Steven Spielberg Is Backing Tony Evers

I have my doubts they ever met, but Hollywood movie director Steven Spielberg, known for such movies as Saving Private Ryan and Jurassic Park, has (along with his wife, actress Kate Capshaw), given $20,000 to the reelection campaign of Democratic Governor Tony Evers. That’s the maximum allowed under the law.

The contribution was listed in a recent report by the nonpartisan Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, which tracks campaign donations to candidates from both parties, along with spending by allegedly independent conservative and liberal advocacy groups, who do those “phony issue ads,” as WDC terms them, where they can’t tell you how to vote, but can dramatically declare, right up to election day, that a particular candidate is a despicable or wonderful politician. Since the U.S. Supreme Court‘s Citizens United decision of 2010 opened the floodgates to unlimited donations by corporations and wealth donors to these groups, the WDC has been left to track way more political spending.

The latest report finds that nearly half of the $10.13 million Evers raised during the first six months of 2022 “came from the state Democratic Party and 31 individuals….Evers’s fundraising haul was about 85 percent higher than the $5.46 million that his predecessor, former GOP Gov. Scott Walker, raised at a comparable time during the first half of the 2018 governor’s race.”

Which is a standard statistic for campaigns, as the amount raised each successive election is ever higher. If Evers wasn’t doing better than the incumbent governor of four years ago he would be be in deep trouble. Indeed, he may still be outspent if his Republican opponent is wealthy businessman Tim Michels, who has poured nearly $8 million of his own money into the primary campaign in just two-and-a-half months. Moreover, Evers money is merely for the traditional campaign. The spending by right-wing and left-wing advocacy groups could be massive for the general election, depending on how big a priority Wisconsin’s race is seen in national terms.

Walker, of course, was a champ at getting donations from out-of-state donors, with 34% coming from non-Wisconsin donors at about this point in his unsuccessful 2018 bid for a third term, as the WDC found. That same report found that 31 individuals gave the maximum donation of $20,000. Looks like Evers has exactly matched that total. As for what percent of Evers money is from out of state, the WDC hasn’t crunched those numbers yet. But by my count, 25 of the 31 top donors to Evers are from outside Wisconsin, while for Walker, 16 of the 31 top donors were from outside the state. However, for both candidates the top donors account for a small percentage of the total money raised.

Other notables from outside the Badger state who maxed out on donating to Evers, as reported by the busy folks at WDC, include:

-“Dirk Ziff and Natasha Ziff, of New York City. The billionaire couple inherited part of their fortune. Dirk later founded Ziff Capital Partners. Natasha is a former Forbes Magazine reporter.

-“Gaye Pigott, of Seattle, WA. Pigott and several extended family members own a nearly $7 billion stake in Paccar, one of the largest truck makers in the world that was founded by the family in 1905.

-“Hope Aldrich, of Santa Fe, NM, a retired newspaper publisher who is a member of the famed Rockefeller family.

-“Monica Horan Rosenthal, of Los Angeles, CA, a television and movie actress.” (For those who wonder who the heck she is, before marrying her name was Monica Horan, when she played the role of Amy MacDougall-Barone on the television sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond.”

-“Vincent Ryan, of Boston, MA, founder and chairman of Schooner Capital,” which has some $25 million in assets under management.

And for right-wing conspiracy theorists obsessed with liberal billionaire George Soros, there was a maximum donation to Evers from “Jennifer Soros, of New York City, president of the Jennifer and Jonathan Allan Soros Foundation.” Yes, the two are married and Jonathan Soros is the third child of George Soros and his first wife, Annaliese Witschak.

Do any of these donors actually know Evers? That seems doubtful. It’s all part of a trend of state elections in the U.S. getting nationalized into liberal vs conservative slugfests with the wealthy lined up on both sides.

Of course, if Ever’s opponent is Michels (and if I were a betting man I’d wager that Michels beats Rebecca Kleefisch in the primary election ), you could argue that at least half of Michels money comes from out of state. That’s because Michels has a $17 million mansion in Connecticut where his wife and kids live and where Michels, by his own account, lives much of the time: he confirmed that he has lived about half the time in Manhattan and Connecticut, where his children attended schools, since 2013, That news came out in early May, and there is no sign that Michels or his family intend to relocate back to Wisconsin.

Needless to say, if Michels were a Democrat, you would be hearing about his half-residency in Wisconsin ad nauseam on right-wing talk radio, from now till the November election.