They say the devil is in the details. Just don't go looking for the Prince of Darkness in Georgia's campaign finance reports.
That information is still being requested.
State law requires candidates to list in campaign disclosure reports the names, addresses, occupations and employers of individual donors. It’s a good way to let voters know who’s the financial muscle behind the office seeker.
In reality, campaigns are pretty good at getting names and addresses — you’ll find that on most checks — but they often fall short in the other categories.
Example A: Republican Brian Kemp’s campaign for governor.
Out of about 5,300 donations of more than $100 in his most recent report, the Kemp campaign wrote down “information requested” for 1,670 donors where occupations and employers were supposed to be listed. That’s roughly three out of every 10 checks.
In all, Kemp took in about $2.8 million in contributions over the past three months from Big Information Requested.
Fortunately, Kemp might get the answer for at least one donor at Thanksgiving dinner. One of the campaign benefactors whose occupations are apparently shrouded in campaign mystery is his brother-in-law, state Senate Majority Leader Bill Cowsert, a fellow Republican from Athens. Spoiler alert: He’s a lawyer.
Wandering the halls of the Capitol also might yield some clues. Other Kemp donors on the “information requested” list include outgoing state Rep. Allen Peake, R-Macon; state Sen. Lindsey Tippins, R-Marietta; and state Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens.
Big Information Requested hasn’t been quite so generous to Kemp’s Democratic rival, Stacey Abrams. Her campaign listed “information requested” for 349 of about 34,000 individual contributions over the past three months, or about one for every 100 checks. “None” is the more frequent answer, listed as the occupation for 1,263 of her contributors. That could mean either the donors are unemployed or retired.
Matt Jensen of Atlanta had a different answer, listing his occupation as “none-of-your-business.”
Doing the checkbook shamble: Tom Price is signing so many checks these days that the former orthopedic surgeon is at great risk of writer's cramp.
Price, the onetime U.S. representative from Roswell and, for a short time, President Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services, has been handing out a lot of cash to fellow Republicans.
He donated $2,000 last month to his successor in the 6th Congressional District, U.S. Rep. Karen Handel. But that’s just one entry in the Price ledger.
Also benefiting from Price’s generosity are:
- State Rep. Betty Price, who happens to be his wife.
- State Sen. Kay Kirkpatrick of Marietta, a physician with whom he once practiced.
- Gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp.
- Lieutenant governor candidate Geoff Duncan.
- Secretary of state candidate Braff Raffensperger.
- Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr.
- The Georgia Republican Party.
- The Fulton County Republican Party.
- State Senate candidate Leah Aldridge.
- State House candidate Alex Kaufman.
- U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan.
- The National Republican Campaign Committee.
The source for all this spending? The more than $1.85 million Price had socked away in a onetime congressional campaign account.
The Tampa Bay Times investigated such accounts, known as "zombie" campaign accounts, earlier this year. It's a prevalent practice among former officials, especially when they're considering a return to politics.
Price has been busy on other political fronts.
He’s given several speeches on health care, he appeared on a podcast with former Obama adviser David Axelrod and he joined the board of Jackson Health Care, a company with political connections.
Lewis shifts to funding mode: U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Atlanta, is also dispensing cash.
Lewis has no opponent on next month’s ballot, but that doesn’t mean he can’t pull in campaign donations.
He raised almost $3.3 million during this campaign cycle, leading all incumbents in the Georgia congressional delegation. In the past three months, he took in $556,000, much of it from outside the state through the Democratic online fundraising platform ActBlue.
Some of that money passed through Lewis’ hands on to the following Democratic candidates Lucy McBath, who’s running against Handel in the 6th Congressional District, and Carolyn Bourdeaux, the challenger to U.S. Rep. Rob Woodall, R-Lawrenceville, in the 7th Congressional District.
Lewis is also keeping those campaign muscles in tone, traveling recently to Illinois to stump for Democratic congressional challenger Betsy Dirksen Londrigan and leading a march to the polls with U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin and state Rep. Carol Ammons.
A fight over homestead: In the 6th Congressional District, Handel has turned the spotlight on homestead exemptions and whether McBath had violated the rules.
McBath received an exemption in Douglas County for two years after marrying her husband, who already had an exemption in Cobb County. State code allows married couples to claim only one exemption between them.
Records show the McBaths did seek separate exemptions in Cobb and Douglas counties during the 2009 and 2010 tax years.
Once somebody has an exemption, it’s automatically renewed. It’s up to taxpayers to report when their living situations have changed.
Taxpayers often forget, though, Cobb Tax Commissioner Carla Jackson said.
When a violation is determined, Jackson said, the county typically removes the exemption and bills the couple for taxes owed from the prior years. The maximum exposure is seven years, so McBath falls outside that window.
McBath’s campaign declined to comment.
It dismissed an earlier attack from Handel that focused on McBath’s husband’s ties to Tennessee, calling it “baseless” while not addressing the Republican’s specific allegations.
Early reports a little murky: Early voting was already gaining in popularity, but this year's it's really stepped on the gas.
About 145,000 voters cast ballots during the first two days of early in-person voting. Add that to 69,006 mail-in ballots that had processed at that point, and you get a total count of 214,171, roughly three times as many as over the same period in 2014.
What that means probably won't be clear until Election Day.
Democrats have pointed to the surge as the product of Abrams’ push to bring out nontraditional, less-frequent voters as part of her strategy to win the governorship. To support that line of thought, they point to the roughly one-third of the earliest of voters as having skipped previous midterm contests.
Not so fast, GOP strategist Todd Rehm says.
He found that roughly 49,000 of the ballots cast early were from people who voted in this year’s GOP primary, compared with about 39,000 who voted in the Democratic contest.
And roughly 70,000 of the people who voted early cast ballots in the 2016 GOP presidential primary, while 44,000 or so voted in the Democratic contest.
And those new voters? Rehm says they’re not a lock for Democrats.
He found that 15,220 of those voters who skipped the past two primaries came from counties that Trump carried by more than 70 percent in the 2016 presidential election.
Missing on the resume: Sally Yates would apparently prefer you forget about that time she spent filling in as Trump's attorney general.
Yates recently made a fundraising pitch for Democrat Stacey Abrams’ campaign for governor.
In the email, Yates identified herself as a “former deputy attorney general.” That was her job during the Obama administration.
Yates made no mention of her time as the acting attorney general during the early days of the Trump administration, a stint that quickly ended when she decided not to defend a White House executive order barring many Middle Eastern refugees from entering the United States.
Capitol Recap
Here's a look at some of the political and government stories that The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's staff broke online during the past week. To see more of them, go to http://www.myajc.com/georgia-politics/.
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