Tag Archives: campaign finance

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The blue tsunami has a message for Virginia Democrats on data centers and campaign finance

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Last Tuesday’s historic win for Democrats nationwide may not feel immediately applicable to state-level politics in Virginia, which holds its own elections on odd years rather than syncing them with federal elections. Democrats already enjoy a trifecta in the state, and last week Virginia voters handily endorsed the constitutional amendments the party put forward to secure reproductive rights, marriage equality and voting rights.

So Virginia is bluer than ever – but that doesn’t mean next year’s state election will be a romp for Democrats. According to exit polls last week, 53% of voters have unfavorable views of the Democratic party. That’s better than the 59% unfavorable rating for Republicans, but it’s apparent that neither party has a well of good will to draw from.

Democrats won elections across the country this month because voters are mad at Trump, his inflationary policies and his war. But they are also angry about data centers and money in politics. These are grassroots issues that Virginia’s leaders have not adequately addressed. If they want to win next year, they should take them seriously now.

Even a couple of years ago, the notion that data centers would play a major role in national elections would have been inconceivable. This year, data centers were on the ballot. Voters adopted data center bans or restrictions in at least 38 jurisdictions, while rejecting proposed limits in precisely one.

Opposition to data centers played a role in high-profile Democratic victories in states as diverse as Ohio, Texas, Georgia, Colorado and South Carolina – all states with significant data center activity. According to a Bloomberg analysis, 40% of planned data center capacity in the U.S. is occurring in states that may now hit pause.

In Georgia, voters even flipped the public utilities commission to Democratic control, supporting candidates who campaigned on reining in monopoly utility Georgia Power. Like Dominion Energy, Georgia Power proposes a major buildout of gas plants to serve data centers. The incoming commissioners backed a data center construction freeze championed by Gov.-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms.

Virginia Democrats are out of step with the zeitgeist here. After years of making Virginia more welcoming for data centers, this spring the General Assembly passed only the weakest versions of a few laws demanding very little of developers. Nor would the new guardrails proposed by Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s “data center framework” do much to slow the buildout.

Where our leaders see data centers as the key to economic growth, residents just want them to go away. Polling conducted this year revealed that 69% of Virginia voters would be “uncomfortable” with a data center near them, while 72% opposed Virginia’s sales tax exemption for data centers.

Many data center opponents suspect the unrestrained spread of data centers has more to do with money in politics than economic policy. Certainly, a politician who accepts large campaign donations from a powerful industry, then acts in the interest of that industry, has an uphill job to persuade voters that the money wasn’t the reason.

A Pew Research Center poll conducted in May showed 74% of Americans considered money in politics a “very big problem for the country today.” A few weeks before the election, another poll showed voters were more concerned about corruption in government than any other issue.

The concern isn’t limited to Trump-style grifting by individual politicians; a depressingly high percentage of people now think corruption is endemic to government.

Americans support campaign finance reforms when they’re given the opportunity. Last week, in deep-red Montana, a ballot initiative to strip corporations of the ability to spend money on elections passed with fully 65% of the vote. The move follows a similar Hawaii law enacted in June. In Michigan, 82% of voters endorsed a set of campaign finance reforms, including a ban on utilities and large government contractors contributing to political candidates and their political action campaigns.

Virginia legislators consider – and reject – these kinds of campaign finance reforms just about every year, and they have never allowed voters to consider them in a referendum. As I’ve previously noted, Virginia is one of just five states that allow unlimited corporate campaign contributions. Legislators claim they can keep money from affecting their judgement. Voters know better.

Even in the wake of the blue tsunami, some Virginia Democrats still act like nothing has changed. At an Energy Commission meeting on Nov. 5, two days after the election, two Democrats joined three Republican members to block the sending of a letter to the SCC encouraging additional scrutiny of the proposed merger between Dominion Energy and NextEra Energy. The merger, of course, is all about data centers and the profit to be had from supplying them with power.

Four of the five who voted against sending the letter – two Democrats and two Republicans – are sitting legislators. For each of them, Dominion is the largest contributor to their election campaigns, doling out from $145,000 to $507,000 apiece during the last election cycle.

The spread of data centers and the role of money in politics are intertwined. Americans don’t like the influence of billionaires and big corporations on politicians under the best of circumstances. The tech oligarchs who sacrificed their don’t-be-evil principles on the altar of Donald Trump fully earned the revulsion of the electorate.

Give Elon Musk credit: if his $445 million effort to buy elections for Republicans failed spectacularly, at least he was upfront about what he was doing. That’s one rat who stayed on the sinking ship as the tsunami gained force. Other tech leaders might be wishing they hadn’t boarded in the first place.

If Virginia Democrats take last week’s election results to heart, they will adopt the data center reforms constituents are demanding and enact the campaign finance laws needed to ensure that people, not corporate interests, call the shots in Richmond.

This article previously appeared in the Virginia Mercury on November 10, 2026.

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Public utilities shouldn’t be funding the campaigns of the people who govern them

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Virginia House Speaker Don Scott is adamant that the nearly $4 million in campaign funds he has accepted from Dominion Energy won’t affect how he views the Virginia utility’s attempt to merge with Florida-based NextEra. 

Scott reportedly told a Virginia Public Radio reporter last week, “If you can’t take their money, eat their food and tell them no, then you need to go home.” 

Scott is, by all accounts, a very smart man, but I just have to ask: is he kidding himself, or us? 

I can’t answer for the Speaker, but I think I have enough of a grasp of human nature to know that what he is saying is bunk. 

If someone gives you something – even if it goes to your political campaign and not into your pocket directly – it influences you. It has to. Humans are hard-wired for this. Giving and taking – cooperating with each other – is at the root of our success as a species.

It’s why government ethics laws, including Virginia’s, have broad prohibitions on their employees accepting gifts that might influence them in doing their jobs. (Politicians have different rules.)  

No doubt some of us are more susceptible than others. Me, for example. Offer me something as trifling as a $3 item of corporate swag, and my feelings about you will grow a little warmer and fuzzier. Give me produce from your garden, and I am your friend for life. I know quite well that if I were to lose my mind and run for office, the only thing that would save my honor is my innate suspicion of anyone who tells me I’m great. 

Many legislators I have talked to who take Dominion money believe themselves to be made of sterner stuff. Money, flattery – they figure they can accept it as their due and never give anything back. Not a one of them admits to being influenced. If you point out that their committee votes align with Dominion’s interests more often than not, they will insist it’s because Dominion’s lobbyists are so good at what they do. 

I wonder how many voters buy that argument. I suspect they look at campaigns awash in corporate cash and feel only disappointment in their leaders, or cynicism about government altogether. 

Virginia is one of only five states that allow unlimited corporate donations to the campaigns of elected officials. Until just this year, shockingly, it didn’t even bar those officials from using their campaign money for personal expenses. (Florida, the home state of NextEra, limits contributions to candidates for legislative office in any election to just $3,000.) 

Defenders of Virginia’s status quo argue that there’s no harm as long as candidates disclose the donations, giving constituents the chance to vote out legislators if they are sufficiently outraged. Dominion hedges against this unlikely outcome by contributing to members of both parties. 

In any event, retribution is unlikely. Former Del. Tim Hugo, excoriated in the Washington Post back in 2013 for using campaign funds to pay a $9,000 personal cell phone bill, nonetheless sailed to reelection that fall. Hugo didn’t lose his seat until the 2019 “blue wave” election shifted his district to Democratic. 

Indeed, our campaign laws feel like a relic of the Old South’s reverence for personal honor. It’s as though adding limits would impugn the integrity of the gentlefolk who selflessly serve the public. 

According to the same nostalgic fantasy, campaign contributions are akin to philanthropy. In that bygone world that never existed, a corporation like Dominion would choose the recipients of its largesse based not on who can be expected to vote in its favor, but according to who it believes most capable of making laws benefitting the public.

But Dominion is not running a charity. It would not spend millions of dollars on legislators’ campaigns if it did not expect a return on its investment. Moreover, if donations did not produce the expected benefits, the company would stop making them. In the cold calculus of the real world, political spending equals influence equals profits. 

Dominion is also not concerned with ensuring that only smart, civic-minded people get into office. It confines its campaign spending to lawmakers who are already in office, with most of the money going to those in leadership positions or who are on the committees that have the greatest power to affect its bottom line. 

If giving money to campaigns did not make the company richer, you would expect Dominion to welcome campaign finance reform measures outlawing donations from public utilities. Prohibiting those donations would save the company tens of millions of dollars every year. 

But Dominion opposes the reform bills. The company claims its participation in “the political process” is on behalf of its employees and customers; it makes no mention of its shareholders.

Dominion’s lobbyists say the company favors a comprehensive approach to reform that addresses all donations, rather than singling out public utilities. Meaning, it won’t support this bill, but it might be okay with a different one that – oh, too bad! – has less chance of passing. Meanwhile, it intends to keep its favored legislators on its dole.  

Virginia’s loose campaign finance laws have survived years of reform efforts that came from members of both parties, only to be killed on orders of both parties’ leaders. But the Democratic Party of Virginia has stopped accepting money from Dominion, and today, most rank-and-file Democrats eschew donations from utilities. 

This puts Scott and several other leaders at odds with those they lead. With a Democratic trifecta now, there’s a valuable opportunity for the party to prove to voters that it cares more about their interests than its own. 

This year, the need for reform is especially urgent. If NextEra acquires Dominion to become the nation’s largest utility without the General Assembly acting to limit campaign spending, nothing will stop NextEra from flooding campaigns with so much cash that all pretense of legislators’ independence will be lost. 

That shouldn’t be acceptable to anyone. 

First published in the Virginia Mercury on August 31, 2026.

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In this arms race, the public loses

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The more things change, the more they stay the same.

A year after Dominion Energy suffered its biggest legislative loss in decades, Virginia’s largest utility is back as the most powerful political force in Richmond. Its influence appears to be greater than ever, powered by campaign donations so large that they warp what it means for legislators to serve the public.

As recently as 2017 I could argue that Dominion did not buy legislators. The amount of money changing hands just wasn’t enough. Former Senate Majority Leader and famous friend-of-Dominion Dick Saslaw received $57,500 over the two-year period 2015-2016. Most rank-and-file legislators got $5,000 or less. It was a lot for those days, but if a politician were going to sell their soul to a utility, you’d expect them to demand a higher price.  

What Dominion’s campaign contributions did buy was access for its many lobbyists, which led to relationships of trust, which in turn produced friendly votes. But if a legislator decided to vote against Dominion’s interest, the threat of losing a few thousand dollars in campaign cash would not have been a serious consideration.

It’s harder to make this case today. The amount of money Dominion contributes to its favored politicians has reached staggering heights. According to the Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP), Dominion has given out more than $11 million in campaign contributions so far in the 2023-2024 cycle, with the top five recipients of its largesse — three Democrats, two Republicans — each receiving at least $400,000. (As in the past, Dominion gives almost equally to Democrats and Republicans.) 

VPAP shows the top recipient is House Majority Leader Don Scott, D-Portsmouth, whose campaign has accepted $720,000 from Dominion in this election cycle. Of this, $125,000 came in on January 5, 2024, five days before the start of the current legislative session. Legislators are not permitted to accept donations during session, presumably to avoid (or at any rate, slightly lessen) the odor of undue influence. 

Scott received a total of 12 donations from Dominion between the end of the 2023 legislative session and the opening of the 2024 session, some of them to his campaign, others to the PAC he controls, from which he doles out donations to other Democrats.

I don’t mean to pick on Majority Leader Scott. Or rather, yes, I do, too, but it’s not just him. House Minority Leader Todd Gilbert, R-Shenandoah, reports receiving over $590,000 from Dominion since last April. Del. Terry Kilgore, R-Scott, has accepted $465,000 this election cycle. 

In the Senate, the top recipient of Dominion dollars is Mamie Locke, D-Hampton, at $515,000 in 2023. Sen. Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, reports $400,000 from the utility in 2023. Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, received “only” $280,000 from Dominion, which almost makes one question the strength of the relationship.  

The reason for the skyrocketing inflation in Dominion campaign contributions can be traced to a single source: the formation of the public interest group Clean Virginia in 2018. Wealthy businessman Michael Bills formed Clean Virginia specifically to counter Dominion’s influence. The deal was that Clean Virginia would donate to campaigns only if candidates agreed not to accept money from Dominion or Appalachian Power.

In its first couple of years, this meant Clean Virginia donated $2,500-$5,000 to most qualifying campaigns, which was more than ordinary rank-and-file members would have gotten from Dominion in the old days. Contributions in 2018 topped out at $12,659 for then-Sen. Chap Petersen, a well-known champion of campaign finance reform. Most, but not all, of those agreeing to eschew utility donations were Democrats, though the offer was nonpartisan. Clean Virginia’s contributions to all campaigns in 2018-2019 totaled $373,119. 

Bills probably had no idea he was setting off a campaign finance arms race. Dominion fought back by increasing its donations to legislators who still accepted its money, causing Clean Virginia to do likewise. The nonprofit’s total contributions skyrocketed to more than $7 million over the 2021-22 cycle — but Dominion doled out over $7.6 million. In just the first year of the 2023-24 cycle, Clean Virginia’s donations totaled over $8.5 million, while Dominion’s exceeded $10.6 million.

Clean Virginia has also matched Dominion in the generosity of its donations. Seven Democrats received $400,000 or more in 2023, with freshman Sen. Russet Perry, D-Loudoun, leading the pack at $593,149. Four Republicans also received Clean Virginia backing, in amounts ranging from $5,000 to $155,000.

Where does this end? So far, at least, Dominion seems to be doubling down. In addition to increasing campaign contributions tenfold, Dominion has nearly doubled the ranks of its lobbyists, from 16 in 2017 to 31 today, at a cost of millions of dollars more. Add in the gifts its charitable arm makes to pet charities of legislators it wants to curry favor with, and all this political influence gets very expensive. Clearly, Dominion believes it makes a return on its investment in the form of favorable legislative outcomes, or it wouldn’t be doing this. (And this legislative session seems to be proving it right, as I’ll discuss in my next column.) But how long will Dominion’s shareholders be willing to keep this up?

For his part, Michael Bills seems to have dug in for the long haul. No longer content to serve as just a counterweight to utility money, Clean Virginia has expanded its own team of lobbyists and become an advocate for ratepayer interests at the General Assembly. Its donations swamp those of all other public interest groups, including the environmental groups that have traditionally battled Dominion. But almost all of Clean Virginia’s funding comes from Bills. How long will he keep this up?

Ironically, the more money gets spent by both sides, the harder it may be to get campaign finance reform passed. The arms race may be just too lucrative for all legislators. 

Take what happened this year with Clean Virginia’s priority bill from Sen. Danica Roem, D-Prince William, which would bar campaign contributions from public utilities. Dominion opposed the legislation, as it always does. Nonetheless, the bill passed out of the Privileges and Elections committee on an 8-6 vote. The vote fell along party lines, but more telling was the fact that none of those supporting the bill accept money from Dominion; all those who voted against it do. 

The vote should have meant clear sailing to the Senate floor, but Louise Lucas, the powerful Chair of Senate Finance (and a Democrat), insisted on the bill being re-referred to Finance, where she never put it on the docket. As a result, the rest of the Senate never voted on it. 

Lucas, as noted before, accepted $400,000 from Dominion in 2023, four times as much as she received from the next largest donor, a homebuilder executive. Whether Dominion gave her so much money because of her long history of supporting the utility’s interests, or whether she supports the utility because they give her so much money, ultimately doesn’t matter. 

Almost all of the campaign reform bills introduced this year are now dead, most from the same kind of machinations that killed Roem’s bill. Sadly, it’s not just Dominion allies doing the killing. As the Mercury reported, the House counterpart to Roem’s bill died when not a single one of the 22-member House Privileges and Elections Committee made a motion for or against it, including those on Clean Virginia’s good-guy list. Their inaction may well have been on orders from their leadership, but the result is that the arms race continues.

However our senators and delegates justify their votes, this is bad for democracy. If a legislator can count on an easy $200,000 by taking Dominion money, or a just-as-easy $200,000 by not taking Dominion money, there’s a growing danger of small donors – of small voices  – becoming irrelevant.

And with the failure of election reform legislation this year, I’m afraid it will just get worse.

This post was first published in the Virginia Mercury on February 27, 2024.

Update: A colleague (not associated with Clean Virginia) wrote to complain that I had unfairly equated Dominion, a profit-seeking business entity, with Clean Virginia, a non-profit public interest group, making donations from both equally problematic. I would have said it is obvious that the public interest is not a special interest, but I have now made a memo to myself: if it goes without saying, say it anyway.

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Where ethics and utility profits intersect, a stain spreads across the “Virginia Way”

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Dominion buildingThe Virginia General Assembly has punted on ethics reform, preparing to pass watered-down legislation that does very nearly nothing. At the same time, legislators are about to pass a law that will cost Dominion Power’s customers more than half a billion dollars as a down payment on a nuclear plant that hasn’t been approved and isn’t likely to be built.

These are not separate issues.

Virginia has had an ethics problem since long before Bob McDonnell met Jonnie Williams. As many people have noted, the real scandal is how hard it is to break our ethics laws. So long as you fill out a form disclosing the gift, it’s legal for politicians to accept anything of value from anyone, to use for any purpose. By this standard, McDonnell’s biggest failure was one of imagination.

The legislation that appears likely to come out of the General Assembly merely puts a $250 cap on the price tag of any one gift, with no limit on the number of lesser gifts and no limit on the value of so-called “intangible” gifts like all-expense-paid vacations. The mocking of this bill has already begun.

Conveniently, the bill deals with a tiny side stream of tainted cash compared to the river of money flowing from corporations and ladled out by lobbyists. Corporations don’t usually give out Rolexes and golf clubs. Instead, they give campaign contributions. Here again, Virginia law places no limits on the amount of money a politician can take from any donor. Five thousand or seventy-five thousand, as long as your campaign reports the gift, you can put it in your wallet.

And here’s the interesting part: you don’t have to spend the money on your campaign. If gerrymandering has delivered you a safe district, you can use your war chest to help out another member of your party—or you can buy groceries with it. The distinction between campaign money and personal money is merely rhetorical. A spokeswoman for the State Board of Elections was quoted in the Washington Post saying, “If they wanted to use the money to send their kids to college, they could probably do that.”

In an eye-popping editorial, the Post ripped into one Virginia delegate who charged his campaign more than $30,000 in travel and meals, and another $9600 in cellphone charges, in the course of just 18 months.

As with taking the money, the only rule in spending campaign funds is that you file timely paperwork showing what you spent it on; the reports are not even audited. The theory originally may have been that the threat of public disclosure would keep a gentleman from taking money from unsavory persons. If you took it anyway, the voters would learn of it and throw you out. How quaintly respectful of the energy and capabilities of voters! How pre-gerrymandering.

And how pre-corporation. The smartest companies today spread the wealth around: more to the legislators in charge of the important committees, less where they just need floor votes. The largesse is bipartisan, making everyone happy but the voters. Certainly, a legislator who accepts thousands of dollars from a lobbyist would be churlish to criticize the company writing the check.

So what do you call someone who pays for his meals out of the check he gets from a company?

How about, “an employee”?

Environmental groups and good-government advocates have long decried the influence of corporate money in Virginia politics. In their 2012 report, Dirty Money, Dirty Power, the Sierra Club, Appalachian Voices, and Chesapeake Climate Action Network documented the rising tide of utility and coal company contributions to Virginia politicians, coinciding with a series of votes enriching these special interests.

Dominion Power has consistently led the “dirty money” pack. As the single largest donor of campaign funds aside from the Republican and Democratic parties themselves, its influence in Richmond is widely acknowledged, even taken for granted.  Most legislators will not bother to introduce a bill that Dominion opposes, even if they like it themselves. Critics joke that the General Assembly is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dominion Resources.

According to Dirty Money, Dirty Power, Dominion’s contributions to elected officials totaled $5.2 million from 2004 to 2011. The Virginia Public Access Project shows another $1.4 million in 2012 and 2013. The contributions overall somewhat favor Republicans, but often the contributions are so even-handed as to be comical, like the $20,000 each to Mark Herring and Mark Obenshain in the Attorney General’s race last fall. These contributions are not about supporting a preferred candidate; they are about buying influence.

Note that much of the donations don’t go directly to General Assembly members but to the parties’ PACs, which then dole out the money. This gives Dominion extra influence with party leaders—again, on both sides.

The result has been spectacularly successful for Dominion, which rarely fails to get its way. Bills it opposes die in subcommittee (witness this year’s bills to expand net metering). Bills it wants succeed.

That brings us to this year’s money bills. As you may have read here or in Virginia papers, Dominion has been “over-earning,” collecting more money from ratepayers than allowed by law. In the ordinary course of things, this would result in both a rebate to customers and a resetting of rates going forward to produce less revenue for the utility.

For Dominion, the solution is a bill that lets the company charge ratepayers for expenses it isn’t entitled to pass along under current law. (Indeed, in a nice touch, the bill actually requires Dominion to pass along these expenses.) Presto: it’s no longer earning too much, owes no rebate, and doesn’t have to cut rates.

In return, the ratepayers get the satisfaction of assuming the sunk costs of a new nuclear reactor that will probably never be built, plus whatever more money the utility spends on it going forward. I believe the technical parlance for this is “blank check.”

“But we must have nuclear,” our legislators murmur as they sign our names on the check. Um, why? Nuclear energy today can’t compete economically. Just last year Duke Energy gave up on two nuclear plants it had been building, after billing ratepayers close to a billion dollars in construction costs. (BloombergBusinessweek headlined its article on the subject, “Duke Kills Florida Nuclear Project, Keeps Customers’ Money.”)

Dominion itself understands the wretched economics of nuclear perfectly well; its parent company, Dominion Resources, just closed an existing nuclear plant in Kewaunee, Wisconsin, because it couldn’t produce power cheaply enough to attract customers. And that’s from a plant that’s paid for; energy from new plants is now more expensive than natural gas, wind, and even some solar.

Memo to Democrats: when the cheaper alternative is renewable energy, no self-respecting progressive signs on to nuclear.

The steadily falling price of wind energy, and more recently, solar energy, helps explain why nuclear is on its way out nationwide. The only nuclear plants under construction in the U.S. today are over budget and reliant on billions of dollars in federal loan guarantees.

Memo to Republicans: no self-respecting, Solyndra-bashing conservative signs on to nuclear.

The State Corporation Commission also understands the economic picture, and it has been skeptical of Dominion’s nuclear ambitions. On top of that, there are serious concerns whether a third reactor at North Anna could even get a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the wake of the earthquake that shut the existing units for four months in 2011. (For a good short history of the North Anna reactors, including the fine Dominion paid in 1975 for hiding the existence of the fault line, see this article in the local Fluvanna Review.)

So there’s a pretty good chance that Virginia ratepayers will find themselves following in the path of Duke Energy’s customers, with many hundreds of millions of dollars thrown down a rathole and nothing to show for it.

The elected officials voting for this boondoggle, on the other hand, will have plenty to show for it, unfettered by rules of ethics.