ICYMI: Kelly Loeffler’s Fundraising Committee Takes the Prize for Tone Deafness [The Daily Beast]

Loeffler’s “Wall Street-Style” Campaign Fundraising Gives Big Donors Access To Exclusive “Investor,” “Shareholder,” And “Board Member” Circles

After spending months trying to desperately defend shady stock trades and beat back allegations of insider trading, Senator Kelly Loeffler is reminding Georgians who she’s really looking out for: the “investor, shareholder, and board member” donors supporting her campaign. 

Loeffler’s “Wall Street-style” fundraising scheme not only reinforces where her priorities are, but is reminiscent of the “albatross around the neck of her re-election effort.” Loeffler is showing no signs of attempting to distance herself from her scandal or working to win back the trust of Georgia voters, even as polls show she is deeply unpopular as Georgia Republicans openly encourage her to drop out of the race. 

The Daily Beast: Kelly Loeffler’s Fundraising Committee Takes the Prize for Tone Deafness

By Lachlan Markay

Key Points:

• As Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) proclaims her exoneration from allegations of insider trading, she’s simultaneously building a campaign fundraising system that imagines her campaign as a Wall Street-style investment opportunity.

• The Georgia Republican is offering donors and fundraisers benefit packages to support her re-election bid. Those packages come in three tiers: investor, shareholder, and board member.

• That’s according to a fundraising brochure obtained by The Daily Beast, which also details each of the benefits that donors can expect from membership in what Loeffler’s campaign refers to as a “co-investor program” and has dubbed its “executive council.”

• [T]he terms that the Loeffler campaign has chosen for its tiered donor honorees now carry some additional political baggage. Though the Justice Department chose to drop its investigation into Loeffler over her and her husband’s stock trades before the coronavirus pandemic caused the market to crash this year, the timing and size of her trades has been an albatross around the neck of her re-election effort.

• Loeffler is doling out these donor perks despite having already loaned $10 million to her own campaign. The Senate’s wealthiest member, she has said she’ll personally spend twice that to win re-election in November.

• The task became significantly more difficult in March, when The Daily Beast reported that Loeffler and her husband, New York Stock Exchange chairman Jeff Sprecher, had sold millions of dollars in stock in the weeks after Loeffler attended a closed-door Senate briefing on the novel coronavirus.

Read the full story here.

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