Gottheimer’s super PAC received nearly $10 million from his congressional campaign, FEC filing shows

As two super PACs supporting Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Tenafly)’s campaign for governor have spent millions on the airwaves, there’s been widespread speculation about whether their funding is coming mostly from Gottheimer’s own congressional campaign. A new filing today with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) confirms that to be the case.

According to Gottheimer’s 1st quarter FEC report, his congressional account transferred $9,599,501 into Affordable New Jersey, a super PAC supporting his campaign for governor, between January 1 and March 31.

Gottheimer ended the quarter with more than $11 million still on hand, so that Q1 total may not be the entirety of what Gottheimer’s congressional campaign is indirectly contributing to his gubernatorial effort via Affordable New Jersey or No Surrender, another pro-Gottheimer group that didn’t make an appearance in today’s FEC filing.

Gottheimer isn’t the only representative to make such a transfer; Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-Montclair), another one of the six Democrats running for governor, gave $127,500 from her congressional campaign to One Giant Leap PAC, a group supporting her gubernatorial campaign. That only represents a small portion of One Giant Leap’s total fundraising, though, which does not appear to be the case for Gottheimer’s PAC.

Transfers between federal campaign accounts and super PACs, which have far fewer limitations on donations and spending, are perfectly legal under both state and federal campaign finance law. The size of Gottheimer’s transfers, however, raises questions about whether they violate existing FEC guidelines regarding outside groups that are funded wholly or largely by federal candidates.

Under New Jersey’s public financing program, Gottheimer faces strict limits on how much he can raise and spend for the competitive June primary election for governor. The five-term congressman wouldn’t have been able to directly transfer his federal campaign money into a state-level account, and even if he had been, he wouldn’t have been able to use most of it thanks to an $8.7 million cap on total spending during the primary election. (Gottheimer did also have the option of simply opting not to participate in the matching funds program.)

Independent expenditure groups, though, face no similar restrictions, and so when Affordable New Jersey and No Surrender began spending millions on TV ads supporting Gottheimer’s gubernatorial campaign, the congressman’s federal campaign account – which had more than $20 million on-hand at the end of 2024 – seemed like a possible source. Gottheimer had declined to comment on that possibility when asked by the New Jersey Globe in February.

New Jersey campaign finance law is relatively loose when it comes to outside spending. Outside groups face essentially no limits on how much they can spend or who they get their money from, and Gottheimer’s PACs won’t have to file any campaign finance reports until late May.

But the FEC has ruled that there are some restrictions on expenditure groups that are “directly or indirectly established, financed, maintained, or controlled” by a federal candidate, which it’s defined in the past as being groups that receive 25% or more of their funding from a single candidate. Gottheimer’s $9.6 million transfer to Affordable New Jersey certainly seems like it might blow past that threshold, though there’s no way to know for sure until the PAC reports how much money it’s raised in total.

Sherrill filed a request for an FEC advisory opinion earlier this year regarding transfers from a federal account to a state account, though she later withdrew the request after the FEC sent her two competing draft opinions. Sherrill could have theoretically been asking for herself, but the small size of her own transfer suggests the request was intended to hobble Gottheimer; Sherrill instead pursued the alternate strategy of using most of her congressional money on ads boosting her profile during her 2024 re-election campaign.

Gottheimer isn’t the only gubernatorial candidate with an unusually close connection to his allied super PAC, which are by law forbidden from directly coordinating with the candidates they support. New Jersey Education Association President Sean Spiller’s campaign has been almost entirely outsourced to a super PAC funded by the union he himself leads – to such an extent that Spiller’s own campaign didn’t even raise enough to qualify for matching funds or the primary debate stage.

(The fact that Spiller’s candidacy has been propped up by millions in teachers union dues – his PAC, Working New Jersey, has pledged to spend $35 million on the race – has caused considerable consternation from his opponents and even from many teachers within the union; “It’s just insane,” Ocean Township Mayor and longtime teacher John Napolitani told NJ Advance Media this morning.)

Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, too, has had a complicated and at times controversial relationship with his allied PAC, Coalition for Progress. The PAC has been steadily raising money since 2015, when Fulop was first considering running in the 2017 gubernatorial election, and has taken in a number of donations from developers and companies that do business with the city Fulop leads.

And even candidates who have more traditional outside support, like Sherrill and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, inevitably have pre-existing connections to the donors and staffers who run the super PACs supporting them. The purportedly sharp distinction between candidate and outside group is a blurry one – and Gottheimer’s congressional cash transfer is an especially obvious example.