Commentary: New analysis of campaign finance reports has revealed that since the 2014 elections that put Republicans in charge of the House, Republican Majority Leader Nate Gentry took over $160,000 from corporations and wealthy special interests.
ProgressNow NM's new analysis of campaign finance reports looked at over 12,000 individual contributions and segmented out the 2,304 corporate contributions reported by candidates and elected officials between the November 2014 election and the last reporting period in October 2015 (the most recent data available).
While Gentry accumulated over $160,000, the median amount of corporate donations to all other individual legislators during that same period was $4,650.
When looking at the averages, Gentry accumulated 20 times more corporate donations than the average of all other legislators.
Beginning in November 2014, just after Republicans won a majority in the state House, Nate Gentry began receiving a deluge of in-state and out-of-state campaign donations from finance companies, oil and gas corporations, Republican political action committees, pharmaceutical companies, lobbyist firms, real estate interests, and more.
For an elected legislator with no named opponent and in a year without an election, many of Gentry’s contributors maxed out their contributions through 2016 with some groups giving $5,000, $10,000 or more. Examples include:
- New Mexico Forward ($10,800)
- Republican Leadership PAC ($10,000)
- COIR Committee on Individual Responsibility ($5,400)
- Builder’s Trust of NM ($5,000)
- FEAPAC of NM ($5,000)
- NextEra Energy Resources ($5,000)
- Rock House LLC ($5,000)
- Occidental Oil and Gas ($4,000)
- AstraZeneca ($2,500)
- K12 Management ($2,000)
These revelations come on the heels of a recently released study by the Pew Research Center that found 65% of Americans feel that our economic system “unfairly favors powerful interests.”
“In a time where the majority of voters think too many of our politicians have handed over our democracy to corporate lobbyists, out-of-state corporations, and other special interests it’s highly concerning that the leader of New Mexico’s House is so indebted to corporate special interests,” said Alex Curtas of ProgressNow NM. “In a year with record income inequality running rampant, House Republicans have fast-tracked no less than a dozen crime bills and passed a budget that protects $70 million in increasing corporate tax breaks, but haven’t produced one jobs bill. They’ve sponsored bills to lower minimum wages, cut wages for construction workers by 30%, and killed a proposal to give working families a small tax break to help them make ends meet.”
Visit this link for an interactive spreadsheet containing the data, as well as a breakdown of the contributions by type.