Political Notebook: Super PACs could make a big comeback in Boston

January 3, 2025

By Gintautas Dumcius

If the past is prologue, prior election cycles in Boston offer a possible preview of what's to come in this year's mayoral contest and the campaign spending vehicles spawned by a 2010 Supreme Court decision. Depending on who gets in, the spending could set new records.

Josh Kraft, the son of New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, moved into Boston’s North End over a year ago, registered to vote, and sought to gauge support for a run against Mayor Michelle Wu, as she has clashed with some members of the city’s business community over bike lanes, new regulations, and a property tax shift proposal.

If Kraft formally enters the race, the city’s chattering class widely expects his wealthy family to help him, likely through the campaign vehicle known as a super PAC. Individual contributions to a candidate’s campaign committee are limited to $1,000 in a calendar year, but super PACs operate without such fundraising restrictions. A Kraft family spokesperson did not comment when asked whether they were weighing such a maneuver.

The 2010 Supreme Court decision known as Citizens United opened up the opportunity for wealthy individuals, corporations, and unions to raise and spend without limits through super PACs, and the entities burst onto Boston’s political scene three years later. Unions spent heavily in the 2013 mayoral contest to help elect Marty Walsh, a labor leader and state lawmaker, while business interests supported his opponent.

In 2021, with Walsh gone, and an open race for mayor underway, an unusual audition for the support of a billionaire who’d taken an interest in the race played out over several weeks in a Brighton warehouse filled with classic antique cars and bar. The car collection belonged to Jim Davis, who tended to the bar, serving up drinks. As the contenders chatted about their respective candidacies, public relations magnate George Regan, whose client list includes Davis’s Boston-based shoe company, New Balance, was also present for the sessions.

From the sessions with the candidates, Davis put his chips on then-City Councilor Annissa Essaibi George, whom he proceeded to back through a super PAC created just before the preliminary election. 

Wu, who did not meet with Davis, had her own super PACs, funded by mostly environmental advocates and lawyers. In fact, each 2021 mayoral candidate heading into the preliminary election had at least one of their own, some more active and effective than others. The final tally had super PACs spending $3.5 million on Wu and Essaibi George, similar to what was seen in 2013, according to campaign finance reports.

Wu again tangled with Davis and Regan in 2023, as left-leaning unions poured money into a super PAC that backed the mayor’s winning progressive slate of City Council candidates, and a separate super PAC had contenders supported by Davis and Regan, though overall spending totaled just hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

Regan, for his part, notched a win over Wu on the policy side a year later, after his firm worked to kill her property tax shift proposal on Beacon Hill, fiercely opposed by several clients.

Whether Davis jumps into another municipal election cycle, checkbook in hand, remains unclear. But inside his warehouse full of antique cars several weeks ago, he hosted an end-of-year fundraiser for City Councilor Ed Flynn, who has been mulling a mayoral run himself.

A Regan spokesperson did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Mariano and Spilka lambast the press

House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka took months to agree on bills curbing private equity’s influence on health care and high prescription drug costs, which were sent to the governor’s desk this week, in a last-minute frenzy of activity just before the end of the 2023-2024 session.

But on the first day of the new session, both legislative leaders, in separate New Year’s Day speeches addressing their members, appeared to find quick agreement on a problem plaguing Beacon Hill: Bad press.

Both touted a productive session, though they didn’t mention, as the ever-watchful State House News Service did, that they “enacted about 20 percent of the two-year term's legislation just on Monday into early Tuesday morning.” Mariano claimed “perception of our work is often at odds with what we know to be the truth about what we’ve accomplished.” Spilka added, “In an age when local news has been obliterated, state and local stories get bypassed in favor of national ones, and the major outlets we have here in Massachusetts choose to report more on personalities than policy, we can understand how frustrating it can be to try to get a handle on what is happening at the State House.”

Despite the griping, the legislative leaders said they’re interested in reforms of internal rules and calendars to make their chambers more transparent. Spilka said the Senate would post online summaries of bills that emerge from their Ways and Means Committee.

Neither Spilka nor Mariano named the Boston Globe, but the regional daily clearly earned their ire for its series looking into the Legislature this year, called “State Secrets.” A dive into Beacon Hill’s spending habits can be an evergreen story – CommonWealth took its own crack at the topic in 2016 – but the series also uncovered how a top lawmaker on a key committee has been dating an influential lobbyist, and how spouses of lawmakers-turned-lobbyists don’t have the same restrictions on campaign donations. The series showed how people in power operate, and the subsequent effect on policies.

Some legislators may view such reporting as an indication of a “fractured and distorted” media, as Spilka put it, but in the stories that flow out of Beacon Hill, it’s a cracked mirror.

We rely on your support to fuel our nonprofit journalism.