I took a quick look this morning at contributions of so-called “soft money” by Hawaii donors to political committees registered with the Federal Election Commission, which includes Super Pacs.
Here’s how the FEC describes this category:
This section includes contributions made by persons (individual, partnership, limited liability company, corporation, labor organization, or any other organization or group of persons) to Super PACs and Hybrid PACs and contributions to the National Party committees’ non-federal accounts. (The latter pertains only to contributions made before the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA)). Look for contribution type “10” here.
And here’s the list of PACs which received money from Hawaii, ranked by the amount raised in the period 2013-2015.
Surprisingly, at the top of the list is Right to Rise USA, the Jeb Bush Super Pac, with over $260,000 raised in Hawaii. But most of that came in a single $250,000 contribution from cruise line NCL America, and $5,000 each from Ivan Kasser of Kona, and Michael Purport of the Carlsmith Ball law firm.
Second on the list is Working Families for Hawaii, a Super Pac that backed Mazie Hirono in recent elections. It’s $200,000 total came from just two sources, the Hawaii State AFL-CIO and William Reeves, co-founder of BlueCrest Capital Management and a major Hawaii contributor. Each put up $100,000.
Reeves also gave $100,000 to a Democratic committee, The Senate Majority Pac, which ranked at #3. He was the only contributor from Hawaii during that period.
Ready Pac was formerly known as the “Ready for Hillary Pac,” which pushed to draw Hillary Clinton into the presidential race. It’s largest and earliest contributor was Douglas Troxel of the Big Island, who put up $25,000 in November 2013, accounting for just over half of Ready Pac’s Hawaii contributions. Troxel was founder of SERENA software.
Several conservative PACs are also on the list, including the National Draft Ben Carson Committee, the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, Freedomworks, and the Ted Cruz Super Pac, Keep the Promise Pac.
I’ll be back later with more details on their contributors.