Thank goodness, Gov. Murphy wasn’t able to gut the independence of the Election Law Enforcement Commission (ELEC)!
The invaluable ELEC has come out with another of its reports, this time on lobbying expenditures from 2000-2022. Because ELEC deals in hard data, these reports reveal the true state of political spending in New Jersey: once again, New Jersey’s most powerful special interest, the NJEA, is BY FAR the biggest political spender. No one else even comes close.
Here are ELEC’s numbers for lobbying expenditures from 2000-2022:
- New Jersey Education Association – $52,560,827
- AARP – $16,563,882
- Verizon – $16,398,266
- Horizon BCBS – $16,288,805
- PSEG – $15,9816,07
- NJ Hospital Association – $13,546,085
- Prudential – $11,688,355
- NJ State League of Municipalities – $11,074,028
- Engineers Labor-Employer Cooperative – $10,600,153
- Comcast – $10,106,102
- New Direction New Jersey – $9,378,381
Bottom line: the NJEA spent more than the next three biggest lobbying spenders COMBINED. And note that #11 New Direction New Jersey was a pro-Murphy Super PAC that got 80% of its funding from the NJEA, so the NJEA’s spending may actually be considerably higher.
But what is really revealing is the NJEA’s utter dominance in yearly spending totals: the NJEA can spend as much as it wants wherever and whenever it chooses. Think how that skews the political playing field in their favor.
- 2011 NJEA – $11,259,886
- 2015 NJEA – $10,348,911
- 2010 NJEA – $6,869,256
- 2019 NJEA – $6,240,028
- 2020 NJEA – $6,255,530
- 2006 Verizon – $4,717,250
- 2016 Engineers Labor-Empl, Coop. – $4,392,830
- 2103 NJEA – $3,316,893
- 2017 Horizon BCBS – $2,524,921
- 2009 NJ Progress PAC – $2,151,864
Bottom line: the top five years are all NJEA, as are six of the top ten, and ALL of them have occurred since 2010. 2010 to the present is the modern era of the NJEA, an era characterized by an all-politics-all-the-time focus and the creation of the NJEA’s Super PAC, Garden State Forward, which has allowed the NJEA to spend unlimited amounts of money on politics.
Here are the three major take-aways:
- The ELEC data says it all: in the six years since 2010 that the NJEA topped the yearly lobbying tables, the NJEA spent over $44 million of its $52 million. That is, the modern, all-politics-all the time NJEA spent 85% of the twenty-three-year total in a mere six years.
- ALL of this $52 million in political spending was funded by teachers’ highest-in-the-nation dues. The NJEA leadership simply appropriates the money and spends it on lobbying as it sees fit. Teachers have no say in the matter.
- ALL of this money ultimately came from New Jersey taxpayers, mostly property taxpayers. The NJEA long ago rigged the system whereby property tax dollars are funneled directly to the NJEA via automatically withheld teachers’ dues. The NJEA then spent $52 million of those tax dollars influencing elected politicians to pass laws …. favorable to the NJEA.
Including elected pols like Murphy, who has benefited from at least $16 million from the NJEA, his biggest political supporter. (It’s unclear how much of this $16 million is included in ELEC’s lobbying numbers).
Sunlight wonders whether Gov. Murphy’s attempt to diminish ELEC’s independence had anything to do with ELEC’s determination to provide New Jersey citizens with the truth about our special-interest-dominated political system: the NJEA is by far and away the dominant political player in the state.