PAY DIRT

Tobacco-Funded Dark-Money Group Mysteriously Turns Up in Phoenix Mayor Race

A minor player by the standards of modern political dark-money spending, the group nonetheless had resources and wherewithal to play in a local race halfway across the country.

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.

In the days before Phoenix residents went to the polls to select the city’s new mayor last week, an obscure political group took out ads on social media and in Arizona’s largest newspaper hyping the soft-on-crime record of the race’s eventual winner.

The attack line was fairly typical, even if it elicited disavowals from the defeated candidate, Democrat Daniel Valenzuela. But the group behind it, an obscure dark-money outfit funded by a leading tobacco company, has no apparent ties to Arizona, or interest in its capital’s governance.

Advancing Freedom Inc. is based in Oklahoma, and appears to be a minor player by the standards of modern political dark-money spending. It’s not even large enough to file full-length annual reports with the Internal Revenue Service; the group has instead filled out the IRS’ “postcard” filing, reserved for groups with annual income of less than $50,000, each year since its 2014 formation.

But it nonetheless found the resources and wherewithal to play in a local race halfway across the country. It took out Facebook ads and space on the front page of The Arizona Republic attacking Kate Gallego, also a Democrat and the victor of last week’s mayoral special election.

Advancing Freedom’s presence in the race confounded local political observers. It’s still not clear why this small Sooner State group was so invested in the race in Phoenix. And there’s scant evidence of its involvement in any other recent electoral contest.

PAY DIRT was able to piece together at least some information about Advancing Freedom’s backers. In 2017, tobacco giant Reynolds American reported donating $10,000 to the organization. And three years earlier, it got $43,000 from another dark-money group called Competitive Governance Action.

Advancing Freedom did not respond to multiple requests for comment on its spending in the Phoenix mayoral race. But its involvement, in light of the group’s scant apparent connections to the city whose leadership it tried to help select, underscores just how thoroughly dark-money politicking can mask political motives.

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