A fundraising committee with ties to deep-pocketed national Democrats began taking sides in Democratic primaries this week, just as the main Senate campaign arm sought to tamp down allegations that it was playing favorites in critical contests.
2020 Senate Impact, a Washington-based joint fundraising committee, is backing two Senate candidates already endorsed by the national party establishment: Arizona’s Mark Kelly and Iowa’s Theresa Greenfield. But it’s also jumping into to two other races with nominating contests that are far from settled—and where the broader split between Democrats’ moderate and progressive factions are playing out.
A Federal Election Commission filing on Monday reveals that 2020 Senate Impact, which has brought in nearly $200,000 so far this year, will be disbursing some of those funds to the Senate campaigns of North Carolina state Senator Cal Cunningham and M.J. Hegar, an Air Force veteran running in Texas.
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Its backing of Cunningham came just a few weeks after the national party denied that it was taking sides against his more progressive opponent, state Senator Erica Smith. And in Texas, Hegar is facing a crowded field of primary opponents in which the national party has yet to officially take sides.
The addition of the four Democratic challengers to 2020 Senate Impact’s list of beneficiaries came after the committee initially told the FEC that it would back four incumbents, Michigan’s Gary Peters, Alabama’s Doug Jones, Minnesota’s Tina Smith, and New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen. It was not immediately clear why the committee abruptly changed course months into an election cycle.
2020 Senate Impact is just the latest in a string of similarly branded, cycle-specific joint fundraising committees going back to 2014 that support Democrats in key U.S. Senate races. Twenty-nine of those committees had the same treasurer, Judith Zamore, who runs a Washington-based FEC-compliance firm and serves as the chief financial officer for Sen. Cory Booker’s (D-NJ) presidential campaign.
In January 2018, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) headlined a fundraiser for 2018 Senate Impact, another of Zamore’s “Impact” committees.
The FEC documents also reveal some recent links between that network and Senate Majority PAC, a high-dollar super PAC run by allies of Schumer, whose leadership PAC happens to be called Impact.
On the same day in February 2018, both Senate Majority PAC and Senate 2018 Impact paid a few thousand dollars each to a company called Dakota Investment Corp. FEC records indicate the payments funded private or chartered jet travel out of New Jersey’s Teterboro airport. This year, Senate Majority and 2020 Senate Impact have once again made travel-related expenditures that appear to align.
Senate Majority PAC, for its part, has been known to surreptitiously back seemingly independent political groups in ways that obscure the involvement of national Democrats. But that tactic is generally brought to bear on behalf of candidates around whom the party has already coalesced.
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