Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) presidential campaign reported paying a whopping 160 employees in the first three months of 2019, according to a PAY DIRT review of Federal Election Commission records, giving her by far the biggest salaried staff of any Democratic presidential contender.
The next biggest presidential campaign staff belonged to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who reported paying 86 employees in the first quarter.
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The sheer number of paid employees is a testament to the size of the operation that Warren already has set up. But it’s also early in the race, and a big staff means big overhead. Warren reported spending more than $1.1 million paying her employees, and an additional $560,000 in payroll taxes. Combined, that’s nearly a third of all of the Warren campaign’s expenditures for the quarter. And with a burn rate of about 30 percent—higher than rivals Sanders, O’Rourke, Booker, Klobuchar, and Buttigieg—a top-heavy campaign could spell trouble for the Massachusetts senator.
On the other side of the equation is Tulsi Gabbard, who reported paying just one full-time employee in the first quarter of the year. As my colleague Sam Stein and I note in a piece today, classifying campaign staff as consultants and freelancers instead of full-time employees is a common way to avoid large overhead expenses such as payroll taxes and employee health-care benefits. But in a Democratic primary, it could also be a political liability.
Some other noteworthy findings: Beto O’Rourke got into the race late, but he doesn’t appear to have had much of a campaign apparatus in waiting. His first quarter FEC filing showed payroll payments to just 26 staffers. John Delaney, meanwhile, has been in the race longer than any other Democrat. And though no one expects the former Maryland rep to eke out a victory, he has a substantial 56 staffers on his payroll, to whom he paid $450,000 through the end of March.
We put together this visualization to show how the Democratic field—at least the candidates who were in the race for a chunk of time in the first quarter—spent on “salary,” “wages,” and “payroll” through the end of March. Those above the trendline have more staffers per dollar spent on payroll—or are paying each of their staffers less, depending on how you look at it—than the average for the field.
