This article cross-posted from The Nation
Sheldon Adelson
won't have Newt Gingrich to write campaign checks for anymore, so the
Las Vegas billionaire has found a new politician to lavish with money
love: Scott Walker.
Adelson, whose $20 million in Super PAC donations kept Gingrich's
sinking presidential campaign afloat through the long months preceding
the former House Speaker's decision to face reality and quit the
competition, is now one of the embattled Wisconsin governor's biggest donors.
Walker, who faces a recall election on June 5, is fighting for his
political life in a state where close to 1 million citizens signed the
petitions that forced the governor to face the voters. The
Wisconsinite's political star has become so tarnished that his only hope for prevailing is to overwhelm the opposition with massive spending.
And Walker has turned to Adelson and other out-of-state millionaires and billionaires,
as well as corporate special interests, to keep himself in the running.
Adelson's response? A $250,000 check to the Walker campaign, which was
allowed to raise unlimited funds during the period when the recall was
qualifying.
On Monday, Walker's campaign reported that the governor raised an unprecedented $13 million in the quarterly reporting period that ended in late April.
That's not just more money than any Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate
has ever before raised in a single quarter. That's more than any
Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate has ever before raised in an entire
campaign.
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Walker's total fundraising for the recall race -- $25 million -- equals the
amount of money that all the candidates combined spent in the 2010
Wisconsin gubernatorial race, which until now was the most expensive in
Wisconsin history.
Where's all that Walker money coming from?
Folks like Adelson. He's one of several dozen millionaires and
billionaires, most of them from outside Wisconsin, who have been the
definitional backers of Walker's campaign. In the last spending report
by the governor, a mere 33 donors accounted for roughly half
of all the money Walker had raised. This time, according to the advocacy
group One Wisconsin Now, 39 "mega donors" giving in excess of
$10,000 a piece accounted for $2,430,000 of Walker's haul.
And there aren't that many billionaires in Wisconsin.
To wit:
* Sixty-three percent of the money raised by Wisconsin's governor in
the last quarter came from other states. Of the $13 million reported, at
least $8,376,195 came from out of state. Another $418,746, delivered in
the form of unaccounted or unidentified transfers of money is likely to
have come from out of state.
* Seventy-four percent of all the donations Wisconsin's governor
received came from residents of other states, with Floridians providing
more than $1 million and Texans, Californians and New Yorkers providing
roughly similar amounts.
But these numbers only tell a part of the story.
Walker, who frequently complains about supposed spending by "big
labor" to defeat him (even though unions have yet to launch a major
television advertising campaign that is critical of the governor), is
also the beneficiary of announced "independent" campaigning by the
Republican Governor's Association (which just accepted a $1 million
check from billionaire David Koch and plans to spent $3 million to buy
pro-Walker advertising before the recall), Americans for Prosperity (a
Koch brothers-funded group that has already spent $1.5 million to assist
Walker) and the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce business lobby
(which is in for $2 million).
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John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written the Online Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.
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