and given the crowded race for the gubanatorial primary you can expect campaigns to break spending records this year especially if you include the major role outside money is playing for the first time An NJ Spotlight News analysis calculated more than $60 million raised by independent groups leading up to this election A massive number that's likely even higher since none of the candidates or dozens of related committees have reported financial information yet this year Senior writer Colleen Oday followed the money and joins me to share what she found Colleen thanks for coming in Um a lot of uh data work went into this A lot When we're talking about breaking records how much money are we looking at and how does this compare to past primary gubanatorial elections right And again we're just in the primary we're talking about now We've got a whole general to come Um we're talking at least $108 million so far that's been raised but there's another $43 million that I I'm not counting in that because we're not sure if that money has actually been provided And that's because why why don't we know that so that's because of this proliferation this year of independent spending groups which we really haven't seen a lot from before in New Jersey There are 28 groups involved at this point that we've identified There may be more that I I didn't find Um but you know in one case the biggest case of those it's um the NJA supporting uh Garden State Forward which is its committee which is then supporting Working New Jersey which is supporting Sean's biller Yes there's a lot of committees here And they're promising to spend $35 million So they have not had to file a report yet Um they they don't have to file a report until the end of May So we won't know exactly how much they're getting but we do know from some other documents from uh some federal documents that they've filed that they've get given at least 17 million so far to this working group So we're not going to know for sure until a few days really before the primary What other candidates have big outside influence in their campaign finances so one of the interesting ones is Josh Godheimer the congressman Um he has been prolific at raising money at the federal level um you're barred from giving more than the maximum allowed which is $5,800 per election to your committee So he couldn't give any of his 20 million to his more than $5800 which he did to his uh campaign committee but um there's a group called Affordable New Jersey that is supporting him and his his congressional committee has given $9.6 million to this committee Now remember these are supposed to be independent groups which means there's not supposed to be coordination between the candidate and the committee I'm not sure how you make that argument if the the congressional candidates committee is giving money to this group Um let me zoom out and though I am curious but on the Republican side but but let me zoom out Um because a lot of what went into requiring um fundraising in terms of getting matching funds from the state was to keep out some of the you know big corporations some of those outside um folks who might uh try to ask for favors if they donate Um talk to me about the matching funds from the state and how realistic this program still is given our political and media landscape right now So so far uh 33 million has been given in matching funds The maximum could go up to 44 million Um in order to take matching funds you've got to raise 580,000 on your own You get a 2:1 match so $2 from the state for every dollar that you raise Um and you have to limit your campaign spend your spending your candidate account spending to 8.7 million So I think to the second part of your question you know this was put in place in I believe it was 1981 Governor Kane's administration we had a very different um you know landscape landscape back then we didn't have all these independent committees And so when I I mean I think that the idea was a good one right you're trying to keep this corporate money this this you know we say money can buy influence We try to keep that out But in today's day and age when you're limiting you know the the candidate spending to 8.7 million but these independent groups can raise and spend unlimited funding welcome it then Does does it almost welcome it i mean can they kind of circumvent these laws by going that route there are those there are those out there in the political world who are saying that in fact this does welcome it and it invites it kind of um encourages candidates to set these up just because they can't spend more than that 8.7 million otherwise right um all right you can read all of Colleen Oday's reporting including uh this article on our website njspotlightenews.org with plenty more on the NJ Decides 2025 Thanks for digging through That was not easy Thanks for coming in Colleen Thanks very much Bri