Coal companies made bigger donations in this year’s General Assembly contest.
(U.S. SENATE PHOTOGRAPHIC STUDIO)
The coal industry, organized labor and other groups with stakes in state legislation wrote bigger checks to Virginia General Assembly candidates this year than they did four years ago. But other traditional donors cut back on their political contributions.
That’s according to the Virginia Public Access Project, a nonpartisan tracker of money in politics, which announced those findings Tuesday.
VPAP analyzed campaign finance data and determined that donations shot up 41 percent from organized labor, coal mining and processing. Contributions jumped 27 percent from hospitals, nearly 17 percent from electric utilities and 8 percent from beverage distributors.
There were steep declines from other industries. Donations from real estate developers, Realtors and physicians all dropped off by about 40 percent. Contributions from auto dealers fell by nearly 37 percent and general contractors by 25 percent.
The complete VPAP analysis is available here.
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