Six-figure war chest in Central Bucks board race: 'This level of expenditure is astonishing'

Doylestown venture capitalist Paul Martino is singlehandedly bankrolling the Republican race for five seats on the Central Bucks School Board, according to a review of campaign finance documents.

Through contributions in multiple PACs, the Bullpen Capital founder has spent at least $200,000 to keep Democrats off the board in a district steeped in controversy.

Martino chairs the Bucks Families For Leadership PAC, the main committee backing the Central Bucks Forward candidates running for election. Martino’s wife, Aarati, is running against Democrat Rick Haring in Central Bucks Region 6.

That committee took in about $154,832 from just over 60 individual donors between June 6 and Oct. 23. About $137,000 – nearly 90% – of that total was directly from Martino.

Martino also contributed another $52,000 on Oct. 30, according to the state's campaign finance online search.

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For comparison, the Central Bucks School District Neighbors United backing the five Democrats on Nov. 7 took in about $28,926 in individual contributions from about 147 donors.

The two PACs are much closer in total funds raised when factoring contributions from other committees.

CB Neighbors United got $40,000 from the Turn Bucks Blue PAC in July. The Pennsylvania State Education Association’s Political Action Committee for Education, the teachers’ union, gave $25,000 in September.

Each of the Democrats have also donated to their collective back through their candidate committees over the past month or so. All told, CB Neighbors United raised about $125,000 since June 6.

The Republican candidates in Central Bucks do not appear to have their own campaign committees.

Bucks Families For Leadership raised just $4,000 from outside committees, a split between the Plumstead GOP and another PAC funded by Martino, Back to School PA, bringing its total contributions to about $157,940.39 this cycle.

Martino’s political funding in Central Bucks doesn’t stop with his local and statewide committees.

In August, Martino also contributed $40,000 to the Stop Bucks Extremism committee, a PAC that’s generated its own headlines earlier this year with controversial mailers painting Democrat candidates as far left.

The committee, which registered in July, gained attention after it mailed campaign literature to 17,000 district homes containing images from two LGBTQ-themed books removed from district libraries earlier this year for sexual content under a controversial library materials policy.

The campaign literature has pushed a false claim that the Democrat candidates support giving children as young as elementary access to “pornographic material” in school libraries.

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Last month retailer Staples deactivated the PAC’s online mailbox over allegations it violated the company’s user agreement policy when it sent the mailers, a move its founder claimed was an attempt to “silence conservative voices.”

More recently the PAC generated controversy again with another round of mailers urging voters to write in former Democrat school board president Tracy Suits as an option on the ballot.

Suits, who did not seek election in the 2021 race, where three Martino-backed Republicans won, took to social media to remind people she is not seeking office.

Stop Bucks Extremism founder, Bob Salera, lives in Virginia and he is a former strategist for the National Republican Congressional Committee who ran the GOP governor campaign for David White in Pennsylvania last year.

He is also president and sole employee of "Landslide Strategies," an advertising and marketing consulting business which received $3,000 from Stop Bucks Extremism for “legal services” in August, according to its campaign finance report.

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Money pouring into school board races, what does it mean?

Six-figure war chests for historically sleepy low-turnout local school boards races has left some political science experts stunned. A 2018 National School Boards Association survey found three-quarters of local school board members reported spent less than $1,000 on their most recent election.

“This level of expenditure is astonishing,” said Stacey Rosenberg, of Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College for the School of Public Policy & Management and the School of Information Systems & Management.

But it could be a sign of what to expect in future campaigns for large school districts like Central Bucks, she added.

Big school districts have large voter pools and if you can get them to the polls, it can pay off in down ballot voting even in off-year elections, Rosenberg said.

“It’s clear there is an effort to have people show up on Election Day and one way to drive people to the polls is to get them riled up on issues that maybe the average person might be able to relate to,” she added.

Another growing phenomenon seen nationally in school board elections is outside contributors and unusually generous donors, mostly linked to the conservative Anti-Woke,” “Anti-Expert” movement, said Dan Mallinson, an associate professor of public policy and administration at Penn State University’s Harrisburg campus.

Typically, when a single donor dumps a lot of money into a local campaign, the reasons are ideological or a connection with a candidate, Manning said.

“It’s basically someone spending a lot of money to win a race,” he added. “Wealthy people do that all the time.”

How voters would feel about large, single-donor contributions, though, is hard to say, but he suspects it will have the biggest impact on voters who consider themselves politically moderate.

“It could turn them off. But you tend to get committed partisans in these off-year races, kind of like primaries,” he added.

Both leading PACs in Central Bucks have a mix of local and outside donors.

In his experience, the number of individual campaign donations can be more predictive of an election outcome than the amount of money spent, Manning said.

Last year he examined donation patterns in western Pennsylvania for the U.S. Senate race between John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz and he described the findings as “striking.”

He found there were many places where Oz was pulling in money, but it was from a few donors. Fetterman had smaller totals in some of the red counties, but he had folks that would give $5 or $10 many times over several months, he said.

It suggests that candidate enthusiasm among a broader base of small donors can translate into voters that can make a meaningful difference, Manning said.

“A wealthy donor is still only one vote – granted, their money gets used to mobilize supporters and demobilize opponents – but the number of donors can give some insight into broader voter support,” he added. “But, of course, only time will tell.”

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This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Central Bucks School board campaign a costly race to finish in 2023