Wells Fargo flooded local elections with donations. Who were the recipients?

Over the past decade, Wells Fargo has tripled its donations to groups focused on influencing state elections as the retail banking giant tries to shake up local policymaking, according to public information and a bank spokeswoman.

While the billions of dollars Wall Street and tech moguls poured into Tuesday’s general election dominated the headlines, Wells Fargo’s increased local spending shows just how important state politics has become to big companies.

Banks and other organizations are facing increasing workloads and in some cases hostile government officials, some of whom want to curtail what they call “emergent capitalism”—corporate policies on hot-button issues like guns, fuel lending and diversity.

In the 2024 election cycle through Sept. 30, Wells Fargo gave a total of $704,300 to three Democratic and three Republican organizations known as 527s that focus on electing governors, attorneys general and state legislators, according to data from the Center for Political Accountability ( The CPA), a non-partisan transparency organization.

Those contributions, split evenly across groups, rose more than 200% in the 2014 cycle, according to the Washington group.

527 organizations are advocacy groups that can raise unlimited corporate capital to promote candidates for office. The six tracked by the CPA, none of whom responded to Reuters requests for comment, receive the bulk of the money from politically oriented companies.

A spokesperson for Wells Fargo said the bank’s engagement with 527s is focused on policy making and that it ensures that its contributions are used only for operational and administrative purposes rather than supporting or opposing candidates for office.

“Like many companies, Wells Fargo regularly consults with elected officials at the local, state, and federal levels to discuss public policy solutions that are important to our customers and the communities we serve,” a spokesperson said, without commenting on any specific policies.

Bank of America, another retail banking giant, has kept its contributions to the same six groups steady at about $400,000 per round since 2014, while Citigroup has dropped about 60 percent over that time, according to the CPA.

A BofA spokesperson said the bank does not allow donations to be used to support or oppose candidates. Citigroup declined to comment.

In 2023, JPMorgan used money from labor-sponsored political committees to pay for memberships in four out of six of the same 527 groups—they spent a total of $101,500 reported—but don’t donate corporate funds, according to the bank’s website.

While deeply divided Washington has suffered from partisan gridlock, statehouses tend to tilt in one direction, giving local legislatures broad power to shape policy.

Voters in 44 states will elect 5,808 state lawmakers on Tuesday, which is 78% of all legislative seats nationwide, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. There are also 11 gubernatorial races.

Bruce Freed, the founder of the CPA, said that 527 organizations in the last decade have changed state-level politics – where issues such as congressional suspensions and reproductive rights are decided – that help to perpetuate the bias that is now evident in the behavior of federal lawyers and the country of America. politics in general.

“If a company contributes to a 527, that’s used for political purposes,” he said. “They can say whatever they want, but the truth is that the money is being used for election-related purposes.”

— Douglas Gillison, Reuters