Mistler’s latest article takes a look at the Maine campaign finance filings of “Campaign for Maine,” an organization that is not a veteran group, but rather formed just last September. In November, its “campaign manager” Betsy Smith (apparently paid through Vision and Strategy LLC) explicitly declared the purpose of “Campaign for Maine”:
I’m so excited about his candidacy that I am leading an independent campaign effort to elect Cutler as our next governor. This coalition of Democrats, Republicans and Independents, called Campaign for Maine, will do everything in its power to communicate Cutler’s vision and plans for bettering Maine.
“Everything in its power” appears to include, as Mistler found, paying Ileana Wachtel of Americans Elect fame for unnamed services.
Wachtel is not, however, the only Americans Elect connection. The figure garnering the most payment from the “Campaign for Maine” is Douglas Schoen, an admitted leader of Americans Elect both in its failed bid to nominate a centrist corporate candidate for president in 2012 and in an effort to pump millions of dollars into the small state of Maine to alter its U.S. Senate race. Schoen raked in $55,000 in the Fall of 2013 for his “consulting” work on behalf of Eliot Cutler through “Campaign for Maine.”
Read the full article here.