Yesterday, Haley Stevens, Mallory McMorrow, and Abdul El-Sayed attended a Democrat Senate candidate forum with the United Auto Workers union in Washington D.C. Their messy primary was on full display with all three of them at odds over accepting corporate PAC money in their campaigns.
As reported by Huff Post:
The Democratic Party is in the middle of fierce intra-party debates over everything from health care to immigration enforcement to the War in Gaza, but the issue which could drive more primary fights than any other has as much to do with how candidates fill their campaign coffers as it does with the policy positions they hold.
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“If you take money from certain people, it’s not like that money doesn’t come with strings,” said Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive who is running for Michigan’s open Senate seat while rejecting corporate PAC money. “I don’t have any strings attached to any corporations who stand to gain based on what I say or what I do.”
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Michigan is perhaps the state where the divides are sharpest, as shown by the arguments at a candidate forum hosted by the United Auto Workers on Wednesday. After a UAW member directly asked if the candidates were taking corporate PAC money, both El-Sayed and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow said they weren’t.
Rep. Haley Stevens, the most moderate of the three candidates and the preferred candidate of Democratic leaders in Washington, does not apologize for her willingness to take corporate PAC donations. She instead focused on her desire to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.
“I’m not a millionaire, and I don’t own stock,” Stevens said. “I’m running my campaign in a grassroots way.”
McMorrow, who took corporate PAC money earlier in her career but now shuns it, gently called out Stevens for not answering the question: “We need to know who our next senator is working for.”
El-Sayed, meanwhile, made sure to highlight his consistency: “I’m the only person on this stage who has never taken a dime of corporate PAC money and never will.”
In an interview with HuffPost before he rolled out a plan last month focused on making sure municipalities benefit from the growing number of controversial data centers in Michigan, El-Sayed noted both his opponents have accepted donations from PACs linked to utility companies in the state who stand to benefit from increased electricity usage.
State and federal campaign finance records show PACs affiliated with three Michigan utility companies gave $19,500 to McMorrow’s campaigns for state legislature and $58,500 to Stevens’ congressional campaigns.
“They say ‘follow the money,’” El-Sayed told HuffPost.
McMorrow has said she took corporate PAC money early in her career because she thought it was necessary to win races ― even once arguing about it with progressives online in a now-deleted tweet ― but is turning it down now because “the corporate influence in federal politics is out of control.” Her campaign, meanwhile, is ready to highlight how Stevens, who has accumulated plenty of union endorsements, has taken cash from companies like Amazon and others with sketchy records on labor issues.
Read more here.
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