Drug Money and State Legislators

 Lev Facher at STAT:

In the last two years, at least 2,467 state legislators — over one-third of all state lawmakers nationwide — used pharmaceutical industry cash to fund their campaigns, according to a new STAT analysis of campaign finance records that spans the full 2020 election cycle. The industry wrote over 10,000 individual checks totaling more than $9 million.

STAT’s findings provide an unprecedented look at drug industry influence in state capitols across the 2020 election cycle. The dataset includes the largest 23 U.S. drug manufacturers by revenue plus the trade groups PhRMA and BIO. It builds upon a previous analysis that STAT published prior to the election, and now includes complete data from nearly every state, including all contributions made through Dec. 31, 2020.