Foreign-Influenced Corporate Money in Politics

Between 2017 and 2022, Washington state elections attracted more than $163 million in contributions from foreign-influenced companies with over 5% aggregate foreign ownership or a single foreign owner with over 1% stake — more than any of the other five states.

Source: OpenSecrets analysis of state campaign reports from the 2018-2022 election cycles for Colorado, Washington, New York, Montana, Michigan and Minnesota. Database includes all political contributions from corporate treasury funds totaling $1,000 or greater reported to state-level campaign finance agencies. Corporate PAC contributions are excluded. OpenSecrets cross-checked totals with data from the Center for Political Accountability and obtained voluntary corporate disclosures directly from companies. In cases where a corporation reported more political contributions from its corporate treasury than were available from the historical NIMP data, the information reported by the company was used instead. For companies with years where voluntary corporate disclosures were not available, state-level campaign finance data from the historical databases compiled by NIMP were used. OpenSecrets compiled foreign ownership information from OpenCorporates, Fintel, CNBC analysis of Refinitiv data, Yahoo Finance, CrunchBase, CNNMoney, publicly available investment portfolios, corporate proxy reports, Lobbying Disclosure Act filings, MuckRack, Market Screener, SEC Section 16(a) beneficial ownership reports, SEC Schedule 13D beneficial ownership filings and other records. EmbedDownload imageCreated with Datawrapper