The Center for Public Integrity

Tobacco and whiskey have helped build Mitch McConnell’s political career. Tobacco giants Altria Group Inc. and Reynolds American Inc. are two of Mitch McConnell’s top five career campaign PAC contributors. And three of the Senate Republican leader’s top five individual donors have ties to the Kentucky-based maker of Jack Daniel’s whiskey.

Those are among the results of the Center for Public Integrity’s review of CQ MoneyLine information on McConnell’s contribution history for both campaign accounts and leadership PACs, dating back to before his first Senate campaign in 1984. The Center’s probe of McConnell’s finances marks the second in a series of pieces on top donors to Congressional leaders.

Addison Mitchell “Mitch” McConnell, 68, a former Congressional aide and Department of Justice staffer, was elected Jefferson County, Kentucky judge-executive in 1977 and again in 1981. In 1984, McConnell narrowly defeated Democratic incumbent Walter Huddleston to win a U.S. Senate seat by just a few thousand votes. McConnell won in 1990, 1996, and 2008 by narrow margins, garnering at most 55 percent of the vote; his 2002 victory was far more comfortable. Those close races required a lot of money, and McConnell has risen to the challenge, amassing more than $47 million for his campaign committees over his career. In 1989 he established the Bluegrass Committee, a leadershipPAC through which he began distributing contributions to fellow Senate Republicans and potential candidates. The PAC has distributed money to 36 of McConnell’s 40 current GOP colleagues. It’s paid off — in 2003, McConnell became the Senate Republican Whip and in 2007, his party made him Senate Minority Leader.

A former professional gambler, a taxi company magnate, a telecommunications lobbyist, and a giant tobacco company are among the top lifetime givers to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, 70, of Nevada, who faces the toughest re-election race of his political career.

Those are the results of the Center for Public Integrity’s review of CQ MoneyLine information on Reid’s contribution history for campaign accounts and leadership PACs, dating back to his first successful congressional campaign in 1982. The Center’s inquiry marks the first in a series of stories on the top donors to Congressional leadership. Future articles will analyze the fundraising records of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Minority Leader John Boehner. 

In Nevada’s rough-and-tumble politics, Reid’s top backers include a heavy dose of the Nevada business community, especially in the casino and land development areas, and the telecommunications industry. Those business interests are balanced by sizeable support from organized labor and trial lawyers.

That 1982 campaign for the House cost Reid just over $500,000. How times have changed. With a hotly contested re-election battle on the horizon this November, Reid’s campaign committee spent more than eight times that amount in 2009 alone.

All told, Reid has raised more than $42 million over nearly three decades, including more than $6.5 million for the federal version of his leadership PAC, the Searchlight Leadership Fund. Representing a swing state like Nevada — in four of the last five presidential elections the state has been won by a margin of less than four points — Reid has needed almost every penny. The former middleweight boxer is currently in the political fight of his life, trailing in virtually every public poll when matched up against his likely November opponents.

Bob Schafer just laid off another worker.

Schafer is a manager at Ranger Construction, a Florida-based company that builds roads in a state famously fueled by its own growth. For more than three decades, Ranger Construction helped connect all that development, but the economic recession has forced the company to cut more than one-third of its staff, which has dwindled to under a thousand.

Looking ahead, Schafer worries whether state funding cuts might eventually mean laying off even more workers. “It could shut the lights out,” Schafer says. At more than six feet tall, Schafer makes an imposing figure at construction sites. He appears as focused as he is bald — which is to say completely.

Schafer just came from checking his team’s progress with a four-mile highway widening project on Interstate 95 in Brevard County, a job that will keep about 30 of his employees on the payroll for the foreseeable future. Ranger Construction won the project, which is funded by the economic stimulus law, amid some tough bidding.

“A lot of these guys,” Schafer says, speaking of struggling home and commercial builders, “now they think they’re all road builders. So we went from projects with four or five bidders to maybe 15 or 20.”

The 2009 stimulus law helped Ranger Construction. But at the same time, Florida’s cash-strapped legislature is raiding state transportation funds to help pay for programs like education and health care. If you compare what Florida received under the stimulus law and what legislators in Tallahassee propose to take away again on top of last year, it’s nearly a wash, Schafer says.

Nearly five years ago, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer of New York landed a million-dollar highway earmark in a transportation bill chock full of more than 6,300 such projects. As earmarks go, it failed to gain much attention. This same bill, after all, directed billions elsewhere for projects far more visible than a rural highway leading to a Catskills Mountain resort planned by a prominent real estate developer.

The relatively small earmark came after the developer, Concord Associates’ Louis Cappelli, and his team opened their wallets and donated a combined $100,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, then headed by Schumer. None had ever contributed to that political action committee (PAC) before. Some of the same executives gave an additional $64,000 to the committee over the next few years, after the bill with the earmark was signed into law.

But the New York Department of Transportation did not claim this specific million-dollar earmark. Its intended purpose — to study widening Route 17 from two to three lanes in each direction over a 43 mile stretch — did not appear to be a priority for the state. The stretch of road in question starts near the village of Harriman and extends northwest to Sullivan County, where Cappelli envisions a huge “Entertainment City” to restore the Catskills to its former fame as a vacation destination and generator of much-needed local jobs. A wider road might cut travel time from New York City, some 100 miles away from the resort and its planned time-shares, dinner theater, riding stable, winery, artists colony, and spa. Empire Resorts Inc., of which Cappelli is also a director and major shareholder, would oversee horse racing and video gaming operations at the site. Empire also hopes to develop a full casino on 29 acres situated just across the highway. The potential is massive; but the planning is still largely unclear.