Few people are more supportive of Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign than Joseph Graham Fogg III. The CEO of the venture capital firm Westbury Partners, Fogg serves as Giuliani's Florida State finance chair and has helped raise thousand of dollars on behalf of the former New York City mayor. Indeed, his enthusiasm for Giuliani runs straight through his blood. In March, Fogg's daughter Whitney donated $4,600 to Giuliani's campaign -- despite the fact that she was a junior at Yale University at the time.
Contributions from students like Whitney -- who now heads her college's young republican organization -- are having a tremendous financial impact on the 2008 campaign. According to a review of Federal Election Commission data, people who list their occupation as "student" -- some under the age of 16 -- have made more than 820 separate donations of the maximum $2,300 to candidates running for president. The $2 million contributed by these max-giving matriculaters is about eight times the amount offered up by the tobacco industry as a whole.
The donations are all perfectly legal, provided that the funds can be shown to be from and under the control of the student. But government watchdog groups warn that many of these young donors are simply being used by their wealthy parents to circumvent contribution limits.
"It is largely the case of parents laundering contributions through their children," Craig Holman, legislative representative for Public Citizen, told the Huffington Post. "It's a way of letting a politician know you are really behind them 100 percent behind them. Not only are they giving a contribution but all the family members are as well... It's all part of attempting to buy, at the very least, access, and at the very worst influence with the presidential candidates."
Recipients of the student largess include both Republicans and Democrats. On Feb. 2, 2007, Daniel Neidich, CEO of Dune Capital Management, gave $4,600 to the Sen. Hillary Clinton's (D-NY) campaign. That same day, his wife and their three children - two of who are still in college - also gave the full amount, Huffington Post's Fundrace shows.
Neither the Neidich family nor the Fogg family returned phone calls and email requests for comment.
In all, through three quarters of fundraising, students have made more than 3,200 contributions for a grand total of more than $3 million to presidential candidates.
How many of these donors had parents who gave to the same candidate is difficult to determine, and some students could have donated as part of a ticket purchase to attend a candidate's event, which sometimes feature celebrities and musicians. Nevertheless, as some who study the issue of money in politics note, rare is the collegian who willingly spends thousands of dollars on a political campaign.
"It's supposed to be their own money, but it is a reasonable assumption that it comes from mom and dad," Massie Ritsch, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics, told the Huffington Post. "In college, did I have $2,300? Sure. But was it going to a presidential candidate? No way."
In 2002, the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill sought to address this issue by prohibiting minors from making contributions to political candidates. But the Supreme Court struck down that provision in a 5-4 ruling in 2003. Five years later, student donors (some minors, some not) are actively filling campaign coffers. More than 285 of the max-giving students contributed to Clinton; 245 to Sen. Barack Obama; 94 to Giuliani; 65 to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney; 49 to Sen. John McCain; and 16 to former Sen. Fred Thompson.
Why the tilt toward the Democrats? "Younger people tend to lean more to the left than the right," said Ritsch, "But also, the money in general is trending that way. Overall, the Democrats have the edge with just everybody."