Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
Former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore appears poised to defy his own party leaders—including Donald Trump himself—and take another shot at the U.S. Senate seat he managed to lose to Democrat Doug Jones in 2017.
But this time around, Moore won’t have anywhere near the same level of support from deep-pocketed political expenditure groups that he did two years ago. A Republican operative deeply involved in the pro-Moore push during his last Senate run tells PAY DIRT that he’s not helping him this time around, and that Moore will likely be hamstrung by a lack of financial support in a crucial contest for Senate Republicans.
Rick Shaftan, a GOP consultant who coordinated efforts by pro-Moore independent expenditure groups during the 2017 race, predicted that the pushback Moore is getting from national Republicans would likely only harden his resolve to mount another Senate bid. But in spite of his prior support, Shaftan said he won’t be backing Moore this time.
“Roy Moore is not going to be a U.S. senator,” Shaftan told PAY DIRT in an interview Wednesday. “He’s just not an effective spokesman anymore. It’s time for a new generation.”
The network of super PACs that Shaftan helped coordinate in 2017 were among nearly a dozen outside groups that supported Moore’s unsuccessful candidacy. And they enjoyed backing from some of the Republican Party’s top donors, including industrial-supply tycoon Richard Uihlein; retired energy executive Tatnall Hillman; and Steven Hotze, a homeopathic doctor from the Houston area who opposes vaccination nearly as much as he does homosexuality.
All told, independent political spenders dropped more than $3.8 million supporting Moore or opposing Jones during the 2017 race, according to Federal Election Commission records.
That network of independent expenditure groups won’t be available to Moore this time around, Shaftan said. “The IE infrastructure was there in the general against Doug Jones,” he noted, and won’t be inclined to back Moore in a primary given his liability as a general-election candidate. To the extent that high-dollar donors want to back Moore, Shaftan added, they’ll largely be donating directly to his campaign, and forced to contend with individual contribution limits, which restrict donors to $2,800 per election.
What Moore does have going for him financially, Shaftan said, is an impressive track record of grassroots fundraising. “When Roy Moore was popular, at the peak of his career, he raised a lot of money through low-dollar contributions,” Shaftan said. But in each case, he added, Moore’s campaign overhead appeared to quickly eat up all that cash. “The last campaign, he had some money, his [advertising] buys were pretty small,” Shaftan said. “He can raise a lot of money, but I don’t think he’s going to net a lot of money.”
Despite those likely troubles, Shaftan lamented that Moore’s entry into the race is all but assured at this point. “I’ve had to have this difficult conversation with people over the years, that it’s time to get out, you shouldn’t run,” he recalled. “Some of these guys, it’s sad, you talk them out of running, they don’t run again, then their life ends. It’s their whole life. No one is kissing their ass like they did. It’s sad.”
“They have to dream,” Shaftan said. “You have to tell them the dream is not going to happen.”
Get the data:
