Special-interest cash eclipses hometown support in a hurry | www.myajc.com

New candidates for the General Assembly often run as outsiders challenging the status quo.

But the winners become instant insiders, absorbed by the very system they ran against.

An analysis of campaign contributions by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution finds that first-time legislative candidates rely on money from friends and neighbors until they win their party primary. Even before they win the general election, fundraising shifts out of candidates’ home districts and into the hands of the professionals: the political action committees, the lobbyists and other special interests.

“I think it’s disgusting,” said Tom Bordeaux, a former Democratic legislator and current Savannah city councilman. “It teaches you your eighth-grade civics class is a lie,” he said. “Regardless of whether an individual is honest, a system fed with barrels of cash is corrupt, and the system is definitely corrupt.”

The AJC studied the campaign records of 38 lawmakers elected in 2010 and re-elected two years later and found the candidates received nearly half of their contributions from their own constituents leading up to their first party primary. After that, they were on the special interest gravy train, collecting more than three-quarters of campaign money from outside their districts, largely from PACs, lobbyists and other campaigns.

That fundamental shift away from home-district support tends to make special interests, and not constituents, more important to a lawmaker’s political future. The legislator’s greatest political asset is incumbency; the most effective way to remain the incumbent is to raise large sums of cash; the biggest sources of campaign cash are, you guessed it, not the folks back home.

Where did the money come from?

The transition from candidate, raising money locally, to incumbent, raising money from lobbyists and PACs, happens at light speed. And sometimes it happens so quickly even the candidates may not notice.

“Mine is pretty balanced,” said Rep. Valerie Clark, R-Lawrenceville, when told about the AJC’s findings.

She may think so, but since the 2010 primary, 95 percent of her fundraising has come from ZIP codes outside her Gwinnett County district. After she spent some time looking at her campaign filings, Clark, a former schoolteacher and principal, agreed.

Clark said she has local fundraisers, but they just do not raise as much as a fundraiser downtown.

“When I have a (local) fundraiser I very often don’t ask for money,” she said of her local events. “Sometimes I get $10 and $20 contributions from former colleagues.”

But you can’t spell impact without PAC. In the month after her 2010 primary, Clark received $2,500 from the state and local chapters of the Georgia Association of Educators, $500 from the state credit union PAC and $250 from the state chiropractors. Once she was the party’s nominee, she took in thousands more from Republican incumbents in the Legislature recycling their own special-interest contributions to expand both their party’s and their own political clout.