Peter Overby
Peter Overby has covered Washington power, money, and influence since a foresighted NPR editor created the beat in 1994.
Overby has covered scandals involving House Speaker Newt Gingrich, President Bill Clinton, lobbyist Jack Abramoff and others. He tracked the rise of campaign finance regulation as Congress passed campaign finance reform laws, and the rise of deregulation as Citizens United and other Supreme Court decisions rolled those laws back.
During President Trump's first year in office, Overby was on a team of NPR journalists covering conflicts of interest sparked by the Trump family business. He did some of the early investigations of dark money, dissecting a money network that influenced a Michigan judicial election in 2013, and — working with the Center for Investigative Reporting — surfacing below-the-radar attack groups in the 2008 presidential election.
In 2009, Overby co-reported Dollar Politics, a multimedia series on lawmakers, lobbyists and money as the Senate debated the Affordable Care Act. The series received an award for excellence from the Capitol Hill-based Radio and Television Correspondents Association. Earlier, he won an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for his coverage of the 2000 elections and 2001 Senate debate on campaign finance reform.
Prior to NPR, Overby was an editor/reporter for Common Cause Magazine, where he shared an Investigative Reporters and Editors award. He worked on daily newspapers for 10 years, and has freelanced for publications ranging from Utne Reader and the Congressional Quarterly Guide To Congress to the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post.
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The Center for Public Integrity calculates that KTUU in Anchorage ran more U.S. Senate ads this cycle than any station in the country. -
Tom Steyer, the hedge-fund billionaire, spent tens of millions of dollars in the midterms, mostly in seven senate and gubernatorial races. Most of his candidates lost, as will — presumably --one of his Steyer's key ambitions: major action on climate change.
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The 2014 midterm election campaigns are almost over — all $3.7 billion worth of them. Most of that money was spent on television advertising.
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Money is flowing into state elections for trial judges and supreme court justices. One big player is the little-known Washington group Republican State Leadership Committee.
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This midterm cycle, more than half the ads from so-called outside groups are being paid for by secret donors. That means voters will never know who's paying tens of millions of dollars for those ads.
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The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is millions of dollars ahead of the Republicans in fundraising, especially among the small-donor faithful. -
Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino magnate, is giving $20 million to GOP-oriented "social welfare" groups for use in midterm campaigns.
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Boggs changed the lobbying profession by recognizing how power in Washington was becoming more diffuse. -
Americans generally agree that too much money is spent running for office. The Senate took up a proposed constitutional amendment that could change that, but it's not likely to ultimately pass. -
The wealthy Ricketts family includes conservatives and a liberal, activists and a candidate. Between them, they raise and spend a lot of political money — and exemplify how the system has changed. -
Kent Sorenson pleaded guilty in federal court to taking under-the-table payments when he switched sides between GOP presidential candidates. The former state senator previously denied the rumors. -
A U.S. Senate seat is up for grabs in Iowa, and the GOP has opened 11 field offices statewide. But there's also a new team working the state, the Virginia-based group Americans for Prosperity.
