This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

Liam Fitzpatrick’s was packed on a Tuesday in November, and all eyes in the suburban Orlando, Florida, pub were glued to the TVs behind the bar. Fitzpatrick’s usually had sports on, but this was Election Eve 2020, and Republican state Senate candidate Jason Brodeur watched nervously as the results trickled in. This was his election party. Brodeur’s campaign had spent millions of dollars running him for an open seat against the Democratic nominee, a labor attorney, and the race was neck and neck.

But his backers had a secret weapon. Just before the filing deadline, a substitute teacher named Jestine Iannotti had joined the race as an unaffiliated third-party candidate. A political unknown, she didn’t even campaign. The central Florida district was then carpeted with misleading mailers that appealed to liberal values and voters’ distaste for partisan politics—one included a stock photo that seemed to imply that Iannotti, who is white, is a Black woman. If she siphoned off votes from his Democratic rival, Brodeur stood a better chance.

Iannotti was a “ghost candidate,” one with no hope of winning who runs—or is run—specifically as a spoiler. Ghost candidates are legal in Florida—sort of. Any eligible person can run for public office, but the covert financing of ghost campaigns sometimes runs afoul of even that state’s famously lax election laws. State prosecutors would eventually conclude that Iannotti and another ghost candidate who ran in 2020—along with their political consultants—had broken quite a few. (Brodeur claimed ignorance of the scheme, and has faced no legal action as a result, though a local tax collector on trial for unrelated charges would later testify that Brodeur was well aware of it.)

Also at Fitzpatrick’s that night was then-47-year-old Frank Artiles, a burly, foul-mouthed ex-Marine and former Republican state senator. Artiles, who is Cuban American, had resigned his Senate post in disgrace in 2017 after using racial slurs in front of two Black colleagues during a drunken rant. He, too, was fixated on Brodeur’s returns, as well as the results of an even tighter state Senate race in south Miami-Dade.

The latter contest was a slugfest between one of Florida’s highest-profile Democratic lawmakers, José Javier Rodriguez, and Republican Ileana García, founder of Latinas for Trump. It, too, hinged on a ghost candidate: Alex Rodriguez, a down-on-his-luck salesman of used heavy equipment, whose shared surname with the incumbent was no coincidence. Like Iannotti, Rodriguez hadn’t campaigned. He, too, was boosted by a flood of misleading mailers. 

As the final tallies came in, the mood at Fitzpatrick’s turned electric. Brodeur ended up winning his seat by about 7,600 votes. (Iannotti drew nearly 6,000.) In south Miami-Dade, Garcia, the Republican, edged out incumbent José Rodriguez by fewer than 40 votes. Artiles was jubilant. “That was me!” a partygoer recalls him yelling. “That’s all me!”

At a criminal trial this week in Miami, the prosecution may ask the jury to interpret Artiles’ outburst as an admission of guilt. Four months after the election party, the Miami-Dade state attorney charged him and ghost candidate Rodriquez with multiple campaign finance–related felonies. Among other charges, Artiles stands accused of conspiracy, making excessive campaign contributions, and “false swearing” in connection with voting or elections. If found guilty on all counts, he faces up to five years in prison.

In Central Florida, prosecutors issued a multi-count indictment against Iannotti and the two operatives (Eric Foglesong and Ben Paris, chair of the Seminole County Republican Party) who’d arranged for her to run. (A ghost candidate Artiles had recruited for a third state Senate race—a spa owner whose wife regularly waxed Artiles’ back—was not charged.) In 2022, a jury found Paris guilty of interfering in an election by means of an illegal campaign donation—the state recommended 60 days in jail; the judge gave him a year of probation, community service, and a fine. Foglesong, charged with felony and misdemeanor election crimes, avoided possible jail time by pleading no contest to misdemeanor charges, and Iannotti pleaded no contest last month to a pair of first-degree misdemeanors. Artiles maintains his innocence.

And all of the above might have been just another colorful tale of shady politics in the Sunshine State were it not for a spat between political consultants.

Indeed, after the leaders of Matrix LLC, a high-powered political consulting firm whose CEO helped finance the ghost campaigns, started feuding, the story took on a new life, offering something rarer and more consequential: a glimpse, oddly enough, into the political meddling of one of America’s largest power companies.

The source of the leak was never clear, but as the consultants squabbled, thousands of pages of Matrix’s internal documents made it into the hands of Florida news outlets. The revelations therein, and reporting on discovery materials generated by the various prosecutions, would culminate in the abrupt January 2023 retirement of Florida Power & Light CEO Eric Silagy, triggering a single-day, $14 billion drop in the company’s market value.

FPL is a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, one of the nation’s largest utility conglomerates in terms of homes and businesses served. And although its parent is a major producer of renewable energy, FPL is among Florida’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitters. The leaked documents, in any case, showed that FPL was enmeshed in a covert campaign of media manipulation, surveillance, and what one federal securities lawsuit calls electoral “dirty tricks,” all in the name of maximizing profits.

Investigations by Floodlight and other Florida news outlets would reveal that the ghost candidates were bankrolled with some $730,000 in dark money, $100,000 of which was channeled through a prominent Republican operative into a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that Artiles controlled. (Artiles’ attorney, Frank Quintero, disputes that any of that money ever made it to ghost candidate Rodriguez: “The prosecutor can say whatever the fuck he wants, but the reality is different than what he wants it to be.”) The remaining $630,000 made its way through a daisy chain of opaque nonprofits partially overseen by the CEO of Matrix, which was then working for FPL.

From the utility’s perspective, expanding the state Senate’s Republican majority—by whatever means—would help fulfill its legislative priorities. Those priorities included escaping liability for damages related to power outages in the wake of Hurricane Irma; ousting J.R. Kelly, the state’s long-serving (unsympathetic) consumer utility watchdog; and winning approval from the Senate-confirmed Public Service Commission for Florida’s largest-ever hike in electricity rates. The defeat of Sen. Rodriguez had the added benefit of kneecapping one of the state’s most prominent backers of rooftop solar, which reduces carbon emissions and lowers utility bills—and against which FPL had waged a decade-long counterinsurgency campaign.

FPL, which declined to comment for this article, prevailed on all counts.

The company has steadfastly denied wrongdoing, although it does not dispute hiring Matrix. “They did good work,” then-CEO Silagy told me in June 2022. During the same interview, he admitted to authoring a January 2019 email about Sen. Rodríguez, wherein Silagy ordered his minions “to make his life a living hell”—a directive that was immediately relayed to Matrix.

The utility claims that two outside law firms, whose investigations FPL commissioned but has never made public, have cleared it of election-related liability or wrongdoing, despite reporting that suggests otherwise. The Orlando Sentinel, for example, reported that Silagy sometimes used an email pseudonym (Theodore Hayes) when communicating with Jeff Pitts, then CEO of Matrix. And a 2022 Federal Election Commission complaint accused five nonprofits linked to Pitts of “direct and serious violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act.”

The complaint, dismissed earlier this year after the partisan six-member commission deadlocked on a party-line vote, cites a memo Pitts sent to Silagy laying out how FPL could channel money covertly through a series of nonprofits and, ultimately, a super-PAC, to fund “‘political activities’ on both the state and federal level.” The complaint alleges that “the effect of this scheme would be to illegally hide the identities of the true source or sources of contributions.”  

“Unfortunately, partisan gridlock and dysfunction has become routine at the FEC, which has only opened four investigations this year,” says Stuart McPhail, senior litigation counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the nonprofit that filed the complaint. “That means many complaints, even those for which the FEC’s nonpartisan expert staff recommends an investigation, end in partisan gridlock. That’s exactly what happened with our complaint.”

The scenes to follow are based on thousands of pages of documents and more than 50 interviews with various players. In addition to setting the stage for Artiles’ long-delayed trial, they offer a window into how some utility monopolies have chosen to flex their political power, pushing legal boundaries for financial gain, and sometimes thwarting America’s transition to clean energy in the process.

On a Friday evening in late February 2017, 32 NASCAR race-truck drivers squinted under the Daytona International Speedway’s 2,000-watt lights. Their eyes were fixed on state Sen. Frank Artiles, who sported a suede jacket emblazoned with the NextEra logo. He waved a green flag to kick off the 250-mile race, sponsored by NextEra Energy Resources, another NextEra subsidiary, but just two laps in things went awry—a 17-vehicle pile-up that resulted in one of the trucks getting completely totaled.

Your high school English teacher would call this foreshadowing.

Artiles was then serving his first term in the Florida Senate and chairing its energy committee. That is to say, the elected official who controlled the fate of state bills related to energy and the environment was accepting the red-carpet treatment from a utility holding company that routinely had business before his committee.

Such potential conflicts of interest are not unusual in the utility realm. Investor-owned power companies specialize in charming and lobbying legislators and regulators. A captured regulator might approve a higher profit margin for a power company than an adversarial one would. A friendly legislator is more likely to pass favorable laws. Across the nation, utilities are the most active lobbyists on state environmental bills.

Our system “gives utilities incredible incentive to build out massive, sophisticated, elaborate, sometimes clandestine political influence machines.”

What makes the situation especially irksome is that utilities are not normal companies. The firms that provide gas and electricity and send monthly bills to homeowners and businesses are state-sanctioned monopolies. They don’t make money from selling power per se. Rather, like a waiter with guaranteed tips, their profit margins are pre-determined by regulators based on how much they invest in their infrastructure. The more plants and poles and substations a utility builds, the bigger its guaranteed return, which averages about 10 percent nationwide. (FPL’s have run as high as 11.8 percent.) Politicians and regulators, at least in theory, are supposed to act on behalf of consumers and prevent utilities from running up the tab.

The way the system is set up “gives utilities incredible incentive to build out massive, sophisticated, elaborate, sometimes clandestine political influence machines,” says David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a nonprofit utility watchdog. “No matter how you slice it,” he adds, “they are among the biggest spenders on political influence generally.”

The numbers are staggering. According to the Institute for Local Self Reliance, an energy think tank, investor-owned utilities have given more than $130 million to federal candidates over the past decade and have spent more than $294 million on state political races between 2014 and 2023.

FPL alone donated at least $42 million to Florida lawmakers between June 2013 and June 2023, according to a Floodlight analysis. And that’s just reported donations. Across the nation, from 2014 to 2020, power companies pumped at least $215 million more into politics via 501(c)(4) nonprofits that don’t have to reveal their donors—which is why these funds are referred to as “dark money.”

Utility influence operations have led to a generational resurgence of fraud and corruption in the sector. A recent Floodlight analysis of three decades of corporate prosecutions and federal lawsuits describes malfeasance that has cost electricity customers at least $6.6 billion over the past 10 years. The costs to the environment and the energy transition are also steep. Utilities in Ohio struck a corrupt bargain with prominent state lawmakers—some of whom were convicted and sentenced to prison—to prop up failing coal and nuclear plants. Utilities in Arizona were investigated by the FBI for using dark money to elect energy regulators who slashed rooftop solar incentives, though no charges have been filed.

Artiles’ Daytona junket didn’t break any laws, but the optics weren’t great. He’d flown in on a private plane that belonged to his campaign treasurer—an FPL lobbyist. The night of the NASCAR race, he took in $10,000 in contributions at a fundraiser in his honor, where he rubbed shoulders with Keanu Reeves. The next day, he visited Disney’s Epcot Center as the guest of John Holley, FPL’s top in-house lobbyist. “It was an honor to be there,” Artiles told the Miami Herald after the news got out. “I’m not going to lie to you. It was cool.”

After returning to Tallahassee, Artiles fast-tracked two bills coveted by FPL.

But like the truck totaled during that second lap at Daytona, the freshman senator’s tenure would be short-lived. About a month after the FPL junket, Artiles got into an argument with two Black fellow senators at a private club near the state Capitol, berating them and using the n-word. The Senate president made Artiles stand and apologize to his colleagues, after which Artiles walked straight out of the chamber and into a gaggle of reporters, shedding his conciliatory tone like a football player doffing sweaty pads. This prompted the legislative Black caucus to demand his expulsion. Artiles resigned two days later.

He was out of the Senate, but not the game. In October 2017, Artiles was invited to a lunch meeting with Ryan Tyson, then a leading Republican operative for Associated Industries of Florida, a powerful trade group to which FPL had donated millions. Tyson, a pollster, had done work on issues critical to FPL, and was executive director of Let’s Preserve the American Dream—a nonprofit that would play a key role in the ghost candidate scandal. Alex Alvarado, Tyson’s protégé, set up the lunch, which Tyson says he does not recall attending. Starting that same month, and continuing into 2021, Artiles would receive $5,000 monthly payments from Tyson for “research services” related to Hispanic voters.

After the 2020 election, Tyson and his group came under the scrutiny of the prosecutors. “We waived all privileges and co-operated with the government in its investigation,” he told me recently. “They couldn’t explain to us what they were looking for, but we were nonetheless cooperative.” (Tyson was never charged with wrongdoing.) “This is crazy that this is how law-abiding tax paying cooperative citizens are treated,” he said.

Chuck’s, a fish house in suburban Birmingham, Alabama, was bustling on the evening of October 26, 2021, when a former Pat Buchanan staffer named K.B. Forbes arrived for what he thought was dinner with Jeff Pitts, who until recently had been CEO of Matrix.

A few months earlier, Joe Perkins, Matrix’s founder, had sued Pitts, his longtime employee and erstwhile protégé. The suit, which had FPL and two of its executives as “fictitious” (unnamed) co-defendants, basically accused Pitts of running his own firm within the firm, stealing Matrix’s clients and cash, operating a clandestine network of dark money groups, and working for FPL without Perkins’s knowledge. (Pitts, in legal filings, denied all of these claims.)

At first, their split had seemed like an amicable, if unexpected, business divorce. “Joe Perkins flew Jeff Pitts down on his plane to meet with me personally to let me know that they had come to an agreement that they were going to part ways, and it was okay,” Silagy said during our 2022 interview. “And then apparently, somewhere along the way, Jeff and Joe got sideways.”

This much was clear: For a decade, Matrix had been the servant of two masters, working both for Southern Co., the nation’s second-largest utility holding company, and NextEra Energy. But as the partners’ acrimony grew, so did the friction between the energy giants. Forbes, who publishes a blog critical of Alabama Power, a Southern Co. subsidiary, told me he had gone to Chuck’s in the hope of obtaining damaging information about Alabama Power’s CEO, Mark Crosswhite. But the vibe was off, and the conversation awkward.

Pitts “was a nervous wreck,” Forbes recalled. “That’s why, on my blog, I call him Jittery Jeff.”

The lawsuit came at a difficult time for Pitts. His new firm, Canopy Partners, less than a year old, was already drawing law enforcement interest. The Miami-Dade Public Corruption Task Force had obtained sworn testimony from Abigail MacIver, one of Pitts’ co-founders, in exchange for limited immunity from prosecution in the ghost candidate scandal. MacIver laid out how she, Pitts, and a contractor had channeled money from a nonprofit operated by Tyson into political committees controlled by Alvarado, Tyson’s associate, by way of a tax-exempt group Pitts controlled. Those committees paid for the ghost candidate mailers.

Reporting from the Sentinel also tied Pitts’ dark-money network to an FPL-funded campaign to defeat a ballot initiative that would have introduced competition into state energy markets and broken FPL’s monopoly. Tyson worked as a pollster on the campaign to counter the initiative. (Neither Pitts nor any Canopy Partners associates have been charged with crimes.)

Pitts is a dapper guy in his early 50s who brings to mind Fred Astaire. He was one of the first employees at Matrix in 1995 and became the director of its Birmingham office in 2009. He enjoys the good life, according to former associates: steak dinners, private flights, expensive wine. But by the time he met with Forbes, his life had grown complicated. “He could not look me in the eye,” Forbes told me, and Pitts wouldn’t stop rubbing the back of his head with his left hand during their dinner: “He was twirling his hair in circles.”

“These are types of allegations and scandals that shatter the belief that this publicly regulated utility is a safe, secure, and non-volatile investment.”

Matrix began consulting for NextEra, FPL’s parent, in the early 2010s. Pitts took extraordinary care to conceal his—and FPL’s—involvement in Florida elections. He obscured the money trail by creating multiple layers of subcontractors, shell companies, and 501(c)(4) nonprofits. In one case, he listed the brother of a Matrix subcontractor as the head of several nonprofits in his network, which he registered in faraway states. He preferred in-person conversations to texts or phone calls and hired expensive tax attorneys to advise him on his moves.

FPL was kept apprised of the work. Flight records show that the Matrix company jet made frequent visits to Palm Beach, where the utility is headquartered, and the leaked documents contain lively text and email correspondences between Pitts and its executives. FPL’s public affairs VPs were forwarded drafts of political ads slated to run against candidates they hoped to defeat. The Matrix document trove also included emails between Pitts and Silagy wherein Pitts lists names of dark money nonprofits and political committees to which Silagy could donate. There was also a Matrix invoice seeking reimbursement for incorporating a nonprofit that helped fund the ghost candidate campaigns.

A generation ago, power companies were forced to disclose the names of their consultants and attorneys, but the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees the industry, did away with the rule in 2002. Jon Wellinghoff, FERC’s chairman from 2009 to 2013, told me he regrets not reinstating it. “We didn’t reverse that when I was chairman,” he said, “And we should have. All that should be disclosed. All that should be open to the public and available—information right down to the $100 contribution.”

Pitts didn’t end up staying for dinner at Chuck’s. He got takeout instead, Forbes says, and never forked over the dirt on Alabama Power’s CEO. Neither did Pitts’ attorney, with whom Forbes kept corresponding until he grew too frustrated: “I was livid. I was like, ‘This is a waste of my time.’”

It was opening day of the 2023 session of the Florida Legislature, and the capitol was abuzz. House Speaker Paul Renner presided over his chamber’s opening ceremonies, introducing a dozen former members in attendance. Among them was Frank Artiles, who, despite his legal troubles, had maintained close ties with some of Florida’s Republican power brokers. He would register as a lobbyist that session—for a construction company that paints traffic lanes.

Twenty-nine months had passed since the Fitzpatrick’s election party, and two years since Artiles’ arrest and indictment. Pitts and Perkins had by this time settled their lawsuit, and Silagy had recently taken his leave from FPL.

The utility’s veil of secrecy had been pierced—at least temporarily. Weeks after the meeting between Pitts and Forbes, the first batch of Matrix records arrived at the offices of the Sentinel in an envelope with no return address. The intel consisted of a heavily redacted copy of a nearly 200-page report Perkins had sent to NextEra’s board of directors in November 2021. It detailed Pitts’ allegedly secret work for FPL, efforts ranging from municipal to congressional campaigns, funded by millions in utility cash.

In 2018 alone, the report revealed, Pitts had participated in campaigns against a South Miami mayor who supported rooftop solar, ran ghost candidates against both a Miami-Dade commissioner critical of an FPL nuclear plant and a progressive state Senate candidate in Gainesville, and moved millions of dollars to help defeat Democratic gubernatorial nominee Andrew Gillum, who lost to Ron DeSantis that year by a razor-thin 0.4 percent margin.

Pitts’ work, the report showed, went beyond elections and into acquisitions. In 2019, Pitts had aided in FPL’s failed attempt to acquire the Jacksonville Electric Authority, a city-owned utility whose territory it coveted. His contributions included hiring a private detective to follow a reporter who’d written critically of the proposed sale, running a front group that championed the sale, and enlisting a contractor to offer Garrett Dennis—a Jacksonville councilman seen as unlikely to support the sale—a $250,000-a-year job with the same dark money group, Grow United, that distributed the ghost candidate funds to the other nonprofits. Accepting the position would mean giving up his council seat. (Dennis didn’t bite.)

The leaked records also detailed how Matrix and Pitts had paid at least $900,000 to six pay-to-play news outlets in Florida and Alabama between 2013 and 2020. The outlets, with more than 1.3 million combined monthly viewers, attacked critics and enemies of Southern Co., FPL, and other Matrix clients, though all of them deny that the payments influenced their coverage.

“These are types of allegations and scandals that shatter the belief that this publicly regulated utility is a safe, secure, and non-volatile investment,” the attorneys in a federal securities suit filed against NextEra in December 2023 wrote of the revelations. It was one of at least two class-action suits filed against the company since Silagy’s resignation alleging political impropriety.

The proceedings in the shareholder suit have been telling, though perhaps not in the way the plaintiffs would prefer. At a hearing this past May, federal district court Judge Aileen Cannon asked their attorneys to clarify the case against NextEra. “Just so I understand,” she said, “has there been any finding of liability…We talk about, sort of, allegations of wrongdoing and criminality. Can you just pinpoint exactly what would be the crime and has there been any finding of such a crime?”

“Artiles is the victim in this case!” his lawyer told me. “He’s the one that quote got fucked on fake scams, on fraudulent business deals that didn’t exist.”

Plaintiffs attorney Jeffrey Block responded in the negative.      

“So, I guess, what exactly is wrong that was allegedly done?” Cannon said.      

Her question, albeit unwittingly, broaches a bigger issue, with ramifications far beyond Florida. The IRS and the FEC have generally failed to enforce nonprofit and election laws effectively. At the state level, regulatory boards are easily influenced—and their penalties for breaking the rules, to the extent they are imposed, are often too small to discourage bad behavior.

It is a system that practically invites monopoly power companies and their consultants to exploit every loophole to maximize political leverage and profit—and even, in some cases, to spend money collected from power consumers to lobby for actions that run counter to those ratepayer’s interests. “It’s ludicrous on its face that state-granted monopolies that provide an essential service are allowed to lobby at all. It ought to be unthinkable,” energy expert David Roberts noted during a 2023 discussion of utility corruption on his podcast, Volts.

The notion of a monopoly utility launching a secret effort to field bogus candidates and trick voters would seem all the more unthinkable, and the fact that a federal judge feels compelled to ask what the company is actually alleged to have done wrong is telling.

Back in January, public corruption prosecutor Tim VanderGiesen told Cannon he intended to follow the money, although it’s not clear how far up the chain he intends to go. “It’s the money, the payment, that makes this illegal, judge,” he asserted then. The state’s position is, look at all the trouble that they were going through to run…ghost candidates.”

As for Artiles’ alleged ghost candidate activities, “It’s my opinion that this case is politically motivated,” defense attorney Quintero told a Miami-Dade Circuit Court judge during a hearing earlier this year. “It’s not just one party that does it. It’s both parties and it’s perfectly legal. Period. End of story.”

The state’s star witness this week is none other than ghost candidate Alex Rodriguez, who agreed to plead guilty to some charges and testify against Artiles to avoid a possible prison sentence. The defendant’s legal team is attempting to impugn Rodriguez’s character and portray the money that changed hands between the two men as a con. “Artiles is the victim in this case!” Quintero told me. “He’s the one that quote got fucked on fake scams, on fraudulent business deals that didn’t exist, on loans, on a car Rodriguez sold to him that didn’t exist.”

The jury is expected to decide on the guilt or innocence of Frank Artiles by the end of September. Yet after all the courtroom dramas, feuding consultants, and exposés about the financial subterfuge that enabled the ghost candidates, it remains unclear when, and whether, and to what extent, anyone will ever hold NextEra accountable.

“The system is on trial, because the system enables this kind of conduct,” Dave Aronberg, the Palm Beach County state attorney, told me of Artiles’ trial. “In a fully functioning democracy, this kind of scandal would result in real changes to campaign finance laws. But Florida doesn’t have a fully functioning democracy.”

This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

Liam Fitzpatrick’s was packed on a Tuesday in November, and all eyes in the suburban Orlando, Florida, pub were glued to the TVs behind the bar. Fitzpatrick’s usually had sports on, but this was Election Eve 2020, and Republican state Senate candidate Jason Brodeur watched nervously as the results trickled in. This was his election party. Brodeur’s campaign had spent millions of dollars running him for an open seat against the Democratic nominee, a labor attorney, and the race was neck and neck.

But his backers had a secret weapon. Just before the filing deadline, a substitute teacher named Jestine Iannotti had joined the race as an unaffiliated third-party candidate. A political unknown, she didn’t even campaign. The central Florida district was then carpeted with misleading mailers that appealed to liberal values and voters’ distaste for partisan politics—one included a stock photo that seemed to imply that Iannotti, who is white, is a Black woman. If she siphoned off votes from his Democratic rival, Brodeur stood a better chance.

Iannotti was a “ghost candidate,” one with no hope of winning who runs—or is run—specifically as a spoiler. Ghost candidates are legal in Florida—sort of. Any eligible person can run for public office, but the covert financing of ghost campaigns sometimes runs afoul of even that state’s famously lax election laws. State prosecutors would eventually conclude that Iannotti and another ghost candidate who ran in 2020—along with their political consultants—had broken quite a few. (Brodeur claimed ignorance of the scheme, and has faced no legal action as a result, though a local tax collector on trial for unrelated charges would later testify that Brodeur was well aware of it.)

Also at Fitzpatrick’s that night was then-47-year-old Frank Artiles, a burly, foul-mouthed ex-Marine and former Republican state senator. Artiles, who is Cuban American, had resigned his Senate post in disgrace in 2017 after using racial slurs in front of two Black colleagues during a drunken rant. He, too, was fixated on Brodeur’s returns, as well as the results of an even tighter state Senate race in south Miami-Dade.

The latter contest was a slugfest between one of Florida’s highest-profile Democratic lawmakers, José Javier Rodriguez, and Republican Ileana García, founder of Latinas for Trump. It, too, hinged on a ghost candidate: Alex Rodriguez, a down-on-his-luck salesman of used heavy equipment, whose shared surname with the incumbent was no coincidence. Like Iannotti, Rodriguez hadn’t campaigned. He, too, was boosted by a flood of misleading mailers. 

As the final tallies came in, the mood at Fitzpatrick’s turned electric. Brodeur ended up winning his seat by about 7,600 votes. (Iannotti drew nearly 6,000.) In south Miami-Dade, Garcia, the Republican, edged out incumbent José Rodriguez by fewer than 40 votes. Artiles was jubilant. “That was me!” a partygoer recalls him yelling. “That’s all me!”

At a criminal trial this week in Miami, the prosecution may ask the jury to interpret Artiles’ outburst as an admission of guilt. Four months after the election party, the Miami-Dade state attorney charged him and ghost candidate Rodriquez with multiple campaign finance–related felonies. Among other charges, Artiles stands accused of conspiracy, making excessive campaign contributions, and “false swearing” in connection with voting or elections. If found guilty on all counts, he faces up to five years in prison.

In Central Florida, prosecutors issued a multi-count indictment against Iannotti and the two operatives (Eric Foglesong and Ben Paris, chair of the Seminole County Republican Party) who’d arranged for her to run. (A ghost candidate Artiles had recruited for a third state Senate race—a spa owner whose wife regularly waxed Artiles’ back—was not charged.) In 2022, a jury found Paris guilty of interfering in an election by means of an illegal campaign donation—the state recommended 60 days in jail; the judge gave him a year of probation, community service, and a fine. Foglesong, charged with felony and misdemeanor election crimes, avoided possible jail time by pleading no contest to misdemeanor charges, and Iannotti pleaded no contest last month to a pair of first-degree misdemeanors. Artiles maintains his innocence.

And all of the above might have been just another colorful tale of shady politics in the Sunshine State were it not for a spat between political consultants.

Indeed, after the leaders of Matrix LLC, a high-powered political consulting firm whose CEO helped finance the ghost campaigns, started feuding, the story took on a new life, offering something rarer and more consequential: a glimpse, oddly enough, into the political meddling of one of America’s largest power companies.

The source of the leak was never clear, but as the consultants squabbled, thousands of pages of Matrix’s internal documents made it into the hands of Florida news outlets. The revelations therein, and reporting on discovery materials generated by the various prosecutions, would culminate in the abrupt January 2023 retirement of Florida Power & Light CEO Eric Silagy, triggering a single-day, $14 billion drop in the company’s market value.

FPL is a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, one of the nation’s largest utility conglomerates in terms of homes and businesses served. And although its parent is a major producer of renewable energy, FPL is among Florida’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitters. The leaked documents, in any case, showed that FPL was enmeshed in a covert campaign of media manipulation, surveillance, and what one federal securities lawsuit calls electoral “dirty tricks,” all in the name of maximizing profits.

Investigations by Floodlight and other Florida news outlets would reveal that the ghost candidates were bankrolled with some $730,000 in dark money, $100,000 of which was channeled through a prominent Republican operative into a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that Artiles controlled. (Artiles’ attorney, Frank Quintero, disputes that any of that money ever made it to ghost candidate Rodriguez: “The prosecutor can say whatever the fuck he wants, but the reality is different than what he wants it to be.”) The remaining $630,000 made its way through a daisy chain of opaque nonprofits partially overseen by the CEO of Matrix, which was then working for FPL.

From the utility’s perspective, expanding the state Senate’s Republican majority—by whatever means—would help fulfill its legislative priorities. Those priorities included escaping liability for damages related to power outages in the wake of Hurricane Irma; ousting J.R. Kelly, the state’s long-serving (unsympathetic) consumer utility watchdog; and winning approval from the Senate-confirmed Public Service Commission for Florida’s largest-ever hike in electricity rates. The defeat of Sen. Rodriguez had the added benefit of kneecapping one of the state’s most prominent backers of rooftop solar, which reduces carbon emissions and lowers utility bills—and against which FPL had waged a decade-long counterinsurgency campaign.

FPL, which declined to comment for this article, prevailed on all counts.

The company has steadfastly denied wrongdoing, although it does not dispute hiring Matrix. “They did good work,” then-CEO Silagy told me in June 2022. During the same interview, he admitted to authoring a January 2019 email about Sen. Rodríguez, wherein Silagy ordered his minions “to make his life a living hell”—a directive that was immediately relayed to Matrix.

The utility claims that two outside law firms, whose investigations FPL commissioned but has never made public, have cleared it of election-related liability or wrongdoing, despite reporting that suggests otherwise. The Orlando Sentinel, for example, reported that Silagy sometimes used an email pseudonym (Theodore Hayes) when communicating with Jeff Pitts, then CEO of Matrix. And a 2022 Federal Election Commission complaint accused five nonprofits linked to Pitts of “direct and serious violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act.”

The complaint, dismissed earlier this year after the partisan six-member commission deadlocked on a party-line vote, cites a memo Pitts sent to Silagy laying out how FPL could channel money covertly through a series of nonprofits and, ultimately, a super-PAC, to fund “‘political activities’ on both the state and federal level.” The complaint alleges that “the effect of this scheme would be to illegally hide the identities of the true source or sources of contributions.”  

“Unfortunately, partisan gridlock and dysfunction has become routine at the FEC, which has only opened four investigations this year,” says Stuart McPhail, senior litigation counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the nonprofit that filed the complaint. “That means many complaints, even those for which the FEC’s nonpartisan expert staff recommends an investigation, end in partisan gridlock. That’s exactly what happened with our complaint.”

The scenes to follow are based on thousands of pages of documents and more than 50 interviews with various players. In addition to setting the stage for Artiles’ long-delayed trial, they offer a window into how some utility monopolies have chosen to flex their political power, pushing legal boundaries for financial gain, and sometimes thwarting America’s transition to clean energy in the process.

On a Friday evening in late February 2017, 32 NASCAR race-truck drivers squinted under the Daytona International Speedway’s 2,000-watt lights. Their eyes were fixed on state Sen. Frank Artiles, who sported a suede jacket emblazoned with the NextEra logo. He waved a green flag to kick off the 250-mile race, sponsored by NextEra Energy Resources, another NextEra subsidiary, but just two laps in things went awry—a 17-vehicle pile-up that resulted in one of the trucks getting completely totaled.

Your high school English teacher would call this foreshadowing.

Artiles was then serving his first term in the Florida Senate and chairing its energy committee. That is to say, the elected official who controlled the fate of state bills related to energy and the environment was accepting the red-carpet treatment from a utility holding company that routinely had business before his committee.

Such potential conflicts of interest are not unusual in the utility realm. Investor-owned power companies specialize in charming and lobbying legislators and regulators. A captured regulator might approve a higher profit margin for a power company than an adversarial one would. A friendly legislator is more likely to pass favorable laws. Across the nation, utilities are the most active lobbyists on state environmental bills.

Our system “gives utilities incredible incentive to build out massive, sophisticated, elaborate, sometimes clandestine political influence machines.”

What makes the situation especially irksome is that utilities are not normal companies. The firms that provide gas and electricity and send monthly bills to homeowners and businesses are state-sanctioned monopolies. They don’t make money from selling power per se. Rather, like a waiter with guaranteed tips, their profit margins are pre-determined by regulators based on how much they invest in their infrastructure. The more plants and poles and substations a utility builds, the bigger its guaranteed return, which averages about 10 percent nationwide. (FPL’s have run as high as 11.8 percent.) Politicians and regulators, at least in theory, are supposed to act on behalf of consumers and prevent utilities from running up the tab.

The way the system is set up “gives utilities incredible incentive to build out massive, sophisticated, elaborate, sometimes clandestine political influence machines,” says David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a nonprofit utility watchdog. “No matter how you slice it,” he adds, “they are among the biggest spenders on political influence generally.”

The numbers are staggering. According to the Institute for Local Self Reliance, an energy think tank, investor-owned utilities have given more than $130 million to federal candidates over the past decade and have spent more than $294 million on state political races between 2014 and 2023.

FPL alone donated at least $42 million to Florida lawmakers between June 2013 and June 2023, according to a Floodlight analysis. And that’s just reported donations. Across the nation, from 2014 to 2020, power companies pumped at least $215 million more into politics via 501(c)(4) nonprofits that don’t have to reveal their donors—which is why these funds are referred to as “dark money.”

Utility influence operations have led to a generational resurgence of fraud and corruption in the sector. A recent Floodlight analysis of three decades of corporate prosecutions and federal lawsuits describes malfeasance that has cost electricity customers at least $6.6 billion over the past 10 years. The costs to the environment and the energy transition are also steep. Utilities in Ohio struck a corrupt bargain with prominent state lawmakers—some of whom were convicted and sentenced to prison—to prop up failing coal and nuclear plants. Utilities in Arizona were investigated by the FBI for using dark money to elect energy regulators who slashed rooftop solar incentives, though no charges have been filed.

Artiles’ Daytona junket didn’t break any laws, but the optics weren’t great. He’d flown in on a private plane that belonged to his campaign treasurer—an FPL lobbyist. The night of the NASCAR race, he took in $10,000 in contributions at a fundraiser in his honor, where he rubbed shoulders with Keanu Reeves. The next day, he visited Disney’s Epcot Center as the guest of John Holley, FPL’s top in-house lobbyist. “It was an honor to be there,” Artiles told the Miami Herald after the news got out. “I’m not going to lie to you. It was cool.”

After returning to Tallahassee, Artiles fast-tracked two bills coveted by FPL.

But like the truck totaled during that second lap at Daytona, the freshman senator’s tenure would be short-lived. About a month after the FPL junket, Artiles got into an argument with two Black fellow senators at a private club near the state Capitol, berating them and using the n-word. The Senate president made Artiles stand and apologize to his colleagues, after which Artiles walked straight out of the chamber and into a gaggle of reporters, shedding his conciliatory tone like a football player doffing sweaty pads. This prompted the legislative Black caucus to demand his expulsion. Artiles resigned two days later.

He was out of the Senate, but not the game. In October 2017, Artiles was invited to a lunch meeting with Ryan Tyson, then a leading Republican operative for Associated Industries of Florida, a powerful trade group to which FPL had donated millions. Tyson, a pollster, had done work on issues critical to FPL, and was executive director of Let’s Preserve the American Dream—a nonprofit that would play a key role in the ghost candidate scandal. Alex Alvarado, Tyson’s protégé, set up the lunch, which Tyson says he does not recall attending. Starting that same month, and continuing into 2021, Artiles would receive $5,000 monthly payments from Tyson for “research services” related to Hispanic voters.

After the 2020 election, Tyson and his group came under the scrutiny of the prosecutors. “We waived all privileges and co-operated with the government in its investigation,” he told me recently. “They couldn’t explain to us what they were looking for, but we were nonetheless cooperative.” (Tyson was never charged with wrongdoing.) “This is crazy that this is how law-abiding tax paying cooperative citizens are treated,” he said.

Chuck’s, a fish house in suburban Birmingham, Alabama, was bustling on the evening of October 26, 2021, when a former Pat Buchanan staffer named K.B. Forbes arrived for what he thought was dinner with Jeff Pitts, who until recently had been CEO of Matrix.

A few months earlier, Joe Perkins, Matrix’s founder, had sued Pitts, his longtime employee and erstwhile protégé. The suit, which had FPL and two of its executives as “fictitious” (unnamed) co-defendants, basically accused Pitts of running his own firm within the firm, stealing Matrix’s clients and cash, operating a clandestine network of dark money groups, and working for FPL without Perkins’s knowledge. (Pitts, in legal filings, denied all of these claims.)

At first, their split had seemed like an amicable, if unexpected, business divorce. “Joe Perkins flew Jeff Pitts down on his plane to meet with me personally to let me know that they had come to an agreement that they were going to part ways, and it was okay,” Silagy said during our 2022 interview. “And then apparently, somewhere along the way, Jeff and Joe got sideways.”

This much was clear: For a decade, Matrix had been the servant of two masters, working both for Southern Co., the nation’s second-largest utility holding company, and NextEra Energy. But as the partners’ acrimony grew, so did the friction between the energy giants. Forbes, who publishes a blog critical of Alabama Power, a Southern Co. subsidiary, told me he had gone to Chuck’s in the hope of obtaining damaging information about Alabama Power’s CEO, Mark Crosswhite. But the vibe was off, and the conversation awkward.

Pitts “was a nervous wreck,” Forbes recalled. “That’s why, on my blog, I call him Jittery Jeff.”

The lawsuit came at a difficult time for Pitts. His new firm, Canopy Partners, less than a year old, was already drawing law enforcement interest. The Miami-Dade Public Corruption Task Force had obtained sworn testimony from Abigail MacIver, one of Pitts’ co-founders, in exchange for limited immunity from prosecution in the ghost candidate scandal. MacIver laid out how she, Pitts, and a contractor had channeled money from a nonprofit operated by Tyson into political committees controlled by Alvarado, Tyson’s associate, by way of a tax-exempt group Pitts controlled. Those committees paid for the ghost candidate mailers.

Reporting from the Sentinel also tied Pitts’ dark-money network to an FPL-funded campaign to defeat a ballot initiative that would have introduced competition into state energy markets and broken FPL’s monopoly. Tyson worked as a pollster on the campaign to counter the initiative. (Neither Pitts nor any Canopy Partners associates have been charged with crimes.)

Pitts is a dapper guy in his early 50s who brings to mind Fred Astaire. He was one of the first employees at Matrix in 1995 and became the director of its Birmingham office in 2009. He enjoys the good life, according to former associates: steak dinners, private flights, expensive wine. But by the time he met with Forbes, his life had grown complicated. “He could not look me in the eye,” Forbes told me, and Pitts wouldn’t stop rubbing the back of his head with his left hand during their dinner: “He was twirling his hair in circles.”

“These are types of allegations and scandals that shatter the belief that this publicly regulated utility is a safe, secure, and non-volatile investment.”

Matrix began consulting for NextEra, FPL’s parent, in the early 2010s. Pitts took extraordinary care to conceal his—and FPL’s—involvement in Florida elections. He obscured the money trail by creating multiple layers of subcontractors, shell companies, and 501(c)(4) nonprofits. In one case, he listed the brother of a Matrix subcontractor as the head of several nonprofits in his network, which he registered in faraway states. He preferred in-person conversations to texts or phone calls and hired expensive tax attorneys to advise him on his moves.

FPL was kept apprised of the work. Flight records show that the Matrix company jet made frequent visits to Palm Beach, where the utility is headquartered, and the leaked documents contain lively text and email correspondences between Pitts and its executives. FPL’s public affairs VPs were forwarded drafts of political ads slated to run against candidates they hoped to defeat. The Matrix document trove also included emails between Pitts and Silagy wherein Pitts lists names of dark money nonprofits and political committees to which Silagy could donate. There was also a Matrix invoice seeking reimbursement for incorporating a nonprofit that helped fund the ghost candidate campaigns.

A generation ago, power companies were forced to disclose the names of their consultants and attorneys, but the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees the industry, did away with the rule in 2002. Jon Wellinghoff, FERC’s chairman from 2009 to 2013, told me he regrets not reinstating it. “We didn’t reverse that when I was chairman,” he said, “And we should have. All that should be disclosed. All that should be open to the public and available—information right down to the $100 contribution.”

Pitts didn’t end up staying for dinner at Chuck’s. He got takeout instead, Forbes says, and never forked over the dirt on Alabama Power’s CEO. Neither did Pitts’ attorney, with whom Forbes kept corresponding until he grew too frustrated: “I was livid. I was like, ‘This is a waste of my time.’”

It was opening day of the 2023 session of the Florida Legislature, and the capitol was abuzz. House Speaker Paul Renner presided over his chamber’s opening ceremonies, introducing a dozen former members in attendance. Among them was Frank Artiles, who, despite his legal troubles, had maintained close ties with some of Florida’s Republican power brokers. He would register as a lobbyist that session—for a construction company that paints traffic lanes.

Twenty-nine months had passed since the Fitzpatrick’s election party, and two years since Artiles’ arrest and indictment. Pitts and Perkins had by this time settled their lawsuit, and Silagy had recently taken his leave from FPL.

The utility’s veil of secrecy had been pierced—at least temporarily. Weeks after the meeting between Pitts and Forbes, the first batch of Matrix records arrived at the offices of the Sentinel in an envelope with no return address. The intel consisted of a heavily redacted copy of a nearly 200-page report Perkins had sent to NextEra’s board of directors in November 2021. It detailed Pitts’ allegedly secret work for FPL, efforts ranging from municipal to congressional campaigns, funded by millions in utility cash.

In 2018 alone, the report revealed, Pitts had participated in campaigns against a South Miami mayor who supported rooftop solar, ran ghost candidates against both a Miami-Dade commissioner critical of an FPL nuclear plant and a progressive state Senate candidate in Gainesville, and moved millions of dollars to help defeat Democratic gubernatorial nominee Andrew Gillum, who lost to Ron DeSantis that year by a razor-thin 0.4 percent margin.

Pitts’ work, the report showed, went beyond elections and into acquisitions. In 2019, Pitts had aided in FPL’s failed attempt to acquire the Jacksonville Electric Authority, a city-owned utility whose territory it coveted. His contributions included hiring a private detective to follow a reporter who’d written critically of the proposed sale, running a front group that championed the sale, and enlisting a contractor to offer Garrett Dennis—a Jacksonville councilman seen as unlikely to support the sale—a $250,000-a-year job with the same dark money group, Grow United, that distributed the ghost candidate funds to the other nonprofits. Accepting the position would mean giving up his council seat. (Dennis didn’t bite.)

The leaked records also detailed how Matrix and Pitts had paid at least $900,000 to six pay-to-play news outlets in Florida and Alabama between 2013 and 2020. The outlets, with more than 1.3 million combined monthly viewers, attacked critics and enemies of Southern Co., FPL, and other Matrix clients, though all of them deny that the payments influenced their coverage.

“These are types of allegations and scandals that shatter the belief that this publicly regulated utility is a safe, secure, and non-volatile investment,” the attorneys in a federal securities suit filed against NextEra in December 2023 wrote of the revelations. It was one of at least two class-action suits filed against the company since Silagy’s resignation alleging political impropriety.

The proceedings in the shareholder suit have been telling, though perhaps not in the way the plaintiffs would prefer. At a hearing this past May, federal district court Judge Aileen Cannon asked their attorneys to clarify the case against NextEra. “Just so I understand,” she said, “has there been any finding of liability…We talk about, sort of, allegations of wrongdoing and criminality. Can you just pinpoint exactly what would be the crime and has there been any finding of such a crime?”

“Artiles is the victim in this case!” his lawyer told me. “He’s the one that quote got fucked on fake scams, on fraudulent business deals that didn’t exist.”

Plaintiffs attorney Jeffrey Block responded in the negative.      

“So, I guess, what exactly is wrong that was allegedly done?” Cannon said.      

Her question, albeit unwittingly, broaches a bigger issue, with ramifications far beyond Florida. The IRS and the FEC have generally failed to enforce nonprofit and election laws effectively. At the state level, regulatory boards are easily influenced—and their penalties for breaking the rules, to the extent they are imposed, are often too small to discourage bad behavior.

It is a system that practically invites monopoly power companies and their consultants to exploit every loophole to maximize political leverage and profit—and even, in some cases, to spend money collected from power consumers to lobby for actions that run counter to those ratepayer’s interests. “It’s ludicrous on its face that state-granted monopolies that provide an essential service are allowed to lobby at all. It ought to be unthinkable,” energy expert David Roberts noted during a 2023 discussion of utility corruption on his podcast, Volts.

The notion of a monopoly utility launching a secret effort to field bogus candidates and trick voters would seem all the more unthinkable, and the fact that a federal judge feels compelled to ask what the company is actually alleged to have done wrong is telling.

Back in January, public corruption prosecutor Tim VanderGiesen told Cannon he intended to follow the money, although it’s not clear how far up the chain he intends to go. “It’s the money, the payment, that makes this illegal, judge,” he asserted then. The state’s position is, look at all the trouble that they were going through to run…ghost candidates.”

As for Artiles’ alleged ghost candidate activities, “It’s my opinion that this case is politically motivated,” defense attorney Quintero told a Miami-Dade Circuit Court judge during a hearing earlier this year. “It’s not just one party that does it. It’s both parties and it’s perfectly legal. Period. End of story.”

The state’s star witness this week is none other than ghost candidate Alex Rodriguez, who agreed to plead guilty to some charges and testify against Artiles to avoid a possible prison sentence. The defendant’s legal team is attempting to impugn Rodriguez’s character and portray the money that changed hands between the two men as a con. “Artiles is the victim in this case!” Quintero told me. “He’s the one that quote got fucked on fake scams, on fraudulent business deals that didn’t exist, on loans, on a car Rodriguez sold to him that didn’t exist.”

The jury is expected to decide on the guilt or innocence of Frank Artiles by the end of September. Yet after all the courtroom dramas, feuding consultants, and exposés about the financial subterfuge that enabled the ghost candidates, it remains unclear when, and whether, and to what extent, anyone will ever hold NextEra accountable.

“The system is on trial, because the system enables this kind of conduct,” Dave Aronberg, the Palm Beach County state attorney, told me of Artiles’ trial. “In a fully functioning democracy, this kind of scandal would result in real changes to campaign finance laws. But Florida doesn’t have a fully functioning democracy.”

The Democratic National Convention wasn’t just four days of good vibes: It was also the cause of a major fundraising and volunteer boom for the Harris-Walz ticket.

A massive fundraising haul is nothing new for Harris.

The campaign has now raised $540 million since launching one month ago, which Harris-Walz Campaign Chair Jen O’Malley Dillon called “a record for any campaign in history” in a Sunday morning memo announcing the figure. Part of that is due to a convention-week bump: The campaign had its best fundraising hour ever just after Vice President Harris’s speech, according to the memo; another campaign spokesperson said a total of $82 million was raised during convention week. Those totals reflect funds raised by Harris for President, the Democratic National Committee, and joint fundraising committees, the campaign said.

A third of the week’s donations were from first-time contributors, almost a fifth of whom were young voters and two-thirds of whom were women, the campaign said. Volunteers are also fired up, as O’Malley Dillon reported supporters had signed up for nearly 200,000 shifts since Monday.

The massive fundraising haul is nothing new for Harris’s campaign: As my colleague Russ Choma previously reported, the campaign raised $81 million in its first 24 hours, which they said was the largest such take in history. And as I reported last month, it raised $200 million in Harris’s first week campaigning, two-thirds of which was said to have come from first-time donors.

Meanwhile, Trump spent the week struggling to gain traction as he ranted against Harris and the Democrats on his platform Truth Social. That may have something to do with the fact that not only has Harris been leading him in fundraising, but she has also been leading him in the polls.

The Democratic National Convention wasn’t just four days of good vibes: It was also the cause of a major fundraising and volunteer boom for the Harris-Walz ticket.

A massive fundraising haul is nothing new for Harris.

The campaign has now raised $540 million since launching one month ago, which Harris-Walz Campaign Chair Jen O’Malley Dillon called “a record for any campaign in history” in a Sunday morning memo announcing the figure. Part of that is due to a convention-week bump: The campaign had its best fundraising hour ever just after Vice President Harris’s speech, according to the memo; another campaign spokesperson said a total of $82 million was raised during convention week. Those totals reflect funds raised by Harris for President, the Democratic National Committee, and joint fundraising committees, the campaign said.

A third of the week’s donations were from first-time contributors, almost a fifth of whom were young voters and two-thirds of whom were women, the campaign said. Volunteers are also fired up, as O’Malley Dillon reported supporters had signed up for nearly 200,000 shifts since Monday.

The massive fundraising haul is nothing new for Harris’s campaign: As my colleague Russ Choma previously reported, the campaign raised $81 million in its first 24 hours, which they said was the largest such take in history. And as I reported last month, it raised $200 million in Harris’s first week campaigning, two-thirds of which was said to have come from first-time donors.

Meanwhile, Trump spent the week struggling to gain traction as he ranted against Harris and the Democrats on his platform Truth Social. That may have something to do with the fact that not only has Harris been leading him in fundraising, but she has also been leading him in the polls.

In one of the most watched primaries this year, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.)—among the first members of Congress to call for a ceasefire—lost to St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell, who jumped into the race late, and with the backing of millions of dollars from pro-Israel groups. The Associated Press called the race for Bell around 10:00 PM local time.

“Organized people beat organized money,” Bush’s campaigners have repeated. This race, however, has tested whether that’s true: as of election day, it is the second-most expensive Congressional primary in American history—and the money has, indeed, made a difference.

Bell dropped out of his bid to dethrone Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and chose to challenge Bush soon after the war began in Gaza. Bell has benefited from an incredibly well-funded advertising campaign since then.

Over half of all the outside money spent on the race came from the United Democracy Project (UDP), the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)’s electoral arm. The money UDP spent here is second only to that which they spent on a successful campaign to defeat Rep. Jamaal Bowman in New York. In total, UDP spent nearly 9 million dollars in MO-01, bolstered by $1.5 million from the crypto PAC Fairshake. Bush and her backers also attracted some outside spending: Justice Democrats, a progressive PAC founded by former campaigners for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), sent $2 million her way.

Bell’s choice to take that money has been divisive. Mike Jones, a 75-year-old former alderman and Board of Education member with a long career in St. Louis politics put it this way: “I think everybody knows that the race is not about the issues that have surfaced. It’s about the issue nobody’s talking about.” On most issues, Bell and Bush’s stances are near-identical. “So, literally, the only reason for this campaign, at a political level, is AIPAC money,” Jones said. 

Over a quarter of children in the district live in poverty, per the latest census numbers. Schools in the City of St. Louis are so underfunded that the district may not have a full fleet of school bus drivers this year. Healthcare access in the district remains limited, particularly for Black women—and abortion, which both candidates hope to restore, remains illegal in the state.

But the millions brought into the district for this campaign by outside groups on both sides of the election are not doing much to address those issues. Instead, they’re flooding people’s mailboxes with fliers, often several per day, about Bush not backing Biden, as I previously reported.

The campaign became vitriolic in its final weeks. Each candidate has dealt with leaked, compromising audio recordings: Bell swearing he wouldn’t run against Bush, only to renege on that promise; Bush comparing the DOJ investigation over her office’s money-management practices to the FBI spying on Martin Luther King Jr. 

The youth voter-engagement group Protect Our Power has been on the ground in St. Louis for the past month knocking on doors. Many of those canvassing are the same young campaigners who powered Jamaal Bowman’s reelection campaign in New York, only to witness his defeat.  Ella Weber, 22, was one of those campaigners said she and her Protect Our Power co-campaigners “went on a long walk” that night “and just like, talked about how important it was that we don’t retreat.” So they moved on quickly to the next “Squad” race to try again. They crashed on couches and canvassed for a month in St. Louis, working what Weber described as “70-hour weeks” for free. As they canvassed, though, they were up against a well-run and well-funded campaign on the other side. 

“I think few times in my political experience have I seen it so clearly that voters are watching a lot of ads,” said Denae Ávila-Dickson of Sunrise Movement.

“I think people power is still putting up a really, really strong fight against this historic funding,” she told Mother Jones about 5 hours before the polls closed. “But I think the reality is that our election systems aren’t equipped to deal with the scale of spending that is in this race.” 

In June, Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) lost to George Latimer in the most expensive primary in the history of the House of Representatives. Latimer was backed extensively by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). While many factors—like a recent redistricting—affected the race, the contest was viewed widely as an indication of the power of AIPAC to help oust progressives. (Bowman had, notably, called Israel’s campaign in Gaza a genocide.)

But to say Bowman lost because of his views on Israel misses the way money works. AIPAC and other ads targeted Bowman on a myriad of issues. A key talking point, repeated consistently, was that Bowman did not vote for President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill. “Jamaal Bowman has his own agenda,” explained one $2.8 million spot, “and refuses to compromise with President Biden.”

In this election cycle, the attack has become a common theme. AIPAC and its subsidiary the United Democracy Project (UDP) have targeted progressive members of Congress who have vocally opposed Israel’s 10-month war in Gaza. But their line of attack has often not been about foreign policy but, instead, that the leftists did not toe the Democratic line.

Tomorrow, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) will go up against St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell, who entered the race almost immediately after Bush called for a ceasefire in Gaza—and, in doing so, has accessed massive ad funding from those same PACs that funded Latimer.

The same dynamic is at play in the race: Bell’s ads have repeatedly said Bush did not vote for the infrastructure bill.

That’s true—but also misses key context.

President Joe Biden’s 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act authorized $1.2 trillion in federal spending to modernize America’s roads and bridges, among other things. It was a landmark achievement. But it came as a compromise—excluding provisions around human infrastructure needs, like child care. Bush had fought for the wider agenda as part of Biden’s original goal to Build Back Better.

When Build Back Better was first introduced, it was budgeted at about $3.5 trillion. The House passed a version of the bill, only to be thwarted by Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.), who at the time had de facto veto power. Eventually, through a lot of negotiations (and exhausting back and forth), Biden and Congress passed two bills: the infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

During that process, to push for as many components of Build Back Better as possible, members of the progressive caucus withheld their votes from the infrastructure bill.

Bush and Bowman, alongside three other progressives, kept pushing to pass a fuller version that would give families a $3,600 annual Child Tax Credit, establish a guaranteed free pre-K program, increase housing investments, supply tax-funded elder care, incentivize green energy development, and expand Medicare and Medicaid. At the time, Bush said this more robust plan would have benefited low-income residents of her district, and people like herself—a Black single mother who spent time living in her car. 

“St. Louis deserves the president’s entire agenda,” Bush said at the time. “So that means both the bipartisan infrastructure package and the Build Back Better Act.” The Build Back Better Act included $1.75 trillion in child care and climate readiness investment; the infrastructure package did not. (Some elements of Build Back Better did make it into the Inflation Reduction Act.)

Bush’s position that both bills needed to pass was not particularly radical. Joe Biden himself initially said that: “If this is the only one that comes to me, I’m not signing it. It’s in tandem.” 

Everyone seemed to understand the dynamics at play in the aftermath. Bush handily won reelection in 2022 with about 70 percent of the vote in her district. Her “no” vote on the infrastructure bill was not brought up as loudly at any point during that election. Now, though, it’s near-impossible to turn on the television in Bush’s district without seeing a portrayal of Bush as anti-union, anti-infrastructure, anti–St. Louis. 

“What I find really disheartening about that is, before she took that vote, she did a district Zoom meeting,” Megan Green, president of the St. Louis Board of Aldermen and a staunch Bush supporter, remembers. “There were labor leaders on the call, there were a lot of elected officials on the call, and she said, I just want to talk through what we’re doing and why I’m taking this vote this way.”

“To kind of turn around and use that against her is really disappointing,” Green continued.

Latimer’s campaign—well-subsidized by PACs like AIPAC and Fairshake, a cryptocurrency lobby group—deployed that same playbook earlier this summer. 

Like Bell in his race against Bush, Latimer’s campaign dug up Bowman’s “no” vote on the infrastructure bill and presented him as an incorrigible obstructionist. But that’s not an accurate account of what happened back in 2021, as Bowman explained at the time. 

“While one is the hard infrastructure bill—roads, bridges, tunnels and construction jobs; great, we need that. We also need child care. We also need universal pre-K. We need to lower drug prices. We need paid family leave,” Bowman said. “The plan was to pass both together, and when we decided not to do that, I decided to vote no on that bill.” 

Latimer defeated Bowman by 17 percentage points. 

Don Samuels, who will be up against Squad member Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in an August 13 primary, is using a note-for-note identical strategy in his first advertisement of the campaign. 

It has been three years since the infrastructure bill vote, and the Build Back Better Act still hasn’t been passed.

Bowman lost, and Bush, tomorrow, runs the risk of being ousted too.

Early on the morning of July 31, a group of about 70 people arrived at the anodyne office of the cargo company Atlas Air, in White Plains, New York. 

They were members of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ)—an activist group that focuses on equity issues in New York City—there to stage a fake “press conference” to highlight the Department of Defense’s contracts with Atlas Air.

A man in a gray pinstripe suit played the CEO of the company, which is the single largest operator of 747 freighter jets in the world. “Atlas Air is so proud to do its part to support the US military,” the actor enthused. “I am especially proud that, through our DoD contracts, Atlas Air has made multiple deliveries to Israel in the last 10 months.” He added with gusto: “As the bombs keep raining on Gaza, the dividends keep raining on our shareholders!” 

Those behind him, dressed as pilots complete with sewn-on epaulets, cheered as he held up a graph with a line going up—“more bombs equals higher profits!”

In the following hours, JFREJ launched a spoof website for Atlas, and sent out press releases claiming Atlas “is proud to have been responsible for transporting millions of dollars worth of material to the Israeli military as it bombs Gaza” to trade outlets like AirlineGeeks, Cargo Connect, Transport and Logistics Middle East, and American Military News. 

The action is part of a broader push. Protest groups are turning toward a new strategy: beyond focusing on the government, they are targeting the companies that profit off Israel’s war in Gaza. 

“We’ve called out, we’ve called in, I mean, we’ve done all that work to reach the decision-makers,” said Audrey Sasson, executive director of JFREJ. “We’ve talked about our Jewish community’s complicity in Israel’s genocide, and we’ve taken action to protest the US government’s culpability, but we haven’t heard enough about the war profiteers—the private companies profiting off of these atrocities.” 

As first reported by Haaretz, records show that more than 30 chartered cargo flights were operated by the US Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) to Nevatim Airbase in Beersheba between October 31, 2023, and March 31, 2024. At least three of those were cargo flights on planes owned by Atlas and leased by the USTRANSCOM, according to a Mother Jones analysis of publicly available flight data. The 747-400 heavy cargo planes flew to the Israeli air base from Cyprus and Germany. An Atlas Air representative said, “I have no information,” when asked if the company supplies weapons to fuel Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

Without private cargo airlines and private companies, the United States Department of Defense would not be able to send Israel weapons at the rate it currently does. The DoD has sent more than 100 shipments to its ally over the past 10 months, containing weapons such as 2,000 pound bombs, Hellfire missiles, and 500-pound bombs. 

Bradley Martin, a researcher at RAND and a former Navy captain, said the airplanes likely carried supplies or weapon parts for the Israel Defense Forces. But it is unlikely that Atlas Air would transport the bombs that get the most publicity. “Preferably, sensitive munitions are not going not going to be moved by commercial air,” he said. “They put them on a military flight because it takes special handling.” 

Still, private companies, Martin said, play a key role. “The amount of material that’s required to sustain the force fighting this war is huge,” he said. “The military needs a [shipping] provider more than a provider needs the military.” 

A report by the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, titled “How to Ensure Israel has the Weapons it Needs,” points out why the US government needs these contracts: “According to one senior Pentagon official, the quantity of weapons sent [to Israel] was so significant that the Department of Defense sometimes [has] struggled to find sufficient cargo aircraft to deliver the systems.” 

Though relatively unknown, Atlas Air is the third-largest cargo airline in the United States by fleet size. The company received an “indefinite delivery contract” from the military in April 2023 for $20 million. It also received nearly $19 million from New York state in subsidies and property tax abatements, plus more than $600 million in federal loans and guarantees.

JFREJ is not the only activist group setting their sights on Defense Department contractors. Last month, the Palestinian Youth Movement launched a campaign  targeting the Danish shipping multinational Maersk, which sends weapons components as a subcontractor to manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin and also contracts directly with USTRANSCOM. A PYM representative said she’s seen enthusiasm for the campaign: “I think people really are hungry to have a set target and something that they can fuel their energy into.”  

Maersk, she said, has a robust shipping portfolio outside of military shipments—after all, it’s the second-largest container shipping company in the world. “Economically, they can still sustain themselves if they don’t maintain these contracts,” the PYM organizer added.

Martin said that companies like Maersk and Atlas could “absolutely” remain economically viable without military contracts: They could “survive, and thrive,” he said. That, however, is not true the other way around. The governments need private aid to help with massive war efforts.

Janet Abou-Elias, co-founder of Women for Weapons Trade Transparency, said that the military has strong economic reasons to rely on companies like Atlas. “Outsourcing certain functions to private contractors can be more economical than maintaining large in-house capabilities.” Martin, of RAND, said that this trend goes back to the end of the Cold War. “It really started happening about 1990,” he explained. “DOD cut back on commitments, cut back on infrastructure—and for transportation [it] has started to look more and more to commercial types of sources.” 

Maersk and Atlas aren’t the only companies catching heat: Protesters in the US and Australia have demonstrated outside ports by the Israeli shipping company ZIM, which has been sued by a group of Belgian NGOs for violating Belgian arms transport law. Last month, protesters brought the St. Louis Missouri pride parade to a standstill because it was sponsored by the airliner Boeing, which was the top manufacturer of missiles delivered to Israel in 2023, according to an analysis of arms transfer data conducted by NPR station KUOW. This past spring, students at protest encampments across the country demanded that their universities sever ties with Boeing. At least one university, Portland State, agreed to temporarily stop accepting Boeing money. 

Atlas has contracted with the DoD, among other government entities, for decades. In the earliest years of the 21st century, Atlas Air’s name was listed among the airlines leasing planes for transit to and from CIA black sites; their aircrafts have flown to and from Guantanamo Bay as recently as 2022.  

It is also owned by the private equity firm Apollo Global Management. (Per National Defense Magazine, private equity–owned companies accounted for 47 percent of defense transactions in 2022.) Apollo’s CEO, Marc Rowan, was so vehemently against antiwar campus protesters that he pushed for the removal of the University of Pennsylvania’s president for allowing a festival of Palestinian literature on her campus, which he described as “hate-filled.” He has railed against antiwar protesters, declaring them “anti-American” and “violent.” 

“I think those executives going into their office jobs daily can pretend to sort of turn a blind eye to what’s happening in Gaza,” said Sasson of JFREJ. “We will not stand for them making money, millions of dollars off of this genocide.” 

Early on the morning of July 31, a group of about 70 people arrived at the anodyne office of the cargo company Atlas Air, in White Plains, New York. 

They were members of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ)—an activist group that focuses on equity issues in New York City—there to stage a fake “press conference” to highlight the Department of Defense’s contracts with Atlas Air.

A man in a gray pinstripe suit played the CEO of the company, which is the single largest operator of 747 freighter jets in the world. “Atlas Air is so proud to do its part to support the US military,” the actor enthused. “I am especially proud that, through our DoD contracts, Atlas Air has made multiple deliveries to Israel in the last 10 months.” He added with gusto: “As the bombs keep raining on Gaza, the dividends keep raining on our shareholders!” 

Those behind him, dressed as pilots complete with sewn-on epaulets, cheered as he held up a graph with a line going up—“more bombs equals higher profits!”

In the following hours, JFREJ launched a spoof website for Atlas, and sent out press releases claiming Atlas “is proud to have been responsible for transporting millions of dollars worth of material to the Israeli military as it bombs Gaza” to trade outlets like AirlineGeeks, Cargo Connect, Transport and Logistics Middle East, and American Military News. 

The action is part of a broader push. Protest groups are turning toward a new strategy: beyond focusing on the government, they are targeting the companies that profit off Israel’s war in Gaza. 

“We’ve called out, we’ve called in, I mean, we’ve done all that work to reach the decision-makers,” said Audrey Sasson, executive director of JFREJ. “We’ve talked about our Jewish community’s complicity in Israel’s genocide, and we’ve taken action to protest the US government’s culpability, but we haven’t heard enough about the war profiteers—the private companies profiting off of these atrocities.” 

As first reported by Haaretz, records show that more than 30 chartered cargo flights were operated by the US Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) to Nevatim Airbase in Beersheba between October 31, 2023, and March 31, 2024. At least three of those were cargo flights on planes owned by Atlas and leased by the USTRANSCOM, according to a Mother Jones analysis of publicly available flight data. The 747-400 heavy cargo planes flew to the Israeli air base from Cyprus and Germany. An Atlas Air representative said, “I have no information,” when asked if the company supplies weapons to fuel Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

Without private cargo airlines and private companies, the United States Department of Defense would not be able to send Israel weapons at the rate it currently does. The DoD has sent more than 100 shipments to its ally over the past 10 months, containing weapons such as 2,000 pound bombs, Hellfire missiles, and 500-pound bombs. 

Bradley Martin, a researcher at RAND and a former Navy captain, said the airplanes likely carried supplies or weapon parts for the Israel Defense Forces. But it is unlikely that Atlas Air would transport the bombs that get the most publicity. “Preferably, sensitive munitions are not going not going to be moved by commercial air,” he said. “They put them on a military flight because it takes special handling.” 

Still, private companies, Martin said, play a key role. “The amount of material that’s required to sustain the force fighting this war is huge,” he said. “The military needs a [shipping] provider more than a provider needs the military.” 

A report by the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, titled “How to Ensure Israel has the Weapons it Needs,” points out why the US government needs these contracts: “According to one senior Pentagon official, the quantity of weapons sent [to Israel] was so significant that the Department of Defense sometimes [has] struggled to find sufficient cargo aircraft to deliver the systems.” 

Though relatively unknown, Atlas Air is the third-largest cargo airline in the United States by fleet size. The company received an “indefinite delivery contract” from the military in April 2023 for $20 million. It also received nearly $19 million from New York state in subsidies and property tax abatements, plus more than $600 million in federal loans and guarantees.

JFREJ is not the only activist group setting their sights on Defense Department contractors. Last month, the Palestinian Youth Movement launched a campaign  targeting the Danish shipping multinational Maersk, which sends weapons components as a subcontractor to manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin and also contracts directly with USTRANSCOM. A PYM representative said she’s seen enthusiasm for the campaign: “I think people really are hungry to have a set target and something that they can fuel their energy into.”  

Maersk, she said, has a robust shipping portfolio outside of military shipments—after all, it’s the second-largest container shipping company in the world. “Economically, they can still sustain themselves if they don’t maintain these contracts,” the PYM organizer added.

Martin said that companies like Maersk and Atlas could “absolutely” remain economically viable without military contracts: They could “survive, and thrive,” he said. That, however, is not true the other way around. The governments need private aid to help with massive war efforts.

Janet Abou-Elias, co-founder of Women for Weapons Trade Transparency, said that the military has strong economic reasons to rely on companies like Atlas. “Outsourcing certain functions to private contractors can be more economical than maintaining large in-house capabilities.” Martin, of RAND, said that this trend goes back to the end of the Cold War. “It really started happening about 1990,” he explained. “DOD cut back on commitments, cut back on infrastructure—and for transportation [it] has started to look more and more to commercial types of sources.” 

Maersk and Atlas aren’t the only companies catching heat: Protesters in the US and Australia have demonstrated outside ports by the Israeli shipping company ZIM, which has been sued by a group of Belgian NGOs for violating Belgian arms transport law. Last month, protesters brought the St. Louis Missouri pride parade to a standstill because it was sponsored by the airliner Boeing, which was the top manufacturer of missiles delivered to Israel in 2023, according to an analysis of arms transfer data conducted by NPR station KUOW. This past spring, students at protest encampments across the country demanded that their universities sever ties with Boeing. At least one university, Portland State, agreed to temporarily stop accepting Boeing money. 

Atlas has contracted with the DoD, among other government entities, for decades. In the earliest years of the 21st century, Atlas Air’s name was listed among the airlines leasing planes for transit to and from CIA black sites; their aircrafts have flown to and from Guantanamo Bay as recently as 2022.  

It is also owned by the private equity firm Apollo Global Management. (Per National Defense Magazine, private equity–owned companies accounted for 47 percent of defense transactions in 2022.) Apollo’s CEO, Marc Rowan, was so vehemently against antiwar campus protesters that he pushed for the removal of the University of Pennsylvania’s president for allowing a festival of Palestinian literature on her campus, which he described as “hate-filled.” He has railed against antiwar protesters, declaring them “anti-American” and “violent.” 

“I think those executives going into their office jobs daily can pretend to sort of turn a blind eye to what’s happening in Gaza,” said Sasson of JFREJ. “We will not stand for them making money, millions of dollars off of this genocide.” 

As the Democratic National Convention kicked off its virtual roll-call vote this morning, the Uncommitted movement—an organization that successfully pushed thousands of primary voters to choose no one instead of casting a ballot for President Joe Biden because of US backing of Israel during its war on Gaza—called on the party to let a member of their delegation speak. 

The movement would like a five-minute speaking slot for a humanitarian aid worker who has recently returned from Gaza. Abbas Alawieh, an Uncommitted organizer, said at this morning’s press conference that the delegates from his group communicated this request to the DNC via email “maybe a month ago.” They have not yet received a response. 

Nationwide, as previously reported in Mother Jones, the Uncommitted movement earned over 700,000 votes—and 30 delegates to the convention. As we wrote:

The movement’s impact was notable, especially in swing states: 13 percent of voters in Michigan, just under 19 percent in Minnesota, and just below 15 percent in North Carolina voted “uncommitted.” In Illinois, a state without an “uncommitted” option on the ballot, voters wrote in “Gaza.”

The 30 Uncommitted delegates selected Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care physician who spent time in Gaza’s hospitals, as their preferred speaker. 

“I am not a politician,” Haj-Hassan said. “I’m not even an activist—my life prior to this year has been spent primarily doing clinical work.” But the “complete destruction of human life” she saw in Gaza—and the awareness that the destruction is made possible thanks to US funds and US weapons—has made Haj-Hassan determined to speak. 

“People are being killed in a thousand and one ways—every hour, in the emergency department…we would receive mass casualties. We received children, maimed, killed, beheaded, shot…many of these child deaths were deliberate killings,” she said. When Haj-Hassan was able to save a child, she was haunted by the fact that they’d be in danger again the moment they left her care: “I know under the current military strategy that that child has a very small probability of surviving, once he’s discharged from the hospital.”

Speakers who are not politicians are often given airtime at party national conventions. At the 2016 DNC, a fifth-grade teacher, a tech entrepreneur, a 9/11 survivor, and actress Meryl Streep were all among the speakers. 

Still, the Uncommitted movement has not received much engagement from Harris or her campaign yet. The vice president is scheduled to be in Michigan, the birthplace of Uncommitted, this coming Wednesday. 

“If next Wednesday works for her, we’ll clear our schedules,” Alawieh said. “We need to be able to speak with the Vice President directly, make sure that she hears us and takes the opportunity to turn a new page.” And if Haj-Hassan isn’t given a speaker slot, organizer Layla Elabed said, they’ll find a way for her story to be heard regardless.

“We’ll find a way for her to speak, one way or another, in the tradition of Fannie Lou Hamer, who made moral witness to human suffering at the 1964 DNC,” Elabed said. 

On her 48th birthday, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) celebrated by campaigning. Yes, there was cake, and there was singing, and there was a DJ, but there was also—a little under three weeks out from a heated Democratic primary—canvassing in the sweltering heat.

The primary has been cast as another test of how the Democrat Party responds to Israel’s war on Gaza. Bush, a member of the Squad, has been among the loudest voices calling for America to push harder for a ceasefire. United Democracy Project—a super-PAC affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee—has spent more than $7 million against Bush. The MO-01 race is already the fifth-most-expensive House primary in US history.

Late last year, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell dropped out of his bid to dethrone Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri to challenge Bush. Some speculated he was recruited by AIPAC. A recently leaked phone call between Bush and Bell published by Drop Site News shows Bell promising he would not run against her: “I’m telling you on my word I am not running against you. That is not happening,” Bell is reported to have said. Four months later, he changed his mind.

Despite both coming of age as politicians during Ferguson—and despite the fact that in their campaign literature, both candidates label themselves the “real progressive” here—Bell’s challenge is firmly from the center. “He’s going to run as a Biden Democrat…as a Democratic team player,” Missouri Independent columnist Jeff Smith, a former state senator who used to represent parts of Bush’s district, told us in early 2024. “There’s a constituency for that, in particular among older voters, white and Black.”

After the defeat of Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) by an AIPAC-funded challenger in New York, many are worried. Will Bush be the latest member of the Squad to lose? The race is shaping up to define how Democrats deal with both post-Ferguson politics and members vocal against the party’s mostly uncritical support of Israel.

Bush’s political career was born in the streets of Ferguson, fighting against police brutality. Her staunch advocacy for a ceasefire, years later, brings those same values beyond US borders. “St. Louis is my priority, but the world is also on my back, and in my head and in my heart,” Bush said at a rally. Those values carried her to an easy reelection in 2020. But now, as the party drifts back to the right, she might be punished for them.

On the muggy late-July afternoon when Bush gathered supporters, friends, and family members in a park pavilion decorated in her signature purple for her birthday, guests buzzed over the news that, only hours earlier, President Joe Biden had dropped his bid for reelection.

“Today was a gift to us,” Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier, a friend of Bush’s from her Ferguson days, told the crowd.

Earlier that week, Bush had told reporters that most calls to her office lately were requests for Biden to step down. While Bush herself didn’t join the chorus of voices calling for Biden to go, she didn’t push for the president to stay in the race as loudly as other Congress members either. “Of course, her opponent jumped on that, and said this was an example of her being anti-Democratic,” Sonnier said.

“Cori Bush is desperate to talk about anything other than how she has failed the people of Missouri’s 1st congressional district,” Jordan Sanders, Bell’s campaign manager, told me in late June. “Wesley will continue talking with voters about why St. Louis needs a progressive champion who will work with, not against, President Biden on delivering his agenda.”

This line has been typical of the attacks on Bush. Bell has campaigned not only against her stance on Gaza but also asserted that her constituent services are lacking, that she hasn’t passed enough bills, and that she hasn’t been willing to work with Biden. AIPAC-funded ads have made similar points. (This is the usual state of play; the group does not often fund ads that are attacks on a candidate’s policies on Israel. Instead, it helps the challenger win on other issues.)

The money could be working. In February, a poll released by the blog Missouri Scout, in collaboration with Republican polling firm Remington Research, showed Bush trailing Bell by 22 points. But people on the ground are not confident that the race for Missouri’s 1st District is a foregone conclusion. President of the Board of Aldermen Megan Green told me the Remington Research poll is not indicative of Bush’s support on the ground—because the group has been under-polling progressives for years. “That same poll has had me far behind, when I ended up winning by 12 points against my opponent,” she said.

Other polls have shown a tighter race. Democratic Majority for Israel, an AIPAC-affiliated group, has run multiple surveys since Remington’s. Both polls show Bell and Bush close, with Bell in the lead. The latest DMFI poll, which sampled 400 residents—but did not provide details about its methodology—finds Bell with a six-point edge over Bush.

“It’s not a shoe-in, and it’s really hard to predict,” longtime Jennings city Council member Terry Wilson puts it. “But [if] anybody was to beat [Bush], I’d say he had a pretty good shot at it.”

Bell and Bush both found political careers in the aftermath of the Ferguson uprising, a protest movement that began 10 years ago this August when white police officer Darren Wilson killed unarmed Black teenager Mike Brown. Bush’s district contains just under half of Missouri’s entire Black population. The legacy of Ferguson has played a large part in influencing the outcome of mayoral, prosecutorial, and congressional races for the past decade here.

In 2018, Bell, previously a Ferguson City Council member, ran for St. Louis county prosecutor on the promise of overturning unjust convictions and perhaps reopening the case against Wilson. He won. But just like his conservative predecessor, he did not charge Wilson.

Bush took a different path to elected office. She was a protest stalwart back in Ferguson in 2014—showing up in the streets again and again as subsequent waves of anti-police-brutality protests bubbled over the next six years. She positioned herself as a community organizer, calling herself a “politivist”—a slightly hard-to-grasp portmanteau of politician and activist. In 2020, she defeated William Lacy Clay, a part of the 52-year Clay family congressional dynasty.

This has earned her trust. Mike Brown’s family recently appeared in a Bush campaign advertisement to differentiate her activism from her opponent’s: “Wesley Bell…used my family for power, and now he’s trying to sell out St. Louis,” Michael Brown Sr. tells the camera.

Two weeks from today is the 10th anniversary of Michael Brown's death.

His family deserves accountability for his killing. We fought for it. They were promised it. And that promise was broken.

His still grieving family deserves this platform to share their story. pic.twitter.com/6pOxXT58L7

— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) July 26, 2024

And rapper Tef Poe released a diss track laying out what he sees as a betrayal by Bell, over the beat of Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.”

“Can’t even walk through the Loop / you a sellout to the Lou,” the former Ferguson activist says, referencing the downtown area in St. Louis. “Shoulda reopened that case, but you a disgrace and ain’t even tried.”

Since her election to Congress in 2021, Bush has become one of the most outspoken members on the left, pushing for an eviction moratorium and the restoration of abortion rights.

In 2022, she won 70 percent of the vote. Since then, she has upped her finances and has received some celebrity donors. Kyrie Irving—a sometimes controversial basketball star who does not ordinarily involve himself in congressional races—donated the maximum legal amount to her campaign, according to FEC records. (Irving’s management did not respond to requests for comment.) Fellow Squad members Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) have come to Missouri to campaign for her. In total, Bush has raised about $2.6 million for her campaign.

That’s surpassed by Bell, who has taken out more than $12 million in ads. “I can’t turn on the TV without every commercial break being like three or four Wesley Bell ads or the same ad over and over again,” Green, the alderman, said.

But the money has courted controversy. As HuffPost reported in May, Bell has taken more than $65,000 from donors who also give to Missouri Republicans.

Some Missouri progressive groups can’t shake their concern that these donors will influence his policy positions. Abortion Action Missouri recently endorsed Bush, though they’ve endorsed Bell in previous races, and have no qualms with his record as a prosecutor around abortion.

Mallory Schwarz, the advocacy group’s executive director, said the group is “unsettled by what we have heard about some of the anti-abortion megadonors who have jumped into this race, and we question—what is their personal interest in weighing in, in our state and in our city?” Planned Parenthood of Missouri has also thrown its weight behind Bush in this contest, though they’ve endorsed Bell before. (On the two-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision, Bell tweeted that he had been endorsed by Planned Parenthood; he then quickly revised that tweet to reflect that he didn’t mean this race, but rather previous races he had run.)

On an organizing call in early June, Bush laid out how she sees the terms of this race to a small Zoom room. “My opponent was running against Josh Hawley, and now he takes money from Josh Hawley’s donors,” she said. “This is who we get if I am unseated—we get someone who goes whichever way the wind blows. We become unsafe when the people that only care about the money are the ones that take power.”

On Sunday night, more than 40,000 Black women reportedly gathered on a Zoom call.

Their purpose: To rally around Vice President Kamala Harris’ newly launched campaign to win the Democratic nomination for the presidency. Part of how that support manifested was through a massive influx of cash: Black women on that Zoom call raised $1.5 million in three hours, according to Win With Black Women, the organization that convened the virtual gathering.

Black women have long been recognized as the most crucial voting bloc for the Democratic party. But experts say their role in contributing to Harris’ record-breaking first 24 hours of fundraising—when she raised raised more than $80 million, according to her campaign—makes clear that Black women’s political power goes far beyond party loyalty.

“Until [Sunday], Black women weren’t necessarily associated with being powerhouse fundraisers,” Aimee Allison, founder and president of the organization She the People, told me. “For Black women to raise money like that is evidence of Black women’s political power in another way.”

Money, Allison said, “is the fuel of American politics—and we can play there as well.”

Win With Black Women has been holding weekly, off-the-record Zoom calls for years to discuss Black women’s political power, according to Allison and Glynda Carr, president, CEO and co-founder of the group Higher Heights for America, which works to elect progressive Black women to office. But the calls have never been as well attended as Sunday’s, which had upwards of 40,000 listeners, according to organizers. Typically, the calls reach a maximum attendance of 1,000 people, according to Allison. (Spokespeople for Win With Black Women did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones on Monday.)

Black women played a major role in grassroots fundraising for former President Obama’s campaign, Carr noted, adding that Black people also tend to donate a higher share of their wealth than white people do. Though Harris has already raked in a huge sum of cash, that kind of windfall is uncommon for Black women running for federal office, who research shows tend to have less cash on hand than other candidates. Of course, it’s hard to make any comparison between Harris and other Black women candidates given that she would be the first woman of color ever to win the Democratic Party’s nomination. This early financial support for Harris from Black women is notable, and shows that “this is a growing space for Black women,” Carr said.

Kelly Dittmar, director of research at Rutgers’ Center for American Women and Politics also sees it as “symbolic of something more”: the “support and enthusiasm” crucial in powering Harris’ candidacy to victory. “If that type of organizing is already happening,” Dittmar said, “that bodes well for the Harris campaign.”

Carr’s organization is already planning on how to capitalize on the enthusiasm for Harris’ candidacy, she said, including by growing Higher Heights’ network of Black women supporters in the coming months.

“There’s a real opportunity to harnesses [Black women’s fundraising]—not just for Kamala Harris’ presidency,” Carr said, “but candidates inspiring Black women’s political spending up and down the ballot.”

Democratic donors unleashed a pent-up flood of cash into the barely established campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris with more than $100 million gushing into Democratic campaign coffers from small grassroots donors since the news of Biden’s departure broke. At least $81 million was raised in the first 24 hours of her campaign and major donors quickly pledged another $150 million to a Democratic super-PAC that initially had been set up to back Biden and is now focused on Harris.

Late Monday, the Harris campaign confirmed that they had raised $81 million and said this adds to the $240 million they already have in the bank, inherited from Biden’s fundraising efforts.

But it’s not just Harris who is benefitting from the donations. ActBlue, the third-party processor of most Democratic campaign donations of less than $200—the grassroots level of supporters—has a live ticker on their website reporting real-time donations. One website that tracks the ticker found that Sunday was ActBlue’s biggest fundraising date of all time. According to the tracker, more than $66.9 million is being funneled through the site. This haul barely surpasses the single highest day of donations from four years ago when Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. By late afternoon on Monday, just about 24 hours from when momentum suddenly began to shift towards Harris, an additional $38 million had been raised from Democratic donors. Assuming that ActBlue’s take includes the $81 million that went to Harris’ campaign, it would appear that Democratic donors are giving heavily to other candidates as well.

While the sum is paltry compared to how much is likely to be sent by the end of the campaign—a figure that may be well into the billions—it is an extraordinary show of grassroots enthusiasm at a time when little or no polling is available to assess how Harris’ sudden elevation to party favorite is viewed by the base.

The numbers compare favorably to Trump’s fundraising juggernaut. His campaign has had enormous surges in small-dollar donations several times this spring, but most notably following his conviction on 39 felony charges back in May. On that day alone, Trump’s campaign raised $53 million. Those donations helped Trump surge past Biden in fundraising totals—it won’t be clear if Harris will take the lead once the dust settles from her entrance into the race.

Harris also received welcome news from big donors—wealthy Democratic supporters who are financing outside groups like super-PACs. The pro-Harris super-PAC Future Forward said it had received $150 million in pledges since Biden quit the race. Of course, pledges are not the same as actual donations, but Trump also has been hauling in major pledges lately, including a promise by Elon Musk to donate $45 million per month to a pro-Trump super PAC.

The recent announcement from the pro-Harris super-PAC is also significant because the Democratic Party’s wealthiest donors had made it clear they would stop funding Biden following his disastrous debate performance last month. The renewed pledges to donate likely are a welcome relief to Harris, showing donors won’t stand in the way as she consolidates her nomination.

Campaign finance disclosures are made public too ridiculously slowly to be of much use for real-time political analysis, but they do reveal some general trends in terms of who supports whom, and how rich they are.

I previously reported that, according to Federal Election Commission data through May 1—before Donald Trump’s criminal conviction, Biden’s disastrous debate performance, or Saturday’s assassination attempt—Trump was getting less than one-third of his contributions from small donors (people who gave less than $200), whereas the 100 top donors (all very, very rich) favored Republicans by a margin of 3 to 1.

That hasn’t changed per the latest data, most of which only gets us through May 31—which is still before all of the mayhem mentioned above. With the new numbers, the Top 100 still favor Republican groups and candidates, in dollars given, by a nearly 3-to-1 margin.

One notable difference involved a reshuffling among the Top 5, who have given overwhelmingly to Republicans and their causes. The lead position in the last round was held by billionaire couple Janine and Jeffrey Yass—he’s a cofounder of Susquehanna International Group (an investment firm) and a major TikTok investor. From his contribution history, it’s clear that Yass wasn’t much of a Trump supporter, though Susquehanna owned a stake in the special purpose acquisition company that merged with Trump Media.

The latest (and likely current, though not for long) top donor is a major Trump backer. That’s banking dynasty heir Timothy Mellon—a “reclusive plutocrat,” as independent journalist Judd Legum wrote in his Popular Information Substack, who over the past 12 months has given $25 million to American Values 2024, a Super PAC supporting Robert Kennedy, Jr. and then turned around and donated a whopping $50 million to the Trump Super PAC Make America Great Again Inc. the day after a jury found the former president guilty of 34 felonies.

At last count, the Top 100 had doled out $933.5 million, only 22 percent of which went to solidly Democratic candidates and causes.

In all, this election cycle, Mellon has given more than $115 million to Republicans, including $76.5 million to MAGA Inc. He also, as Legum noted, has donated $4 million to Sentinel Action Fund, a Super PAC created by Heritage Action, a subsidiary of the Heritage Foundation, whose controversial Project 2025 was created as more or less a blueprint for a second Trump term—though Trump, incredibly, claims no knowledge of it.

Moreover, in 2020, Mellon gave $20 million to America First Action, a Super PAC run by America First Inc., a nonprofit that claims in its IRS filings it is “bipartisan,” but listed as its board chair Linda McMahon. That’s the WWE mogul Trump appointed to run his Small Business Administration. Linda and her husband, Vince McMahon, are No. 17 on the Top 100 donors list, giving more than $11 million so far to Republican candidates and causes during the current election cycle. Nonpartisan indeed.

At last count, the Top 100 had doled out a total of $933.5 million to candidates, party committees, and outside groups. Only 22 percent of it went to solidly Democratic candidates and causes, while 64 percent went to solidly Republican candidates and causes.

President Joe Biden’s campaign committee raised a total of about $231 million, of which 42 percent came from small donors giving less than $200. Trump’s campaign committee reported about $196 million in donations, 31 percent from under-$200 donors. The Trump campaign also reported about $193 million from outside groups, while the Biden campaign reported roughly $160 million.

So that’s where we are—or rather, were. So much has changed, so quickly, in this race. Trump’s conviction, for which he showed only contempt, and no remorse, only seemed to boost his status with MAGA die-hards. Meanwhile, ever since that unforgettable June 26 debate, top Democratic donors have been flipping out about Biden, who keeps insisting he’s in for the long haul.

And then came the attempt on Trump’s life, which has energized his already frenetic base, and could fuel his grassroots fundraising efforts.

On Sunday, less than 24 hours after a 20-year-old man fired an AR-15 at the Republican nominee, wounding him slightly, Trump’s campaign was already sending out pleas like the following, which landed in a colleague’s inbox at 2:51 pm ET that day:

I am Donald J. Trump, and I will NEVER SURRENDER!

I will always love you for supporting me.

Unity. Peace. Make America Great Again.