Misleading, negative campaign ads are a fact of life in politics, and they aren’t going away. But the voters should at least know who is really paying for them.
In another four weeks, that’s going to be even tougher to tell in Mississippi, when a law passed by the Legislature during the 2019 session exempts nonprofit groups, even those involved in electioneering, from having to disclose their donors.
Even though the law doesn’t take effect until July 1, at least one “dark money” group apparently thinks it already is covered by that shield.
Recently, a group called Mississippi Civil Justice Alliance began running a radio ad attacking Attorney General Jim Hood, who is running for governor this year. The ad criticizes the Democrat for using private attorneys to sue insurance companies to get some of the money back that the state spent when the insurers denied homeowners’ wind damage claims following Hurricane Katrina.
The ad claims that Hood is making things worse for homeowners on the Gulf Coast whose lives were turned upside down by this cataclysmic storm in 2005. It says that the lawsuits the attorney general is pursuing will translate into even higher property insurance rates, while only benefitting the government and Hood’s trial-lawyer friends.
The ad is mostly bogus, in that the homeowners had no claim on the money that Hood is pursuing. He is going after funds, most of which came from the federal government, that the state spent to help homeowners rebound from losses that Hood argues the insurers should have covered instead.
The state has filed a dozen lawsuits against insurers over this alleged shifting of their costs to the government. So far, four of the cases have been settled for a total of $5.7 million recouped by the state.
Who is bankrolling the ad attacking Hood? The founder of the Civil Justice Alliance, Derek Easley, isn’t saying, and the Secretary of State’s website doesn’t have any information in that regard either.
Technically, the Civil Justice Alliance may be in violation of the current campaign finance reporting laws, but those are about to change, thanks to Republican efforts to keep this spending by special interest groups in the dark.
This essentially anonymous attack ad is just the beginning. Watch for a lot of these shell nonprofits to be founded in coming months to do the candidates’ dirty work, but without having to acknowledge who is putting up the money.
