A “dark money” group that spent millions of dollars this year on ads supporting conservative Democrats, including Reps. Henry Cuellar and Kurt Schrader, was funded by oil and gas industry lobbying group the American Petroleum Institute, Sludge has discovered.
Better Jobs Together’s ads do not explicitly endorse the candidates they praise, and the group does not report its activities to the Federal Election Commission. Federal campaign finance laws on “electioneering communications” allow groups to air political ads while avoiding disclosure as long as the ads do not explicitly say to elect or defeat a certain candidate, and are not shown within 30 days of an election., Rep. Vincente Gonzalez, Rep. Marc Veasey, Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, and Sen.
This is the second election cycle in a row that Cuellar has been boosted by a dark money political group that Sludge later uncovered was funded by API. In the 2020 election cycle, a then-unknown group called American Workers for Progress spent more than $720,000 on pro-Cuellar ads and mailers and wasto have received $1.3 million from API in 2019.