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.
More than 80 percent of small-dollar contributions raised this year by Republican congressmen facing competitive re-election fights went to just three candidates: Reps. Devin Nunes, Steve King, and Duncan Hunter.
We examined first-quarter fundraising numbers for every incumbent on the Cook Political Report’s list of competitive 2020 House races—52 Democrats and 35 Republicans in all. Nunes, King, and Hunter are the only congressmen of either party who got more than half of all their individual contributions in Q1 in the form of unitemized donations, or donations of less than $200.