Follow the Money: Where Campaign Cash in Georgia’s 3rd District Goes

Last November, when Peachtree City residents were deciding who should be on City Council, a political committee run by Rep. Brian Jack sent $500 to one of the candidates. A month later, Jack’s campaign sent a far bigger check to the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC).

Those two checks point to a part of campaign finance most voters never see.

We already know congressional campaigns are expensive. We know corporations and wealthy people give a lot of money, and we know some of them seek greater access to elected officials. None of that is news. What I wanted to understand was something else: When someone writes a check to our congressman, where does that money actually go?

A big share of the money raised in Jack’s name never goes toward his own re-election. Meanwhile, his Democratic challenger, Maura Keller, runs a much smaller campaign, and almost all of her money stays in her race.

None of this is improper. It is how the system is built to work for a member in Jack’s position. But it means a donation to Brian Jack can also be a donation to something much bigger, and that says a lot about where money in politics stands today.

I sent both campaigns questions by email, and both answered in writing. Jack’s campaign responded through a spokesperson and included a statement from the congressman. Keller’s campaign manager, Alex Waterson, answered for her. Their answers appear throughout this story.

Following The Big Check

Let’s start with the bigger of the two checks, the one Jack’s campaign sent to the national party a month after 2025’s Election Day. It was for $250,000, and the campaign followed it with another $50,000 in February.

If you are not familiar with the NRCC, it is the Republican Party’s national organization for winning seats in the U.S. House. It recruits candidates, helps pay for their campaigns, and spends heavily in the close races that decide which party controls the chamber. By the end of March, it had already raised $164.4 million this cycle.

Those two checks were only the beginning of what Jack has sent. To understand where the money went, it helps to know how Jack raises it. Many candidates, like his opponent Keller, run their campaign through a single committee. Jack runs his operation through three:

Brian Jack for Congress is his campaign.
Peach State PAC is his leadership PAC and lets a member of Congress give money to other candidates and causes.
Team Brian Jack is a joint fundraising committee and lets a candidate and a party collect one large check and split it. Jack shares his with the NRCC.

That third committee is arguably the most important. The law caps what one person can give Jack’s campaign at $3,500 per election. The cap for giving to the NRCC is far higher, at $44,300 a year. So a donor who wants to give more than Jack’s campaign can accept needs another way to do it.

That is where Team Brian Jack comes in. It lets a donor support Jack and the party with one much larger check. Its filings list three partners: Jack’s campaign, his leadership PAC, and the NRCC. When a check comes in, the committee divides it among the three using a formula set in advance, and no partner can receive more than its own limit allows. Because the NRCC’s limit is so much higher, the joint committee can accept checks far bigger than anything Jack’s campaign could take on its own. Several donors have written checks of $100,000 or more. Jack’s campaign told me the committee’s disbursements “adhere to the FEC’s disbursement limits, as prescribed by federal law.”

So where has that money gone? Since the start of 2025, Team Brian Jack has raised about $1.1 million and handed out just over $1 million. The biggest share, $426,595, went to the NRCC. Jack’s own campaign received $375,143, and his leadership PAC got $204,562. Add the $300,000 his campaign sent directly, and Jack’s committees have given the NRCC $726,595, a total his campaign confirmed to me.

Jack’s campaign has also sent about $116,000 to other Republican candidates, and his leadership PAC has added $16,500 for federal candidates and the state party. A few examples:

On a single day in March, the campaign sent $2,000 apiece to 15 House Republicans, including Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Mike Lawler of New York, Tom Kean of New Jersey, Jen Kiggans of Virginia, Zach Nunn of Iowa, and David Valadao of California. It voided 13 of those checks in June and reissued many of them later, which Jack’s campaign told me was “due to a clerical error.”
Over the summer, it gave $95,500 to nearly 50 candidates, from Randy Fine in Florida to Nick Begich in Alaska, a total that includes the reissued checks.
The leadership PAC gave $5,000 to Mike Collins’s U.S. Senate campaign and $2,000 to Michael Whatley’s in North Carolina.

Add it all up, and the picture comes into focus. Not counting money moved between his own three committees, Jack’s operation has raised about $3.2 million this cycle. By my count, nearly $900,000 of that has gone to someone other than Jack. That is more than $1 of every $4 raised in Jack’s name. His campaign said its own count is even higher, above $950,000.

And there is more where that came from. At the end of September, Jack’s campaign still had $1.21 million in the bank, and a report filed Oct. 22 showed $1.11 million by mid-October. Federal rules let a campaign move unlimited amounts to its party. When I asked his campaign whether more of that money would go to the party or to other candidates, the answer was one word: “Yes.”

Following The Small Check

Now back to the smaller check, the $500 that landed in a Peachtree City race on Election Day last November. It came from Jack’s leadership PAC, Peach State PAC, and went to Clint Holland when he was running for re-election to City Council.

Peachtree City’s council races are nonpartisan. When I asked how the PAC decides which local races to support, a Jack campaign spokesperson said the congressman has built friendships with local officials across the district and is “delighted to consider any request for support from candidates who seek to also represent his constituents.”

Holland is far from the only local recipient. Peach State PAC has given about $28,000 to state and local candidates and groups:

Local Republican parties got $6,000 in Fayette County, $2,000 each in Carroll, Heard, and Lamar counties, and $1,500 in Haralson County. The North Spalding Republican Women’s Club got $2,000.
State House candidates Daniel Cook, Jutt Howard, Tim Bearden, and Carmen Rice each got $1,000, and Rice got another $1,000 from Jack’s campaign.
James Dutton got $1,000 for his race for Spalding County commissioner.
The rest included $2,000 to the Fayette Shrine Club, $1,000 to Georgia Good Government, and $3,300 to a candidate in Texas.

The PAC also spends a fair amount on itself. Its operating costs total about $95,000, including $52,500 to a law firm called Elections LLC and about $30,000 to compliance consultants who handle the detailed reporting federal law requires. By my count, it has given away about $44,800. Jack’s campaign puts the figure at $73,800. Either way, the PAC has spent more running itself than it has given away, and it had $185,699 in the bank at the end of September.

Why Raise Money For Everyone Else?

Part of the answer is our district. Georgia’s 3rd stretches from Fayette and Coweta counties south to the northern suburbs of Columbus, and Jack won it by 33 points in 2024. Every major forecaster rates it safely Republican this year. In a seat like that, a congressman does not need millions of dollars to keep his job. That frees him up to use his fundraising for other things.

The rest of the answer is the job itself. House members face fundraising targets for the party, known as party dues, on top of what they raise for themselves. No law requires members to pay, but in practice those dues are not voluntary. Former Rep. David Jolly, a Florida Republican, said he was handed an invoice for what he owed the party in his first week in Congress. He later wrote that a member of his party’s leadership told him his responsibility was to raise $18,000 a day to secure his re-election. In 2017, chairs of the most powerful committees, including the Rules Committee, were expected to raise at least $1.2 million for the NRCC. Jack sits on Rules but does not chair it. His campaign would not share his target, calling it part of internal party strategy, but said he has exceeded it.

Jack also has a bigger role than most. He is deputy chair of the NRCC, and he leads the effort to recruit Republicans to run for the House across the country. Before Congress, he ran then-House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s political operation, and in his first term he landed a seat on the Republican Steering Committee, which decides which committees other Republicans serve on. His supporters could argue that kind of influence is what our district gets in return.

His Georgia colleagues do some of this as well, just not to the same degree. Rick Allen of the 12th District has given $320,700 from his campaign to other candidates and committees, and Rich McCormick of the 7th has given about $38,000, plus $89,000 in transfers to other committees. What really sets Jack apart is his reach. He has raised more than either of them, including about $246,000 from donors who gave $200 or less.

Who Is Paying For It?

That reach raises another question: Who is supplying the money?

Nearly 300 PACs have given Jack’s campaign a combined $1 million. A few industries stand out because several of their PACs gave the $10,000 maximum:

Peanuts: Four groups representing growers, shellers, and buyers gave $10,000 apiece, or $40,000 in all. They are the U.S. Peanut PAC, the Peanut Buying Points PAC, the American Peanut Shellers Association PAC, and the PAC of the Alabama Peanut Producers Association. That is no surprise in a state that grew 51% of the nation’s peanuts in 2025.
Accounting: The four largest accounting firms and their national trade group gave $36,000. The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants gave $10,000, Ernst & Young gave $8,000, Deloitte gave $7,500, KPMG gave $7,000, and PwC gave $3,500.
Health insurance: Six large insurers and their trade group gave $26,000. Cigna gave $7,500, Elevance Health gave $5,500, Molina Healthcare gave $4,000, Centene gave $3,500, Humana gave $2,500, UnitedHealth Group gave $2,000, and the trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans gave $1,000.
Aflac: The Columbus-based insurer gave $10,000 to Jack’s campaign and another $10,000 to his leadership PAC.

The biggest checks go to Team Brian Jack, where seven donors gave $551,000 through June. Donors rarely explain why they give, and the filings do not say. Their backgrounds, though, show the kinds of interests Congress touches:

Rick Yi of Suwanee gave $125,000, the most of anyone. He is president of STSC, a Gwinnett County company that provides technology and network systems to government agencies and corporations.
Narasimhulu Neelagaru of Atlanta gave $101,000. A retired cardiologist, he founded Quantum National Bank in 1995 and joined the board of HomeTrust Bancshares when that company bought his bank in 2023. He was also appointed to the Georgia Student Finance Commission in 2024.
Thomas Tull of Sewickley, Pennsylvania, gave $100,000. He founded Legendary Entertainment, the studio behind films such as Inception and Jurassic World, and sold it in 2016. Today he runs his holding company, Tulco, and chairs U.S. Innovative Technology, an investment fund that backs defense technology companies such as Anduril and Shield AI. He is also part of the Pittsburgh Steelers ownership group.
Karmin Pace of Chattanooga, Tennessee, gave $100,000. FEC filings list Pace as founder of the Appalachian Conservation Institute, a nonprofit that protects nearly 11,000 acres in Tennessee’s Little Sequatchie Cove.
Michael and Szana Marr of Sandy Springs gave $50,000 together. Michael Marr is an Atlanta personal injury lawyer who runs the Marr Law Firm.
Michael Saylor and Phong Le each gave $37,500 in March. Saylor is the founder and executive chairman of Strategy, and Le is its CEO. Strategy is the world’s largest corporate owner of bitcoin, so federal rules for cryptocurrency matter a great deal to its business.

Much of Jack’s money also comes from outside Georgia. By my count, only 16% of the money his campaign received over the summer from donors large enough to be listed by name came from people with Georgia addresses. For Keller, it was 82%.

So does any of this influence how Jack votes? I looked, and I could not find evidence that donations changed his votes. On the votes he has cast this Congress, he has sided with his party about 97% of the time, and the crypto industry’s biggest checks came months after he voted for bills setting federal rules for cryptocurrency, not before.

The one place where a donor’s business and his own work meet is the SALUTE Act, which sets up a Pentagon pilot program letting service members and their families buy supplemental cancer insurance. This is the kind of coverage Aflac pioneered. Its language became law in December 2025. Aflac lobbied on it, and most of the $49,000 that Aflac’s PAC and employees gave Jack’s committees came after the bill became law. Jack’s campaign said “constituents engaged Congressman Jack with an idea to better support our brave service members who are fighting cancer,” and that the bill has 32 cosponsors, 19 Republicans and 13 Democrats.

The Other Way To Run

While Jack is flush with money, Keller calls her operation the “coupon-clipping” campaign, and her filings fit the description. She has raised $237,866 through a single committee, Maura Keller for Congress, with no leadership PAC or joint committee behind it. Ninety-six percent of that came from individuals, and the typical gift over the summer was $50. Her top cities were Peachtree City, Newnan, and Fayetteville.

Only three committees have given to her for a combined $10,000:

March On PAC is a women-led group focused on reproductive freedom and voting rights.
Hold the Line is a Democratic PAC founded by Marcus Flowers, who ran against Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2022.
SCP Democrats for Action is a group of Democrats in the Sun City Peachtree retirement community in Griffin.

Her spending is just as simple. Over the summer, her campaign spent $60,165, and its biggest payments were $15,000 each to her communications director, AJ Flanigan, and her campaign manager, Alex Waterson. She had $114,762 left at the end of September. By mid-October, after raising another $8,755 and spending $29,996, she had $93,522.

Keller has also expressed her own frustrations with how her party raises money. Her campaign said she has not decided whether she would pay dues to the DCCC (the Democrats’ version of the NRCC) if elected. Waterson said Keller is frustrated that the party’s spending always seems to react to races instead of building for the future. “How are we going to develop rural areas if we never give a dime to party-building because they’re not built up enough?” Waterson wrote me in an email. “It’s a Catch-22.”

Is This A Healthy System?

Not everyone thinks so. House members told NOTUS this summer that they or their teams spend about 10 to 20 hours a week on “call time,” phoning donors for money. One House Democrat described constant reminders to pay “your full dues.” Lauren Underwood of Illinois, who helps lead candidate recruiting for House Democrats much like Jack does for Republicans, put it simply: “We always have to make fundraising calls.”

The watchdog group Issue One has argued that party dues pull members’ time and attention away from legislating, oversight, and constituent services, and some Republicans agree. Former Rep. Trey Radel, a Florida Republican, has described a tally sheet on display at NRCC meetings listing what each member had given, calling it “a huge wall of shame.” Former Rep. Zach Wamp of Tennessee called the dues system “a recipe for corruption that disconnects members of Congress from their constituents.” Watchdogs have also questioned the rule that lets campaigns send unlimited sums to their parties, especially after Michael Bloomberg moved $18 million in leftover campaign money to the Democratic National Committee in 2020.

Party leaders see it differently. Former Rep. Rodney Davis, an Illinois Republican, has said the payments are not a requirement. Others argue that pooling money is how a party protects its most vulnerable members and holds a majority, and that a strong majority is how members deliver for their districts. Rep. Beth Van Duyne, a Texas Republican, recently compared a $25,000 fee to attend her party’s midterm convention to NRCC dues, calling it a way for “team members to help other team members.”

What to do about all this is where people part ways. Some reformers want to change the job itself. The STOP Act, introduced in 2016 by Jolly, would have barred members of Congress from personally asking for money and left fundraising to their campaign staff. Democratic Rep. Rick Nolan of Minnesota signed on, but the bill went nowhere. Other reformers have pushed to lift up small donors so candidates depend less on PACs and wealthy givers.

I asked both campaigns how much time their candidates spend raising money. Keller’s campaign said she spends about 20 to 30 hours a week on fundraising calls. Jack’s campaign did not give a number. Instead, a spokesperson pointed to his record and claimed he is one of only nine members of Congress who have never missed a vote and has visited local groups more than 100 times.

What Should We Make Of This?

Let’s go back to those two checks where one went to a city council race in Peachtree City and the other, 500 times bigger, went to Washington.

Members of Congress who want to move up are expected to raise money for their party, and Jack has built an operation that does exactly that. The money raised in his name pays for his own campaign, but it also pays for House races across the country and for Republican candidates and parties here at home.

Our district is not unusual in where its money comes from, either. In 2024, only 17.6% of the itemized money given to House campaigns came from donors inside the candidates’ own districts, according to an OpenSecrets analysis. A decade ago, it was closer to 30% to 40%. Online platforms like WinRed and ActBlue have made it easy for a donor in Dallas to give to a congressman in Georgia, and it’s just as easy for that congressman’s campaign to pass the money along to a race in New York.

Voters have noticed. In a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, 72% of Americans said there should be limits on how much individuals and organizations can spend on political campaigns, and 84% said special interest groups and lobbyists have too much say in what happens in politics. Support for limits crossed party lines.

Where you land probably depends on what you want from a congressman. Jack’s supporters could say a member with deep party ties and a big fundraising network may be able to do more for our district in Washington. Keller’s supporters could say a member who depends on her neighbors may feel more answerable to them.

Either way, a check written to our congressman does not always stay with him. It might pay for his own race, help a neighbor running for City Council, or end up in a House race a thousand miles from here. Whether that is the system working or the system broken is a question only you can answer, and you get your say on November 3rd.