Washington — 5th District

With just over a week to go before the August primary, significantly more money is flooding into Eastern Washington’s congressional race than by November two years ago.

The surge has been fueled primarily by corporate, foreign and party interests jumping in early to defend incumbent Michael Baumgartner and the wealthy elites backing independent challenger Nate Powell, both directly and through opaque Super PACs.

While 11 challengers appear alongside Baumgartner on ballots this summer, only four have raised an appreciable sum: Powell, Carmela Conroy, David Womack and Bajun Mavalwalla.

Among them, Womack and Mavalwalla lag well behind the rest, both raising less than 10% of Baumgartner’s war chest. Womack’s largest donors all come from Walla Walla, where he resides, or Tulsa, Oklahoma, where his wife’s family lives. He has also donated roughly $11,000 of his own money into the campaign.

Mavalwalla’s campaign is unusually reliant on small-dollar donations, as well as those out of state; none of his donations are maxed out, and while the other top campaigns got 70-91% of their donations from Washingtonians, roughly 66% of Mavalwalla’s came from elsewhere. He recently made a $20,000 loan to his campaign to try to compete with the flood of political ads hitting the airwaves in the waning days of the campaign.

But it is Baumgartner, Conroy and Powell who have the most resources behind their campaigns. And in Powell’s case, it’s significantly more than at first appears.

Baumgartner

Baumgartner is enjoying the kind of PAC support he didn’t have in the open primary two years ago, when several Republicans were vying to become the successor to former Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers’ political legacy. Even compared to that general election, he’s significantly gained ground.

More than 100 different PACs have donated over $1,000 to the incumbent, and often much more.

Republican party or leadership PACs make up the largest donors by category, with roughly $89,000 raised from Baumgartner’s colleagues. The Republican congressman is sharing the love, having created two of his own PACs, Baum Pac and the Baumgartner Vanguard Society, to send money back to Republican candidates who need it and to the party itself. Combined, his two PACs have raised over $450,000, on top of the roughly $1.9 million his campaign has raised, according to reports from the Federal Election Commission.

A strong defender of Israel and a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Baumgartner’s largest single donor, by far, is the Israeli-interest group AIPAC, which had single-handedly donated roughly $68,000 to the candidate by the end of July. Combine that with roughly $11,000 raised from Turkish- and Pakistani-interest PACs, and foreign interest groups make up Baumgartner’s second-largest support sector.

Other industries are well represented, including roughly $24,000 from insurance company-affiliated PACs, more than $13,000 from timber groups, and over $15,000 from the sugar industry.

More than 30 people have donated the maximum legal amount of $7,000 ($3,500 each for the primary and general elections) to Baumgartner. These top donors include wealthy Washington philanthropists B. Corry and Donna McFarland, billionaire conservative activist Brian Heywood of Let’s Go Washington!, and Ekta and Sanjeev Saini, owners of Shree Investments and parent to philanthropist and beauty pageant titleholder Shree Saini, whose name graces the Shree gas stations found in Seattle and along I-90.

Peter and Beatrice Plath, members of the family that owns the agricultural heavyweight Washington Fruit Growers, are also maximum donors, as are heritage Christmas tree ornament moguls Timothy and Elizabeth Merk of Spokane’s Old World Christmas.

He’s churned through nearly $1 million of that cash – more than all of his opponents’ campaigns have spent combined, not including independent expenditures. Still, his spending habits haven’t left him vulnerable heading into the general election, as the nearly $1 million he has left on hand still dwarfs that of his challengers.

Opaque money

Federal law requires anyone who donated more than $200 to a political campaign to disclose who they are so that the public can see who is trying to influence elections. This disclosure entails not just providing their name, but other identifying information, such as their city and state of residence – voters often care if a candidate’s money is coming from down the street or 3,000 miles away – and also their employer and occupation.

These last two data points can be important for any number of reasons. If a donor is the CEO of a logging company, their donation may be more of a sign of support from the logging industry rather than a holistic stamp of approval from that individual. Federal officials also want to know if there might be a direct conflict of interest with a company under scrutiny by Congress.

Campaign finance laws provide a window into those motivations – so long as they’re actually followed. They often aren’t, with little if any consequence for the donor or the campaigns they give to.

The most common listed profession for Baumgartner’s donors, for instance, is retired – this is true of nearly all of the candidates – but a close second is “(empty)”, meaning the information simply wasn’t filled out.

This isn’t uncommon. Mavalwalla’s campaign finance reports are filled with people whose profession is listed as “TBD” – a placeholder while the campaign attempts to fill in the gaps, campaign treasurer Donald Dover said.

“I want everyone to know I’m at least making a good faith effort to try to get the information,” he said in a brief interview.

In other cases, the information that donors do provide raises questions.

Four members of the Reiner family, Andrew, Elizabeth, Rhonda and Halle, for instance, donated the maximum amount allowed by law to Baumgartner’s campaign. None of them listed their employer or occupation, and all of them listed Wilmington, Delaware, as their primary place of residence.

Wilmington, a town with a population roughly a third the size of Spokane’s, is better known as a corporate tax haven than a burgeoning metropolis. There are several times more companies and nonprofits incorporated in a single building in Wilmington than there are actual people who call the city home.

This lack of information made it difficult for The Spokesman-Review to determine who these people actually were – private relatives of the late Rob Reiner, perhaps? There is a Maryland-based self-help author named Andrew Reiner, and he happens to be married to an Elizabeth Reiner, but they aren’t the mystery donors, Andrew wrote in an email.

As it turns out, the four are all relatives of the late Daniel Reiner, the billionaire investor who died in a private lake north of Spokane in 2024. Rhonda is his widow; Andrew and Elizabeth were founding members of the board of the Reiner Family Foundation, a philanthropic organization created by Daniel. The foundation is incorporated in Wilmington, Delaware.

The foundation did not respond when asked whether the Reiners had recently moved to Wilmington to more closely monitor the family foundation’s mail.

The Reiners, at least, put their name on their money. Not everyone did.

Powell

A former Marine and current firefighter, Powell came out of nowhere to join the race to replace Baumgartner in Congress.

He had never run for office before, and wouldn’t have considered running for this position before he was recruited by the Working Class Heroes Fund, a political action committee founded by Dan Osborn, an independent U.S. Senate candidate from Nebraska who lost against incumbent Republican Deb Fischer in 2024, but significantly overperformed compared to Democrats challenging Republicans across the nation.

Osborn appears to be turning that loss into a nationwide campaign to try to replicate and improve upon his performance in districts that Republicans have held confidently for years.

The Working Class Heroes Fund has endorsed four candidates, including Powell, all of whom are firefighters running independent populist campaigns against Republicans in solidly red congressional districts.

As part of that populism, Powell has railed against the billionaire class, arguing that the issues facing Americans are not left versus right, but the upper class versus the working class. It’s a value, he argues, that distinguishes him from the incumbent.

Yet, likely through the influence of the out-of-state campaign hoping to boost a different kind of challenger, Powell’s campaign finances are replete with dark money and the billionaires he rails against, many of whom are donating from clear across the country.

This includes Django Bonderman, son of the late David Bonderman, a “low profile” Fort Worth billionaire, and Cale Bonderman, whose exact relation couldn’t be determined before publication. Both Django and Cale gave the maximum legal amount to Powell’s campaign.

Other top donors include Liz Simons, daughter of billionaire retired hedge fund manager and Democratic political donor James Simons and wife of billionaire philanthropist Mark Heisin, a former executive and two employees of premier quantitative trading firm Jane Street Capital; Michael Novogratz, CEO and founder of crypto company Galaxy Digital; and three wealthy philanthropists from New York and California.

The Working Class Heroes Fund itself is Powell’s single largest donor at $8,200, but the original source of that group’s money is opaque. Roughly half of the over $1.7 million it has raised to influence elections comes from just two dark money nonprofits, American Opportunity Action and Contours Inc.

Powell has for months faced criticism, largely from the Conroy campaign and its supporters, as being a dark money plant. In the face of that criticism, Powell has argued that $8,200, while the largest single donation to his campaign, is a drop in the bucket compared to the funds he has raised and will need to raise to defeat Baumgartner.

What he has largely been quieter about, however, is that it is also a drop in the bucket of dark money supporting his campaign.

Dark money

Voters have been inundated in the last week with flyers and video ads paid for by Fire House PAC. While the Super PAC cannot legally coordinate with the Powell campaign, it has spent over $600,000 – almost all of it in July – to buoy Powell and sink Baumgartner. There is only one minor exception: roughly $25,000 paid for on Thursday that attacks Conroy as a weak challenger to the incumbent.

Fire House PAC’s biggest single donor is, again, Contours Inc., a dark money group that has poured millions of dollars into Democrats and independents hoping to take on Republican challengers – or occasionally rival Democrats.

The organization has funneled $800,000 into the Independent Candidates Action PAC – which also happens to be Fire House PACs second-largest financial backer – and $450,000 into the Working Class Heroes Fund. Both of these recipients are groups affiliated with Osborn’s campaign to elevate independent challengers.

Contours has also dumped $2.9 million into the Government That Works PAC, a group that has in turn funneled millions into the Super PAC supporting Texas Democrat James Talarico’s Senate campaign. Another $2.6 million has poured from Contours coffers into the Progressive Vet PAC.

A 501(c)(4), Contours will never be required to disclose who is actually funding its political blitz, but the organization has also only existed since October, meaning there is nearly no publicly available information about who runs it. If it seeks an extension from the IRS, that information may not be available until well after the November election.

“The campaign has never spoken with these groups, but we are glad people are supporting Nate’s fight for working families against corporate-backed, AIPAC-funded Michael Baumgartner,” wrote Adam Sherill, Powell’s campaign manager. “Nate was the first candidate in this race accepted into End Citizens United’s ‘Unrig Washington’ program, committing to end the influence of corporate and dark money in DC when elected, and he’ll deliver on that promise when he defeats Michael Baumgartner in November.”

Another Super PAC, the Together for Working People PAC, has raised another roughly $380,000 this election cycle. Its funding sources are by far more transparent than Fire House’s, primarily supported by a handful of unions and wealthy Seattleites.

That group has spent a little bit of money elsewhere in Washington, but by far it’s largest spend has been roughly $260,000 attacking Baumgartner and supporting Powell.

Conroy

Former Diplomat Carmela Conroy, who faced Baumgartner in the 2024 general election and lost, came into the 2026 race as the likeliest challenger to face Baumgartner again this November.

Baumgartner appears to have acknowledged this, running the exact same attack ad against Conroy that he did before the primary two years ago – though some of Baumgartner’s other challengers believed then as they do now that attack is actually meant to elevate a challenger he thinks he can easily beat. The ad does set an unusual tone for something meant to denigrate a likely challenger, stating that Conroy wants to “tax the rich,” a popular position among the voters she hopes to reach.

“Michael Baumgartner is trying to pick his general election opponent to give himself an easier path to re-election,” the Powell campaign wrote in a Friday morning statement.

At first glance, Conroy’s campaign finances appear to confirm she’s in the top-two position, with roughly $400,000 raised since she started running. It’s a significantly better position than she was in this time two years ago, though her funders fall under largely the same patterns.

Eight PACs had given Conroy money by the end of July, and most are associated with unions, including a combined $10,000 from the Laborers’ International Union of North America and the UA Union Plumbers & Pipefitters Vote! PAC.

The American Defense and Military PAC, which has nothing to do with the defense industry but is rather a leadership PAC associated with Washington Congressman Adam Smith, also gave $2,000. The Center for Freethought Equality PAC, associated with an organization that promotes “issues the humanist and atheist community cares about,” gave another $250.

At least six people have given the maximum amount allowed by law, including John and Karen Cowen, retirees from Walla Walla; Angela and Grant Fredericks, who own Spokane Valley-based surveillance analysis company Forensic Video Solutions; the late Jerry LeClaire, former surgeon and major local Democratic donor; and Garry Shea, a financial advisor.

She had spent more than $230,000 from her war chest by the end of July, leaving her with roughly $170,000 cash on hand.

If the race was just about the cash flowing to the campaigns proper, Conroy would have a slight but noteworthy edge on Powell. That’s not the case this year.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly attributed a quote about the motivations behind an attack ad against Carmela Conroy. The quote came from a statement by Nate Powell’s campaign.