Independent expenditures and coordination in Washington

What “coordination” means in Washington law

Washington separates two kinds of political money. A campaign’s own spending is limited and candidate-controlled. Independent expenditures are unlimited — on one condition, written into the statute’s governing phrase: the spending must not be made “in cooperation, consultation, or concert with, or at the request or suggestion of” the candidate or the candidate’s agents. Sponsors of independent expenditures backing a candidate must file a sworn declaration that the spending also wasn’t made “with the encouragement or approval of” the candidate (former RCW 42.17A.255; Washington’s campaign-finance code was recodified into Title 29B RCW effective January 1, 2026). An expenditure that fails that test isn’t merely improper — it legally becomes a contribution, subject to the contribution limits (RCW 29B.40.020–.030; WAC 390-05-210).

The constitutional root is Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1, 47 (1976): “the absence of prearrangement and coordination of an expenditure with the candidate or his agent … alleviates the danger that expenditures will be given as a quid pro quo for improper commitments from the candidate.” Independence is the entire justification for the unlimited-money channel; when spending is coordinated, the Supreme Court treats it as a contribution (FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee, 533 U.S. 431 (2001)).

Washington’s Public Disclosure Commission has gone further than the bare statute: its rule presumes coordination in defined circumstances (WAC 390-05-210) — among them, when the expenditure draws on the candidate’s “plans, projects, or needs,” when the spender served as an officer of the candidate’s committee in the preceding twelve months, or when the spender received campaign-related compensation from the candidate in the preceding twelve months. That last presumption is aimed squarely at the pattern this report measures. It is rebuttable, and it carries one carve-out: persons performing only “ministerial functions” — defined in RCW 29B.10.380 as duties carried out “without exercise of personal judgment or discretion,” and confined by WAC 390-05-243 to clerical work like data entry, filing approved reports, and depositing checks as directed — may serve multiple campaigns without triggering it.

The disclosure system cannot see conversations. What it can see is payees. Every campaign and committee reports who it pays, and reading those records across each other shows where the two kinds of money hire the same firms in the same race. A shared vendor is not, by itself, a violation — the presumption is administered case by case, and nothing in this report adjudicates any instance. What the records document is how much of Washington’s political economy operates inside the zone the rule exists to police.

The rule, enforced

Washington’s marquee coordination case is fifteen years old, and it looks exactly like this report’s subject. In the 2010 race for the 38th District Senate seat, the consulting firm Moxie Media ran candidate Nick Harper’s campaign while its principals set up nominally conservative committees — “Conservative PAC” and “Cut Taxes PAC” — whose last-minute mailers and robocalls attacked the incumbent, Sen. Jean Berkey, from the right. Berkey lost the primary. The PDC found the scheme serious enough to reject a settlement and refer it to the Attorney General, who sued and settled in 2012: $250,000 in penalties plus $40,000 in fees, with $140,000 suspended on condition of clean conduct. One firm, both sides of the race, and the state’s answer was its largest campaign-finance action of that era.

Since the PDC codified its coordination presumptions, the recorded enforcement has mostly shown how hard the rule is to trigger with facts. A 2019 complaint alleging over-limit coordinated expenditures for a Spokane candidate (Citizens for Liberty and Labor) was dismissed — the record “did not support findings of violation.” A 2024 pair of cases drew the sharpest doctrinal line yet: a State Senate candidate had chaired Cascade Political Action Committee, which later made independent expenditures in his race; the PDC dismissed the coordination question because he had resigned from the PAC in January 2024, before the spending — “the Independent Expenditures made by Cascade PAC were not made in coordination” with the candidate — while the PAC itself closed with only a written warning on a registration count. The officer presumption, in other words, runs on a clock: step down before the money moves, and the inference dissolves.

The enforcement record and the disclosure record thus point at the same gap from opposite directions. Conduct — the phone call, the shared plan — is what the law forbids, and it is what neither regulators nor the public can usually see. Payees are what everyone can see. That is why the overlap tables below are worth maintaining: they are the observable surface of the thing the rule polices.

Where most of the overlap lives: the parties

The single largest generator of same-race overlaps is not a private consultancy. It is New Direction PAC, the independent-expenditure committee funded by the Democratic legislative caucuses and their labor allies — its top contributors are the Kennedy Fund ($1.3M) and Harry Truman Fund ($225K), the House and Senate Democratic caucus funds, alongside WFSE, SEIU and the WEA. New Direction accounts for 84 of the 430 overlaps, across 51 legislative candidates and 14 shared firms.

The mechanics are legal and openly institutional: a candidate pays Blue Wave Political Partners for consulting; New Direction PAC, spending independently in that candidate’s race, pays Blue Wave too (24 overlap rows). Thirteen more rows are starker still — the House Democratic Campaign Committee itself appears as a paid vendor to candidates in races where the caucus-funded PAC is spending, and the state Democratic Central Committee appears in ten. The caucus sits on both rails of the wall its own PAC is supposed to be separated by.

This is not a one-party structure. The Washington Realtors PAC generates 29 overlaps, Concerned Taxpayers of Washington State 20, the state Dental PAC 20, and the Spokane County Republican Central Committee 19 — with Axiom and Majority Strategies playing the Blue Wave role on the Republican side.

Putting the twelve-month clock on every row

Because the presumption runs on dates, we ran the dates. For each of the 430 overlaps we compared when the candidate paid the firm against when the independent committee was active in that race — its reported independent expenditures, and its own payments to the same firm. 416 of 430 (96.7%) fall inside the twelve-month presumption window: the firm received candidate money within the year preceding independent-side activity. In Seattle’s 2025 races the typical gap is not months but days — frequently zero, the firm paid by both sides of the wall in the same reporting period.

The 14 rows outside the window are the exceptions that prove the clock matters: candidates who hired a firm only after the independent spending had ended, and prior-cycle relationships gone stale — one firm’s 2019–2020 fees from a legislative candidate set against 2022 independent expenditures in her race. Timing is a real boundary. Most of the overlap map sits well inside it.

The officer prong, filled in

The rule’s other presumption — service as a committee officer within twelve months — can now be tested too. Every committee’s electronic registration with the PDC names its officers, treasurer, and administrative contacts, and we pulled the registrations behind 423 of the 430 overlap rows. The result: 130 rows (30%) carry a person-level or administrative link on top of the shared vendor. In 107, the same person is named on both the candidate’s registration and the independent committee’s. In 73, the two registrations are administered from the same firm’s email domain — bluewavepolitics.com appears on both sides of 25 rows, electnw.com on 21, argo.us on 17. In 25, the independent committee’s own registration is administered by the overlap firm itself: New Direction PAC’s registration lists Blue Wave’s office as its contact address and a Blue Wave address for its books.

Most of the shared people are Washington’s small professional-treasurer class — a handful of practitioners who keep the books for hundreds of committees on both sides of the wall, which is precisely what the ministerial carve-out exists to permit. The sharper category is small but real: in five rows, the candidate personally is a named officer of the committee making independent expenditures in their own race — typically a local party organization on whose board the candidate sits. Under the rule, that is the presumption’s core case, rebuttable but squarely inside it.

Seattle 2025: what overlapped, and what didn’t

In the mayoral race we examined in Twenty-five dollars at a time, the strategy and media-placement layer stayed cleanly separated: neither candidate’s consultants worked for the independent committees in the race, on either side. The overlaps that do appear are the routine kind — Seattle CFO LLC kept the books for the Harrell campaign ($17,750) and for Bruce Harrell for Seattle’s Future ($18,000), the committee that spent $1.5M in his race; and Morel Ink, a Portland print shop, printed for the Armstrong campaign ($24,616) and for the same independent committee ($183,467). Bookkeeping and printing are the classic shared categories — and the ministerial-functions carve-out (RCW 29B.10.380, WAC 390-05-243) exists for exactly this: clerical work done without discretion over message or strategy does not trigger the coordination presumption. Note, though, that the rule draws the exemption narrowly — clerical acts, not “compliance services” broadly.

What this is not