| 2002 Soft Money Contributions by Texas Interests |
| Rank |
Organization |
Total |
To
Democrats |
To
Republicans |
| 1 |
Texans for John Cornyn |
3,100,000 |
0 |
3,100,000 |
| 2 |
Williams & Bailey |
2,361,400 |
2,361,400 |
0 |
| 3 |
O'Quinn, Laminack & Pirtle |
1,815,000 |
1,815,000 |
0 |
| 4 |
Governor Bush Cmte |
1,700,000 |
0 |
1,700,000 |
| 5 |
Nix, Patterson & Roach |
1,631,000 |
1,631,000 |
0 |
| 6 |
Stanford Financial Group |
1,258,595 |
1,015,500 |
243,095 |
| 7 |
Provost & Umphrey |
1,030,200 |
1,030,200 |
0 |
| 8 |
Kinetic Concepts |
831,000 |
0 |
831,000 |
| 9 |
Pilgrim's Pride Corp |
670,800 |
0 |
670,800 |
| 10 |
Baron & Budd |
650,000 |
650,000 |
0 |
| 11 |
El Paso Corp |
626,032 |
85,000 |
541,032 |
| 12 |
Ranger Governance Ltd |
525,250 |
0 |
525,250 |
| 13 |
Ernst & Young |
499,225 |
29,600 |
469,625 |
| 14 |
Dell Computer |
425,250 |
10,000 |
415,250 |
| 15 |
TXU Corp |
394,986 |
5,000 |
389,986 |
| |
|
17,518,738 |
8,632,700 |
8,886,038 |
|
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Soft money was outlawed by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA) in subsequent federal elections. The BCRA is
popularly known as McCain-Feingold after its main Senate sponsors, John
McCain (R-Arizona) and Russell Feingold (D-Wisconsin).
As the table shows, the top fifteen Texas groups and individuals that contributed soft money (among literally thousands) gave more than $17.5 million in 2001-2002, representing just over half of the $33.6 million total. The data in the table seem to indicate that soft money from Texas was split almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans. However, overall Republicans pulled in $21.4 million while the Democrats took in only $12.2 million in Texas soft money.
Nationally, Texas sources contributed just more than 5.5 percent of the $606 million in soft money raised by the Democratic and Republican parties in 2001-2002, putting the state in fourth place behind Washington, DC (42.4 percent), California (10.3 percent), and New York (7.2 percent). With the ban on soft money imposed by McCain-Feingold those millions are now available to enter politics through other even less-regulated, generally undisclosed channels.
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