NJEA BACKING FOR SPILLER DOESN’T VIOLATE RULES, ETHICS

Former mayor of Montclair has millions of dollars from his union supporting him, but none from Wall Street, developers, or corporate PACs

Is there anything wrong with Sean Spiller getting electoral support from the organization he leads, the New Jersey Education Association?

In this article, we’ll look at the facts.

The New Jersey Democrat did a deep dive into Spiller’s campaign finance record since he announced his decision to run for governor last June, the decision-making process involving his decision to run for governor, NJEA’s decision to endorse him, and the creation of the super PAC that may, when all is said and done, spend as much as $35 to $40 million on his behalf in the 2024-2025 election cycle.

In preparing this story, we examined detailed records at the Federal Election Commission (FEC); the Internal Revenue Service (IRS); the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission (ELEC); Open Secrets, the private data analysis group; and more. We conducted extensive interviews with officials at the NJEA; with Spiller’s super PAC, Working New Jersey; with teachers who are NJEA members; and, in the end, with Spiller himself.

Somewhere along the twisty campaign trail, a narrative has taken shape about Sean Spiller: that there’s something problematic, something nefarious, even corrupt, about the fact that the NJEA has created that multimillion-dollar war chest to support Spiller’s gubernatorial campaign.

In recent weeks, a spate of news articles has raised questions about the Spiller campaign in ways that suggest vaguely that he’s doing something improper. A story in NJ.com, entitled “The $35M Candidate,” said that New Jersey teachers “are funding Sean Spiller’s quest to be governor, whether they want to or not” – implying that a lot of NJEA members aren’t in favor of the effort. And it reported that “critics are doubtful” that Spiller isn’t illegally coordinating with the super PAC backed by NJEA, but citing no evidence.

The same article also quoted extensively from something called the “Sunlight Policy Center,” which has been engaged in a relentless anti-NJEA campaign for years, which accused the NJEA of “intentionally trying to prevent its members from learning the breadth of its Spiller spending.” In fact, the tiny Sunlight Policy Center is a far-right organization whose “president and founder,” Michael Lilly, is connected to the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. “They’re MAGA,” said an NJEA official.

As reported below, hundreds and hundreds of NJEA rank-and-file members, presidents of the 800 NJEA locals statewide, and teachers who make up its 125-member elected delegate assembly all participated in NJEA’s 2025 election strategy decision-making.

The New Jersey Democrat could find nothing wrong with NJEA’s support for Spiller. Voters may like or not like what he stands for and what he says, and – according to several recent polls – he may be a long shot to win the Democratic primary election on June 10. Those voters may or may not be troubled by the idea that NJEA, a teacher’s union, is pushing to put its president, a former teacher, in the governor’s mansion. But the fact that Spiller is backed by Working New Jersey violates no election rules or ethical standards.

Both NJEA’s endorsement of Spiller last year and its financial backing of his campaign arrived as the result of an internal process, through what NJEA’s officials call “representative democracy,” involving union committees and a union-wide elected delegate assembly that makes those decisions.

Of course, for the past several years, neither NJEA as an organization nor Spiller himself was unaware of what the other was doing. NJEA knew full well, probably since 2022, that Spiller was likely to be a candidate – though, until he made the actual decision to run, it wasn’t a certainty. And Spiller knew that if he were to run, he’d be guaranteed to have NJEA’s support. But the parallel relationship between candidates and super PACS is true for politicians nationwide in the era of deregulated campaign finance rules.

Spiller points out that his competitors in the gubernatorial race take large cash donations from wealthy people, from Wall Street and investment companies, from real estate companies and big developers, and other special interests. “Why do we think of it as strange that working class folks who voluntarily joined the union, who realize that this is the only way we can compete against these big donors, these politically powerful bosses, come together to pool their resources?” he told TNJD.

Working New Jersey (WNJ), which is wholly funded by the NJEA, by law must be independent of Spiller’s campaign. It cannot – and, according to both Spiller and Craig Varoga, the veteran consultant who runs WNJ, does not – coordinate its work with Spiller’s campaign. Both Spiller and Varoga, interviewed separately, told TNJD that they’ve never even met each other.

NJEA, of course, has been deeply involved in New Jersey politics for many, many years. The union represents nearly 200,000 teachers statewide, including some retired teachers and other school employees. They don’t always get their way: back around 2011, then Governor Chris Christie – joined by Democratic party heavyweights including George Norcross, Steve Sweeney, and Essex County’s Joseph “Joey D” DiVincenzo – passed a law over the vociferous opposition of NJEA and other unions that devastated teachers’ pensions and other benefits. According to NJEA, that law has so far cost its members more than $9 billion.

Still, from local school board elections to governor’s races, NJEA makes waves. Indeed, its internally run super PAC, Garden State Forward, was created in the wake of the 2010 Citizens United decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. Since then, that PAC has spent more than $67 million on New Jersey politics.

In preparing for 2025, however, NJEA was alarmed. “Our member-leaders saw this election coming,” Steve Baker, NJEA’s spokesman, told TNJD. “They saw a confluence of things, in terms of the national landscape and that state landscape, and they recognized that this was going to be a really important election.” Another senior NJEA official told TNJD, “Going into 2025, we realized that we had to make a statement.”

Starting in late 2023, the NJEA began preparing its budget – including a decision about how much to commit to the looming 2025 election in New Jersey. Its executive committee; its 125-member delegate assembly, made up primarily of teachers elected locally; its budget committee -- and eventually its “PAC operating committee” (another 125-member body) which screens candidates and makes recommendations about who to endorse in elections – all had a part in deciding how NJEA would approach the 2025 election. In other words, it was decided democratically, by representative bodies within the union, said Baker – not, as some have suggested, through a top-down process ordered by Spiller himself.

“Our budget process typically meets in April, coming up with what is the final outline of the budget, and it goes to the delegate assembly sometime in May,” said Baker. “In May 2024, we decided that we were going to be prepared to commit a significant amount of resources to this election, in the $35 million range.”

Throughout the process, Spiller walled himself off from any NJEA decisions about 2025.

On June 14, 2024, Spiller announced his intention to run for governor. Shortly thereafter, NJEA’s PAC operating committee decided to endorse his candidacy. “That endorsement was probably not a very difficult decision for most people,” said Baker, with some understatement. “The support was overwhelming.”

Next, NJEA launched what would become the main vehicle for supporting Spiller in the election: Working New Jersey.

As a super PAC, WNJ had to kept entirely separate from NJEA. At the same time, the union had to set it up in such a way that the vast resources at its disposal would be spent in support of Spiller – and not someone else. (That’s pretty much true of all super PACs, to the annoyance, or disdain, of campaign finance experts. The folks in charge of super PACs are vetted in such a way that they’ll do what’s expected of them – and then kept at arm’s length.) In the case of WNJ, NJEA named three board members to run it, all retired NJEA people: Ed Richardson, Gayl Shepard, and Steve Wollmer.

And they selected Craig Varoga. On WNJ’s paperwork with ELEC, Varoga is listed as “deputy treasurer.” Asked by TNJD what his title is, he said, “Just say consultant.” A graduate of Princeton, Varoga has been involved in politics for decades. His firm, Varoga & Associates, says that Varoga “has advised and managed national, state and local campaigns including the 1996, 2000 and 2004 U.S. presidential campaigns.”

“I’ve organized super PACs and IEs [independent expenditure groups] across the country, and probably communicated in all 50 states, or close to it,” Varoga told TNJD.

And he argues that there’s nothing unusual about NJEA’s project. “It’s a standard practice for unions throughout the country,” he said. “No candidate or Democratic official has ever objected to it.” Varoga told TNJD that Working New Jersey was up and running “sometime in July.”

Indeed, starting in July 2024, NJEA money starting pouring in. It was funneled to WNJ from NJEA’s own in-house super PAC, Garden State Forward. On July 29, according to IRS records published by ProPublica, the first infusion of $3 million came through from Garden State Forward, and over the next several months, and by the end of 2024 a total of $17.5 million had arrived at WNJ.

In its only official filing with ELEC, on August 8, 2024, Working New Jersey declared that “the total amount this committee expects to expend on independent expenditures for this election” is $35 million. NJEA officials have said that in all the union could invest as much as $40 million. That’s just for the 2025 primary. Whichever Democrat wins the primary on June 10, that candidate is likely to seek additional millions of dollars from NJEA for the general election in November.

It’s money that comes from teachers, via their annual dues, which fall into a range of roughly between $1,000 and $1,300 per year, which all go into NJEA’s general fund. “The money that makes its way to Working New Jersey is grassroots money,” says Varoga.

Presumably, since the end of 2024, more money has continued into WNJ’s coffers, but under the rules of NJ ELEC the PAC isn’t required to reveal either its donors or its spending until it has to file a report on May 30, 2025. That’s two weeks from now.

WNJ is active. “We’ve had an organization of people working on behalf of Working New Jersey, independently in favor of Sean Spiller’s candidacy, for eight and half months now,” Varoga told TNJD, most of them paid a competitive wage. “We’ve knocked on about 900,000 doors since the field program began. We’ve had face-to-face conversations with a quarter million primary voters, people who’ve had a history of voting in Democratic primaries. We have the best organization in the state, bar none.”

Meanwhile, Spiller has his official campaign fund, Spiller for Governor. Outside of the tens of millions of dollars controlled by WNJ, however, Spiller for Governor has raised little in comparison to his rivals for the Democratic nomination. According to a May 13 press release from NJ ELEC, Spiller for Governor has raised just over $431,000 – not enough to qualify for state matching funds, not enough to have qualified to participate in the May 12 Democratic candidates’ debate, and far less than, say, Rep. Mikie Sherrill, who, including matching funds of $5.5 million, has raised more than $9 million.

The most recently detailed data on contributors to Spiller for Governor report that 281 donors gave a total of about $306,000 to the campaign. A sampling of those contributors suggests that a large number of them are current or retired teachers and current or former NJEA officials. A second category includes contributions from teacher’s union PACs in places such as Connecticut ($5,800), Jersey City ($5,800), Louisiana (($5,800), California ($5,000), and Essex County, N.J. ($1,800). Ray Lesniak, the former senator and state party chairman, contributed $3,500.

None of the contributions appeared to come from corporate or special interest PACs, and a large number of his contributors gave just a few hundred dollars each. Spiller, in an interview with The New Jersey Democrat, said that for his backers, giving even that much money is a big deal.

His opponents, he said, all get money from wealthy donors and corporations. “And we think they're gonna fight for us when they get in there? They're gonna answer to the folks who have helped support them and put them there,” he said. “I only wanna answer to working class folks. And raising $400,000 is real money from working class folks, and you’ve gotta talk to the millionaires if you want to get the other dollars. And that means you're fighting for the millionaires.”

Several of the articles cited at the top of this story implied that NJEA members aren’t aware of the union’s work in the 2025 election. And they managed to ferret out NJEA members to interview who were quoted saying that they don’t like it. “I can’t believe there’s not an uproar coming from the members saying: ‘Hold on, what’s going on?’” said one teacher quoted in the NJ.com article.

But NJEA officials readily admit that, despite their efforts, a number of NJEA members may not have heard or may have ignored multiple efforts to inform them about the organization’s plans for 2025, and that some may be opposed.

“We’d love to see all 200,000 members involved,” Steve Baker, NJEA’s spokesman, told The New Jersey Democrat. “We’d love to see that higher level of engagement. There are certainly, like any organization, different levels of involvement, different levels of engagement, and different levels of how closely people follow what is going on.”

Several teachers interviewed by TNJD said that, indeed, the organization worked hard to let every member know about how it planned to invest its resources this year. Gene Woods, an NJEA member who’s taught high school in Bayonne for the last 18 years, described the organization’s extensive effort to involve its members in the plans for 2025. “Sure, sometimes, you know, people will hear it, sometimes people choose not to hear it or they just don't hear it at all,” he said. But NJEA took pains to involve all of its members through emails, a newsletter, local meetings, and through its magazine, NJEA Review.

“I don’t recall anybody spoke out against it at all,” he said.

Melissa Tomlinson, a special education teacher in Atlantic County for 23 year and an elected NJEA representative there, agrees. “We were all part of the decision,” she said. “No decisions are made at the union level without a lot of conversations to begin with, and even before announcements and final decisions were made, the leadership and executive team and the local leaders had a lot of conversations with us.”

She added, “Everybody recognizes that we're at a point in time where education is seriously under attack, and we need to do something to defend it. So, after having those conversations, even members that were like, “Well, I don't like this,” had to admit that it needs to be done.”