Vermont has a reputation for progressive government, but in two important areas, the state’s regulations are the antithesis of good government: Our campaign finance laws are among the weakest in the nation, and our state government ranks near the bottom in several recent studies of transparency. The goal of Common Cause of Vermont is to minimize the influence of money in elections and to make government more transparent.
Download the database atwww.commoncause.org/vt/2010contributions.
More cash was spent in the 2010 election than ever before, especially in the race for governor. The winner, Democrat Peter Shumlin, raised almost $1.5 million in contributions which was 12 percent more than Jim Douglas’ top year of 2008. Brian Dubie raised almost $1.8 million.
Both candidates also had the help of independent expenditures by PACs. The Democratic Governors Association and Green Mountain Future spent $1.1 million on Shumlin’s behalf, and the Republican Governors Association spent $756,000 on behalf of Dubie.
In total, the top two candidates spent $4.78 million, a 147 percent jump from 10 years ago. The expenditures by four other Democrats in the 2010 primary bring the total expenditures for the 2010 gubernatorial campaign to $6.1 million, more than four times the amount spent in 2008. Clearly, Vermont’s elections are becoming susceptible to the Big Money virus that infects Washington and casts a shadow over the integrity of elected officials.
Big Money is fueled by large donations, so it’s important to be able to easily find where they come from. Our investigation of Vermont’s campaign finance disclosure reports, however, were hampered because our laws don’t require adequate disclosure and because the pertinent web pages are inadequate.
The information on campaign financing that is available is mostly in the form of PDF documents which means they are not easily tabulated or searchable. Common Cause has spent nearly 1,500 hours since last summer creating searchable databases of the 2010 campaign contributions.
The state’s failure to require adequate disclosure and to make its records of campaign expenditures and contributions easily accessible on the web severely restricts the public’s right to know how campaigns are financed and how big donors influence public policy.
As a public service Common Cause of Vermont today is publishing the state’s first fully searchable database of campaign contributions for the 2010 election along with an analysis that breaks down each candidates contribution into five categories: Individuals, Businesses, PACs, Candidate & Family, and Party and Candidate Committees.
The project has two goals: to make the information available as a public service in a format that’s comprehensive and easy to use, and to have it serve as a model for how the state system can be improved. We’re posting the database on our website along with a Guide and User’s Manual, and you have the press release summarizing the findings.
Common Cause of Vermont (CCVT) today is publishing the state’s first fully searchable database of campaign contributions for the 2010 election along with an analysis that shows more than one-third of the Senate received between 40 and 80 percent of their contributions from Businesses and PACs, compared to the average (17.8 percent) for all members of that body.
Contributions from individuals in the 2010 election accounted for 47.3 percent of all donations, and the contributions from political parties, candidate committees and elected officials accounted for 42.1 percent. Businesses contributed 6.9 percent; PACs, Trade Associations and Nonprofits, 7.4 percent, and the Candidates & Family, 5.5 percent.
The project has two goals: to make the information available as a public service in a format that’s comprehensive and easy to use, and to have it serve as a model for how the state system can be improved.
CCVT sorted the contributions into these categories because the Senate Government Operations Committee has been debating a proposed ban on corporation donations over the past year. The committee has also been discussing some of the changes recommended in our full report, as has Secretary of State Jim Condos. Rep. Jason Lorber (D-Chittenden 3-3) has introduced two bills H. 741 which would create the kind of electronic database CCVT recommends and H. 740 which make other revisions to the state’s campaign finance law. CCVT is grateful for the interest of these officials in this issue.
These changes are urgently needed. Under the current system, candidates can file only physically-signed hard copies of their disclosure reports. These reports are scanned into PDF format and posted on the Secretary of State’s website. None of the information is put into a format that would allow for quick and easy searching and sorting.
Citizens who want to get a list of all the contributors to a candidate in a given election have to open seven different monthly reports each of which runs three or more pages. To get a complete list of contributions to all candidates for all 185 state offices means opening and paging through more than 1,000 documents each of which is at least three pages long.
The range of contributions from Businesses and PACs as a share of total contributions in the Senate races ranged from zero for Joe Benning (R) of Caledonia County and Peter Galbraith (D) of Windham Country to 80.1 percent for Richard Sears (D) of Bennington County. For a detailed breakdown by contribution category for each Senator, see pp. 6-7 in CCVT’s full report on the database, the ‘Guide and User’s Manual,’ which is also available on the website.
The most important contributions in the governor’s race were the $285,421 that Peter Shumlin (D) donated to his own campaign, along with the $35,618 donated by his relatives for a total of $321,039. These two donations comprise 21.5 percent of all donations to Shumlin’s campaign and dwarf the Candidate and Candidate’s Family donations to Republican Brian Dubie’s campaign of $4,250, which was 0.3 percent of his total.
Dubie received almost four times as much from Businesses as did Shumlin, $211,018 vs. $58,690, which represent 13.4 percent and 4 percent of the candidates’ total contributions respectively. Dubie also received more from PACs, Nonprofits and Trade Associations than did Shumlin, though by a much smaller margin $76,798 vs. $50,593 respectively. Various Party and Candidate Committees gave $306,439 to Dubie and $215,304 to Shumlin.
CCVT also analyzed for the overall top contributors. David Blittersdorf, founder of NRG and All Earth Renewables, was the largest single individual contributor, with contributions to candidates for various state offices totaling $19,213 In addition, NRG donated $4,000 to the Shumlin Campaign. Other top Individual contributors include Bruce Lisman of Shelburne, a retired finance executive and founder of Campaign for Vermont, $17,650, and Bill and Jane Stetson of Norwich for a combined total of $24,950. He is a filmmaker and board member of Vermont Public Radio and she is finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
The top Business contributors were AT&T, $16,900; Medco Health Solutions, a pharmaceutical management company, $15,650; and Kimball, Sherman & Ellis, a Montpelier lobbying firm, $15,600. (Steve Kimball, one of the principals of that firm, was named by Shumlin last year to be Commissioner of the Department of Banking, Insurance, Securities, and Health Care Administration (BISHCA) which regulates those industries.)
The top contributors among the PACs & Nonprofits were the Teamsters Union, $18,025; the Vermont Fund for Families, a gay and Lesbian rights advocacy group, $12,600, and the Vermont Troopers Association and the Vermont League of Conservation Voters, each with $9,250.
The top trade association contributors were the Vermont Fuel Dealers, $13,950 and the Vermont Realtors Association at $13,400, and the top Party Committee was the Jim Douglas for Governor Committee, which gave $11,000 to various Republican candidates. Altogether, the Top Contributors gave $570,685 to all candidates, which is 8.2 percent of all donations.
This first batch of databases includes the following files:
‘VT Master Contributions ‘ 2010 Election’ which contains all contributions for all statewide candidates; for the winning Senate candidates, and for the 34 House candidates who received more than $1,000 in contributions and later won leadership positions. This database lists more than 9,250 contributions and is comprised of all the data in the secondary files listed below:’VT Statewide Candidate Contributions ‘ 2010,’ which contains the contributions to both the winning and losing General Election candidates for Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Treasurer, Secretary of State and Auditor of Accounts.
‘VT State Senate Contributions ‘ 2010’
‘VT House Leadership Contributions ‘ 2010’
‘Shumlin for Governor Contributions - 2010’
‘Dubie for Governor Contributions - 2010’
‘VT Top Contributors ‘ 2010’
All of these databases were written in Excel 2007 and can be sorted using its ‘Data’>>’Sort’ function. The databases can be viewed and downloaded at www.commoncause.org/vt/2010contributions. There is a Master Contributions database and six secondary databases for different races and categories of contributors, plus a spreadsheet showing historical trends. The ‘Guide and User’s Manual’ contains additional analyses of the donations, along with recommendations for improving the disclosure of campaign contributions and expenditures.
In the coming months, CCVT will compile the contributions from the remaining house members and then create a new database for the election in November as those reports are file beginning in July.
Download the Guide and User's Manual
Common Cause ‘ Vermont, 52 State St., Montpelier, Vt.05602
802-262-6105, tel ~ 802-249-1442, mobile ~ [email protected]