. Kelly Loeffler appears, at first glance, to be operating entirely independently of the Georgia Republican’s re-election effort. But a closer look at the players involved reveals some notable ties to a pro-Loeffler dark-money group with mysteriously deep pockets—and to Loeffler’s campaign itself.
The super PAC, Georgia United Victory, is chaired by Martha Zoller, a former aide to Gov. Brian Kemp, who appointed Loeffler to her Senate seat in December. Zoller is also a former congressional candidate who narrowly lost to Loeffler’s top Republican opponent, Rep. Doug Collins, in a 2012 House primary. In the less than two weeks since GUV was formed, the group has spent $1.85 million on digital and television ads attacking Collins, Loeffler’s most formidable Republican challenger in November’s 20-candidate “jungle” style special election.
Zoller’s involvement, to say nothing of the group’s acronym, has fueled speculation that Kemp and his formidable political apparatus are behind the super PAC. But a PAY DIRT investigation reveals ties to other forces with more direct involvement in Loeffler's election contest, including the political vendor to which Loeffler’s campaign has steered nearly three-quarters of all the money it’s spent since last year.
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GUV’s massive anti-Collins spending spree has coincided with Loeffler campaign moves that appear designed to assist supportive super PACs, with which the campaign is legally barred from coordinating. And while none of data points unearthed by PAY DIRT show that the campaign, the super PAC, or any of their vendors have run afoul of that prohibition, they do paint a picture of a tightly knit, well-oiled pro-Loeffler political machine that’s spending massive sums in a highly strategic fashion to ensure that Loeffler’s first actual election doesn’t end in defeat.
Zoller didn’t respond to questions about GUV and her role with the group. In addition that role, she is listed as a board member at the Georgia Life Alliance (GLA), a leading pro-life group in the state and one that’s played an intriguing role in Georgia’s 2020 Senate contests.
Records on file with the Internal Revenue Service show that GLA had less than $50,000 in annual income in both 2018 and 2019. Then in January 2020, just a few weeks after Loeffler assumed her Senate seat, GLA’s political arm announced a $3 million ad campaign supporting Loeffler and Sen. David Perdue (R-GA), who is also facing a competitive re-election fight. Voters won’t get a glimpse at GLA’s 2020 finances until about a year after the election, and GLA will never be required to disclose the identities of the donors who made its unprecedented election-year ad spending possible.
GLA also works with Jay Williams, a Republican consultant in Georgia, who’s listed on the group’s website as an adviser to its board of directors. Williams leads a Republican political consultancy called the Stoneridge Group, which is working with GUV to run its anti-Collins ads.
While Stoneridge itself doesn’t pop up in any of GUV’s Federal Election Commission filings, the super PAC has reported paying $250,000 to a firm called Quick Response Communications for “digital media.” Georgia records indicate that Quick Response is closely affiliated with Stoneridge. Quick Response was incorporated in the state in 2014 by Janie Stair, Stoneridge’s controller. When PAY DIRT called the number listed in disclosure information for GUV’s Facebook ad buys, we reached the voicemail of Jonathan Dickerson, Stoneridge’s vice president of digital engagement. Reached by email, Williams would only say that “Quick Response is a digital vendor for GUV.”
Ironically, Stoneridge previously worked with Collins’ House campaign, and in that capacity drew allegations of underhanded politicking from Collins opponents over a Georgia political news website hosted by Stoneridge at the time. The website, ZPolitics, was founded a few years earlier by Zoller, the GUV chairwoman and Collins’ 2012 primary opponent, though she wasn’t running the blog at the time. Security-certificate data for Zoller’s current personal website indicates continued ties to Stoneridge.
The only GUV officer beyond Zoller listed in public records for the group is its treasurer, Paul Kilgore, an Athens, Georgia election-law compliance specialist who serves as treasurer for hundreds of political groups at the federal and state levels. FEC records list Michael Goode, the director of operations at Kilgore’s firm, Professional Data Services, as the Loeffler campaign’s treasurer, but documents filed by Loeffler’s ad buying firm with the Federal Communications Commission say its treasurer is Kilgore.
Vendors such as Professional Data Services are permitted to work with both political campaigns and supportive super PACs as long as they establish firewalls between their work for the clients. Kilgore didn’t respond to questions about his dual roles with the Loeffler campaign and GUV.
Those roles just scratch the surface of vendor overlap between the campaign and the super PAC. But the other instances are shrouded by layers of corporate bureaucracy.
The vast majority of the money that GUV has spent since it was formed on Aug. 1 has gone to a TV advertising vendor called National Ad Placement. Filings with both the FEC and the FCC list the firm’s address as a post-office box in Dallas.
National Ad Placement is actually a trade name for a different vendor called Medium Buying, according to corporate records filed by the latter in Ohio in 2018. And Medium Buying happens to be the Loeffler campaign’s ad-placement vendor. The campaign paid the firm $8 million to place its ads from 2019 through June, according to FEC records. It’s by far the campaign’s largest vendor; 73 cents of every dollar the Loeffler team has spent this cycle has gone to Medium Buying.
Medium Buying was founded by a Republican operative named Nick Everhart, who told PAY DIRT that Medium and National Ad Placement “have a firewall policy in place whenever there's a race that both are working on,” such as Georgia’s U.S. Senate contest, to ensure their work stays on the right side of coordination prohibitions.
With such policies in place, the substantial vendor overlap between GUV and the Loeffler campaign might be less noteworthy were Loeffler not also employing a common tactic for circumventing the ban on super PAC coordination without running afoul of federal law. On Sunday, as the GUV ad campaign ramped up, the Loeffler campaign uploaded a new video to its YouTube page. The video is more than 11 minutes long, and features nothing but “b-roll” footage of Loeffler.
Such videos allow supportive super PACs to access footage created by the campaign and use it in their own ads without ever “coordinating” with the campaigns they support. And while GUV has gone purely negative so far—all of its ads to date simply attack Collins, and don’t even mention Loeffler—the timing suggests Loeffler’s team expects an ostensibly independent supporter to pick up the ball and run with it.
Loeffler’s campaign didn’t respond to inquiries about their various independent backers—and whether they had uploaded that footage with the expectation that one of them would use it.
