Every number in this report comes from a filing that Florida law required someone to make. We downloaded the Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections' complete campaign-finance exports — 113,901 contribution rows and 46,187 expenditure rows covering 445 candidates and committees across 89 offices — and read them together. All 160,088 rows parsed; none carried an unreadable date.

Hillsborough is Florida's fourth-largest county, with 1,515,904 residents and Tampa at its centre. In Report 01 we mapped Lee County, where the top donors were all political committees drawing on a state-party pipeline. In Report 02 we mapped Orange County, where a committee lived for five months to pass a penny transportation tax and was funded substantially by the firms positioned to build what the tax would buy. Hillsborough repeats Orange County's structure almost exactly. It does not repeat its cast. That difference is the finding.

The scale

Hillsborough's donor base is broad. 81,747 gifts of under $500 — 72.3% of all contribution rows — carried $8,405,297, and 48,655 distinct donors appear across the window. Chad Chronister alone reported 3,310 distinct donors and the county's Democratic Executive Committee 3,119, at an average gift of $291. Broad participation is real and should not be waved away.

But 61 gifts of $100,000 or more — one-tenth of one percent of all contribution rows — carried $10,805,000, or 21.2% of the money. A further 103 gifts between $25,000 and $100,000 carried $3,742,671. Concentration in Hillsborough is not in who gives. It is in where the very large gifts land, and in Hillsborough they landed overwhelmingly in one place.

The referendum committee

On 6 November 2018, Hillsborough County voters approved a one-cent transportation sales tax placed on the ballot by citizen initiative. A political committee called All for Transportation existed to pass it. In February 2021 the Florida Supreme Court struck the measure down — a judicial determination about the measure's allocation provisions, not about its funding. In 2022 the committee reactivated for a revival attempt.

Across those two bursts it raised $5,227,589 in 257 gifts from 221–222 distinct donors and spent $5,154,156. Its active window runs 15 June 2018 to 7 November 2022 — 1,606 days on paper, but concentrated into two discrete rounds with a long silence between them.

That single committee is the largest political filer in Hillsborough County over thirteen years. It is larger than either party's county organisation, larger than the best-funded sheriff's campaign, and larger — by a wide margin — than any single commission seat.

22 donors giving $100,000 or more supplied $3,607,064 — 69.0% of everything the committee raised. 97 donors giving under $1,000 supplied $21,206, or 0.4%.

The committee's top ten donors supplied $2,507,064 (48.0%) and its top five $1,707,064 (32.7%). Its median gift was $1,000; its average gift was $20,341. For comparison, the Democratic Executive Committee's average gift across 13,255 contributions was $291. Those two numbers describe two entirely different machines for raising money.

Orange County's engineers, Hillsborough's franchises

This is where the two counties part company. In Orange County, eleven engineering and construction firms gave $220,000 — 13.0% of a $1,693,762 committee — to pass a tax whose proceeds were designated for transportation construction. They were the firms that bid on that category of work.

In Hillsborough, construction and engineering supplied $150,000 of the $100,000-plus tier, or 2.9% of All for Transportation's total. Across the whole committee, the construction, engineering and contracting sector gave $572,150. The firms that would build the transit projects were not the dominant funders of the campaign to authorise them.

The dominant funders were professional sports franchises and the real estate around their venues. Eleven such entities gave $1,627,064 — 31.1% of the committee.

This is not a minor variation on the Orange County pattern. Under a strict name-match rule the professional sports and stadium sector contributed just $753,327 across the entire thirteen-year Hillsborough dataset — 1.5% of all money — reaching only 20 campaigns across 15 offices, and supplying 0.1% of all money raised for the county's key offices. Of that $753,327, $700,000, or 92.9%, went to All for Transportation.

A bloc that barely participates in routine county elections — one-tenth of one percent of candidate money — put nearly all of its county political spending into a single ballot measure.

Real estate and development is the largest identifiable economic bloc in Hillsborough at $6,534,111, or 12.8% of all contributions, reaching 273 campaigns across 60 offices. Of that, $1,410,250 went to All for Transportation. Combine the stadium-district development vehicles with the franchises themselves and the character of the committee's large money is clear: it came from the downtown and Ybor redevelopment economy, whose interest in transit is in getting people to a district rather than in winning a construction contract.

The largest gifts, named

Twenty-one corporate families were tested in aggregate. Together they gave $4,492,666 countywide — and $3,558,064 of it, or 79.2%, went to All for Transportation, against only $934,602 to candidates, parties and every other committee combined. These interests did not spread their money across county races. They concentrated it on the referendum.

That is the mechanism worth understanding. Florida caps what any donor may give a candidate per election. It caps nothing for a ballot-measure committee. A donor who would be limited to a few hundred dollars per commissioner could, and did, write $250,000 to the committee asking those commissioners' voters for a tax. 66 donors did both: they gave $163,222 directly to candidates served by the county's dominant consulting bloc while giving $2,095,810 to the committee — a ratio of roughly thirteen to one in favour of the uncapped vehicle.

Where the money went

Almost none of it stayed in Hillsborough. Three out-of-area political vendors took 77.7% of the committee's spending.

  Sports franchises + arena ($700,000)  ─┐
  Stadium-district real estate ($927,064)├─►  ALL FOR TRANSPORTATION
  Other $100k+ donors ($1,980,000)       │      $5,227,589 raised  (221–222 donors)
  97 donors under $1,000 ($21,206)      ─┘      $5,154,156 spent
                                                      │
                                      Mercury Public Affairs  48.3%
                                      Multi Media Services    17.3%
                                      Revolution Field Strat. 12.1%
                                                      │
                                                      ▼
                                      1% transportation sales tax
                                                      │
                            ┌─────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────┐
                            ▼                                                    ▼
              6 Nov 2018 — APPROVED by voters              Feb 2021 — STRUCK DOWN, FL Supreme Court
                                                                     (allocation provisions)
                            ▼
              2022 revival round — $1,193,250 from 43 donors

  OPPOSITION:  NoTaxForTracks.com — $138,596 from 43 donors over 33 days
               52.3% from one individual · ratio against AFT, 37.7 to 1

The other side

The referendum was opposed, on the record, by a registered committee. NoTaxForTracks.com raised $138,596 from 43 donors across a 33-day active window — 5 October to 7 November 2018 — and spent $136,996. It was funded 52.3% by one individual, Sam Rashid, who gave $72,467 across six gifts, and 36.1% by Social Justice PAC at $50,000. Its top five donors supplied 94.5% of its money.

The pro-to-con funding ratio is 37.7 to 1. The contest was lopsided in money. It was not one-sided in participation, and the measure's passage was decided by voters, not by the funding gap alone.

The consultant duopoly

Beyond the referendum, Hillsborough's second structural pattern sits on the vendor side of county-office campaigns. Two firms dominate it.

SIMWINS and Strategic Image Management together billed $3,756,261 across a combined 20 filers, and they share five clients — Chad Chronister, Ken Hagan, Stacy Hahn, Sandra Murman and Silverman. Of all $13,938,864 spent by County Commission and Sheriff campaigns between 2014 and 2026, $3,516,809, or 25.2%, went to these two firms. Their twenty clients raised $13,402,181 between them.

A separate and largely non-overlapping cluster serves the other side of the county's politics: Statecraft Digital, Street Smartz Consulting and Momentum Strategy Group billed $1,567,977 across 40 filers while sharing only three clients with the larger bloc. Hillsborough has two consulting ecosystems, not one.

The seats

The two extremes are instructive. District 2 shows eight filers with Ken Hagan alone at 80.0% of the district's money and the top two at 88.2% — the most concentrated seat in the county. District 7 shows 22 filers with the best-funded, Joshua Wostal, taking only 14.8% and the top two 25.8%. Money does not foreclose entry everywhere in Hillsborough.

Shared-donor analysis shows the county's officials are not funded by separate constituencies. Ken Hagan and Sandra Murman share 314 donors, the strongest raw overlap in the county, and both are clients of both firms in the dominant consulting bloc. Harry Cohen and Jane Castor share 301. Mariella Smith and Patricia Kemp share 283 at a Jaccard of 0.18 — the highest similarity among genuinely distinct candidates — and both are Street Smartz clients. Successive sheriffs David Gee and Chad Chronister share 258. Across the dataset, 226 candidates have 60 or more distinct donors and 1,356 candidate pairs share 25 or more, which describes a dense, overlapping county donor class rather than isolated constituencies.

The layer above

Hillsborough's donors do not stop at the county line. Joining the county filings to the Florida state political-committee system — 65,298 donors of $1,000 or more to 3,178 state committees between November 2018 and October 2026 — identifies 3,146 donors present in both layers. They gave $17,535,363 locally and $184,755,479 to state committees: a ratio of 10.5 to 1.

The shape of this table is the point. TECO Energy gave $64,000 across 36 Hillsborough campaigns and $8,285,309 to state committees — a 129-fold difference between the two layers. GuideWell gave $1,000 locally and $7,176,000 at state level. For many of these interests the county is a rounding error and the state is the venue; the local gift buys presence, and the state committee carries the weight. A reader looking only at county filings sees a small donor. Both numbers are in the public record, in different databases, and nobody is required to put them side by side.

What we did not find

• No criminal referral, indictment, charge or conviction involving anyone named.
• No Commission on Ethics finding of probable cause.
• No undisclosed contribution — everything here was filed as required.
• No evidence of a quid pro quo, and no agreement to exchange anything of value for official action.
• No evidence that any contract was awarded improperly, and no finding about any procurement. Notably, the firms best placed to win transit construction work were not the committee's principal funders, which materially weakens any inference of contractor self-dealing in this referendum.
• No evidence that referendum money flowed to the consultants who ran county-commission campaigns. All for Transportation paid SIMWINS, the county's dominant local consultancy, exactly $7,500 — a single payment in November 2022. The referendum operation and the local consulting bloc were largely separate.
• No election irregularity of any kind. The 2018 measure was approved by voters and later invalidated by the Florida Supreme Court on the measure's own terms; nothing in these filings bears on that decision.
• No evidence of concealment in the spelling variance. SIMWINS / SIMWIMS and the 19 spellings of Good Guys Signs are consistent with ordinary clerical inconsistency by filers.
• No evidence of common ownership or coordination between the two consulting firms in the apparent duopoly; they share only 5 of 20 clients and are better described as competing vendors in an overlapping market.

The finding

Florida caps what a donor may give a commissioner and caps nothing for a committee asking that commissioner's voters for a tax. In Hillsborough, twenty-one corporate families put 79.2% of their county political money through the uncapped door.

The second finding is the comparison. Orange County and Hillsborough County ran the same instrument — a short-lived, single-purpose committee raising large uncapped sums to pass a penny transportation sales tax — and the instrument was funded by entirely different interests. In Orange County the money came substantially from the engineering and construction firms that would build the work. In Hillsborough, construction and engineering supplied 2.9% of the large-gift tier, while professional sports franchises and stadium-district real estate supplied 31.1%, and a bloc that contributes one-tenth of one percent of ordinary candidate money supplied 13.4% of the committee by itself. Orange's measure was rejected by voters 58.5% to 41.5%. Hillsborough's was approved and then struck down in court. The vehicle generalises across Florida counties; the beneficiaries are local, and only reading the filings tells you which is which.

The third finding applies to anyone using this data. Aggregate totals taken straight from a county portal are systematically too low, because the same donors and vendors are filed under many spellings — one vendor's position was understated by 29.5%, a consultancy's by 17.7%, and a single donor network appears under 26 names. And county filings are only one layer: 3,146 Hillsborough donors also fund state committees, at a floor of nearly eighteen times their local giving. Any analysis that skips reconciliation, or stops at the county line, will understate concentration everywhere.

Corrections and challenges to any figure in this report: corrections@florida.institute. We publish corrections in full.