Campaign cash flows from business community

Note: Links to detailed data of Nashville-area campaign contributions follow the body of this story.

The coincidences can be remarkable.

On a single February day, nine people with ties to Murfreesboro-based nursing home chain National HealthCare Corp. are simultaneously seized with a passion for the cause of Doug Ose, a Republican congressional candidate in the northeastern corner of California. They send a total of $18,000 his way.

In the past year, synchronicity has struck again and again in the offices of some Nashville companies. People keep deciding in droves to give contributions to the same candidate or political action committee.

Everyone knows what’s going on, of course. If you have a white-collar job in certain highly regulated industries — most notably health care and booze distribution — odds are that someone has put the touch on you in the past year to give up a bit of your gold for the company’s pet lawmaker or PAC.

Corporations can’t give money to candidates in this country and they are limited in what they can give to PACs. So they encourage employees to donate as individuals.

The political parties and the 2008 presidential candidates have raised money from “ordinary people” as never before, using the Internet to solicit small contributions in tremendous amounts. But for all the attention grassroots fundraising has attracted, the old model of corporate underwriting is still alive and well in American politics.

A City Paper analysis of campaign contributions reported by the Federal Election Commission so far in the 2007-08 cycle highlights the role Nashville companies are playing now, as they have in past elections, to fund electoral campaigns from all parts of the political spectrum at the federal level.

There’s no sure way to tell between the motivating roles of business interest and real political commitment in evaluating the $13 million that Middle Tennesseans have donated to federal campaigns and committees since 2007. It’s easy to be cynical, but the widely acknowledged master of political fund-raising in Nashville, real estate investor Ted Welch, insists most donations have sincere motivations.

“A very high percentage of people give because they believe in the candidate,” says Welch, who has been a key supporter of Republican presidents and causes since the 1980s. “A much smaller percentage are giving money for what they think they can get out of it.”

GOP leads two to one

Whatever their intentions may be, businesspeople in the Nashville area have accounted for a large proportion of the $7.8 million in Republican money and the $3.2 million of Democratic cash raised locally from January 2007 through the end of August 2008. And business folk provided essentially all of the $2 million given to industry-sponsored political action committees, such as the Federation of American Hospitals PAC and the National Beer Wholesalers Association PAC.

The more than two-to-one lead of Republican cash over Democratic reflects the strength of GOP support outside reliably “blue” Davidson County. It also reflects circumstances different from prior electoral cycles such as 2000, when Tennessee’s Al Gore was the presidential nominee. The $245,000 in “soft money” that longtime Democratic operative Jane Eskind personally donated to the Democratic National Committee during 2000 is more than the top six Democratic donors of the current cycle have given in total. (Subsequent legislation put limits on soft-money donations.)

Naturally, the GOP funding lead also correlates with the predominance of business owners on the list — the local business class tends to be solidly Republican. Reading down the lists of donors to John McCain, Fred Thompson, Lamar Alexander and other GOP stalwarts, business owners and senior executives appear every few lines.

Their support helped make Thompson the top recipient of local political largess. In the brief time his presidential primary campaign flourished, it raked in more than $1.5 million in 1,443 donations. And Thompson’s people were going all in, with an average donation above $1,000.

Barack Obama’s campaign, curiously, reports receiving almost exactly the same number of local donations that Thompson’s did — 1,438 in the current cycle — but the Democratic nominee has taken in only half as much money, $768,000.

That difference reflects Obama’s tendency to attract small contributions in large numbers. Just over half of Obama’s local donations were for $300 or less, while a quarter of McCain’s 670 Nashville-area donations were at or below $300.

Since the campaigns are not required to report supporters giving less than $200, it’s possible that contributions below that level bring Obama somewhat closer to the $1.04 million in total contributions posted by John McCain 2008 Inc., the funding entity of the McCain campaign during the primary season, and McCain Victory 2008, a PAC supporting McCain in the general election.

Enlightened self-interest?

One clear trend in the local data is that the more an industry depends on Washington for funding or permission to operate, the richer the rewards it offers up to politicians at the federal level.

Health care providers are typically at the mercy of government-set payment rates for much of the care they offer and government-mandated regulations controlling the flow of that money. Small wonder, then, that 2007-08 contribution records show locally based executives of HCA and its subsidiaries giving some $272,000 to congressional and senatorial candidates of both parties across the country, as well as health care trade PACs.

Vic Campbell, a senior vice president at the nation’s largest hospital chain, says HCA has a duty to spread that cash around.

“HCA provides nearly five percent of all health care delivered in this country,” Campbell explains. “With the many compelling health care issues we are facing as a nation — access, rising costs, 47 million uninsured Americans — we would be falling down on our responsibilities if we did not give voice to those issues in the political process.”

Ted Welch, who turned down a cabinet position in the Reagan administration after raising millions for the president’s campaigns, encourages a charitable view of those who may stand to gain from their gifts — even those who dole out funds to both parties at the same time.

“It could be that they believe the reason we have the greatest political and economic system in the history of the world is not because of what Republicans have stood for over the years or what Democrats have stood for over the years,” Welch surmises, “but the fact that we have a strong two-party system in this country.”

Downloadable files of Nashville's top contributors and where their money went:

Top overall donors

Top donors by party

All donors of $2,000 or more

Top recipients of local contributions