Who's Giving Big Bucks to Our Senate Candidates?
05/07/2012
Flickr: World Economic Forum
Linda Lingle is backed by Hawaii business executives like Ernest Nishizaki and Constance Lau, former U.S. senators John Danforth and Phil Gramm and several members of the hotel family Marriott.
Mazie Hirono has received the financial support of megastar Barbra Streisand, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, local legal eagles Paul Alston, Brook Hart, Gary Galiher and Jeff Portnoy and a consultant in Washington, D.C., named Linda A. Lingle.
(No — not that Linda Lingle.)
And Ed Case received contributions from Kailua magnate Mitch D'Olier, Outrigger hotel executive David Carey and Hilo attorney Jay Kimura.
Those are some of the name-dropping nuggets to come out of the most recent quarterly campaign disclosure filings with the Federal Election Commission for Hawaii's top U.S. Senate wannabes.
In addition to sometimes being gossipy fun — e.g., actor George Takei (Sulu of "Star Trek") gave Hirono $500 — the list of names provides insight into the kind of support the three leading candidates for the U.S. Senate have attracted.
For example, Lingle and Hirono are getting major contributions from a lot of folks who don't live in Hawaii. They include lobbyists, financial investors and attorneys — the kind of folks who will have a vested interest in who wins the race. Many have maxed out at the $5,000 limit for the primary and general election cycles.
Most of Case's supporters, meanwhile — and they are far, far fewer in number than either Lingle's of Hirono's, befitting the candidates' much larger donation totals — are from Hawaii.
At least one person — former admiral and Hawaii Superferry exec Tom Fargo — gave money to all three candidates ... although in unequal amounts.
Because Senate disclosures are still not electronically generated — unlike those for candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives — it's impossible to quickly search for names. We scoured more than a thousand pages of PDFs so that you don't have to.
As always, we apologize if we left your name off the list. (Fear not, Walter Dods — we got ya covered.)
And if we misspelled a name, got a contribution wrong or misidentified an affiliation, please let us know ASAP.
