Every number in this report comes from a filing that Florida law required someone to make. We downloaded the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections' complete campaign-finance exports — 74,056 contribution rows and 38,471 expenditure rows covering 365 candidates and committees across 67 offices — and read the two sides together. The finding is not about who gave. It is about who was paid.
Palm Beach is Florida's third-most-populous county, with 1,518,379 residents, and the richest per capita of the large ones. Its reputation suggests a politics bought by individual wealth. The filings do not show that. The largest genuine outside individual donor in thirteen years gave $129,285 — roughly a third of one percent of all money. What the filings show instead is concentration on the spending side, in a layer most campaign-finance reporting never reaches.
The legal frame
We found no evidence of a crime, and this report does not allege one. There is no criminal referral, indictment, charge, conviction or Commission on Ethics finding of probable cause in these records involving anyone named. No crime, bribery, kickback or quid pro quo is alleged or evidenced anywhere in this analysis. Hiring a political consultant is lawful and ordinary, and says nothing improper about any candidate who did so. Paying a venue for a fundraising dinner is a lawful, disclosed campaign expense. Every figure below was volunteered by the filers themselves under mandatory disclosure; the pattern described is one of market concentration, not of concealment. The data's existence is itself evidence that disclosure is working.
The scale
| Contributions | $37,525,219 | 73,810 gifts |
| Expenditures | $35,803,405 | 38,471 payments |
| Refunds (never netted into gifts) | −$502,217 | 246 |
| Candidates and committees | 365 | — |
| Distinct offices | 67 | — |
| Distinct donors (after merging) | 34,262 | — |
| Distinct payee spellings | 8,328 | — |
Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections campaign-finance database (VoterFocus), complete export for 1 January 2014 to 29 October 2026. Of the $35,803,405 in expenditures, $14,949,056 (41.8%) was spent by party and political committees and $20,854,349 by candidate campaigns.
The committee layer is the dominant financial channel, as it is in every large Florida county we have mapped: $15,746,023 raised, 42.0% of all county contributions, across 42 committees. The reason is structural. Florida caps gifts to county candidates at $1,000 per election, and that cap visibly binds — 10,587 gifts landed at exactly $1,000, supplying $10,587,000, or 28.21% of all money, the single largest bucket in the dataset. Committees face no such cap. Gifts above $5,000, which only committees can accept, number 1,033 rows — 1.4% of all gift rows — and carry $12,869,447, or 34.29% of the money.
| Donor type | Total | Share | Gifts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Individual | $19,082,119 | 50.85% | 56,030 |
| Business | $13,260,270 | 35.34% | 15,459 |
| Unspecified in filing | $3,824,394 | 10.19% | 1,539 |
| Committee | $527,166 | 1.40% | — |
| Other | $455,485 | 1.21% | — |
| Political party | $375,786 | 1.00% | — |
The 10.19% with a blank contributor-type field makes this mix approximate. Business share is probably understated, since large blank-type gifts skew toward organisational donors.
The consultant
Cornerstone Solutions is the disclosed payee on $5,795,327 of Palm Beach County campaign spending between 2014 and 2026, across 955 separate payments from 46 distinct campaigns spanning 31 of the county's 67 ballot offices. That is 16.19% of all county campaign expenditures, and 27.08% of everything spent by candidate campaigns as distinct from committees. The firm appears in every year in the window — thirteen consecutive years, with no gap.
All five of Palm Beach County's countywide constitutional officers — Sheriff, Property Appraiser, Clerk & Comptroller, Tax Collector and Supervisor of Elections — appear in these filings as clients of the same consulting firm.
| Vendor | Paid | Campaigns | Offices |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cornerstone Solutions | $5,795,327 | 46 | 31 |
| Mar-a-Lago Club / Trump National Golf Club | $3,453,460 | 1 | 1 |
| Mark Graphics | $1,092,045 | 27 | 19 |
| Patriot Games | $822,814 | 32 | 22 |
| Public Concepts | $807,490 | 9 | 8 |
| West Palm Beach Marriott | $506,017 | 6 | 5 |
| Tower 1555 LLLP (office lease) | $340,979 | 1 | 1 |
| TMT Properties (office lease) | $324,670 | 1 | 1 |
| Florida Democratic Party | $221,165 | 14 | 10 |
| MDW Communications | $208,631 | 10 | 8 |
The county Supervisor of Elections appears in the raw data at $394,751 across 139 payments, but these are statutory qualifying and filing fees rather than service purchases, and are excluded from this ranking. Office-lease and single-venue payees are single-filer overhead and are not comparable like-for-like against multi-campaign consulting relationships; they are shown here only for scale.
Against the next genuine multi-campaign vendor, Mark Graphics at $1,092,045, Cornerstone is 5.31 times larger. The gap is not a matter of one outlier contract. It is thirteen years of recurring work across most of the county's significant offices.
A note on counting, and what this figure is not
The firm's name is filed four different ways: Cornerstone Solutions ($4,979,797 across 851 payments), Florida Cornerstone Solutions ($399,416 / 81), Cornerstone Solutions Florida ($234,715 / 18) and Cornerstone Solutions FL ($181,400 / 5). Counting only the most common spelling gives $4,979,797 and understates the firm by $815,530, or 14.1%. We merged variants by token signature and character similarity, keeping the most frequently filed spelling as canonical. That method can over-merge, so the figure is an upper bound.
More important: $5,795,327 is payee-side revenue disclosed by clients, not fee income. It does not establish what Cornerstone retained versus what it passed through to third parties. $1,577,860 of it is filed as "media buy" and $813,125 as "direct mail services" — categories that typically involve substantial pass-through to television stations, printers and mailing houses. The firm's actual net revenue is unknown from these records and is certainly lower, probably materially so. What the $5,795,327 measures is the volume of campaign money that moved through one firm's hands, which is a statement about structure rather than about profit.
The client roster
Cornerstone's single largest client is the Sheriff's office: $2,209,983 across Ric Bradshaw's campaigns, filed under two name variants, which is 38.1% of the firm's entire county revenue. Below that, the roster reads as a map of the county's executive and legislative branches at once.
| Client | Office | Paid |
|---|---|---|
| Bradshaw, Ric L. | Sheriff | $1,701,123 |
| Bradshaw, Ric | Sheriff | $508,860 |
| McGovern, Michelle | Commission D6 | $380,339 |
| Bernard, Mack | Commission D7 | $312,562 |
| Kerner, Dave | Commission D3 | $235,667 |
| Weiss, Gregg K. | Commission D2 | $229,252 |
| Jacks, Dorothy | Property Appraiser | $224,011 |
| Woodward, Marci | Commission D4 | $218,715 |
| Whitfield, Erica | Commission D2 | $187,400 |
| Weinroth, Robert S. | Commission D4 | $181,400 |
The two Bradshaw entries are the same person filing under different name forms across cycles; they are not merged in candidate-level figures. Together they total $2,209,983.
The constitutional offices break down as Sheriff $2,209,983; Property Appraiser $224,011; Supervisor of Elections $73,555; Clerk & Comptroller $66,709; Tax Collector $39,209. On the County Commission, the firm is paid in six of seven districts — D2 $574,684, D7 $516,235, D4 $415,471, D6 $380,339, D3 $378,334 and D5 $72,012. District 1, a $1,158,822 seat, is the only one with no disclosed Cornerstone payment at all.
COUNTYWIDE CONSTITUTIONAL OFFICERS COUNTY COMMISSION
────────────────────────────────── ──────────────────────
Sheriff .............. $2,209,983 District 2 ..... $574,684
Property Appraiser ..... $224,011 District 7 ..... $516,235
Supervisor of Elections . $73,555 District 4 ..... $415,471
Clerk & Comptroller .... $66,709 District 6 ..... $380,339
Tax Collector ........... $39,209 District 3 ..... $378,334
District 5 ...... $72,012
5 of 5 offices District 1 ............ —
6 of 7 districts
│ │
└──────────────┬─────────────────────┘
▼
CORNERSTONE SOLUTIONS
$5,795,327 · 955 payments · 46 campaigns
31 of 67 offices · 2014–2026, every year
│
5.31x the next largest vendor
What concentration looks like at seat level
The structural measure is not the firm's revenue. It is the share of all money raised in a given seat that was raised by candidates who paid the firm. In eight separate offices, Cornerstone's clients account for more than half of every dollar raised across the window.
| Office | Raised in seat | Client share |
|---|---|---|
| County Commissioner, Dist. 2 | $952,460 | 86.0% |
| Sheriff | $3,116,024 | 80.2% |
| County Court Judge, Grp. 7 | $278,978 | 80.1% |
| County Commissioner, Dist. 4 | $1,491,309 | 72.9% |
| Clerk & Comptroller | $685,817 | 64.3% |
| County Commissioner, Dist. 7 | $1,435,574 | 59.5% |
| County Commissioner, Dist. 3 | $862,286 | 59.0% |
| Property Appraiser | $615,811 | 58.4% |
| County Commissioner, Dist. 5 | $981,367 | 55.5% |
One published figure must be discarded. The same calculation returns 108.9% for School Board District 3. That is an arithmetic artefact, not a real share: candidate Karen Brill raised $267,015 in total but filed $147,474 under School Board D3 and $119,541 under County Commission D5, while the seat denominator counts only the D3 filings. 16 of 365 candidates file under more than one office, and any share above 100% should be read as "this seat's Cornerstone-client candidates raised more across all their filings than was raised under this office code" — never as a literal share. We publish the artefact rather than quietly dropping it, because the same trap sits in anyone else's version of this calculation.
Property Appraiser is worth isolating. Across the entire thirteen-year window the office drew $615,811 and exactly two candidates — Dorothy Jacks at $359,882 and Shelley Vana at $255,928. It is the least contested countywide office in the county, and the incumbent paid Cornerstone $224,011.
What this does not mean
Political consulting is a legitimate, openly advertised service, and a consultant who wins races will mechanically accumulate market share. Nothing in these records suggests any client did anything other than buy campaign services at arm's length, and no candidate is criticised here for having hired a firm that works.
Three facts cut directly against reading this as capture. First, 83.81% of all county campaign money went to vendors other than Cornerstone, across 8,328 distinct payee names, and Mark Graphics (27 campaigns), Patriot Games (32 campaigns) and Public Concepts all operate at meaningful scale — viable alternatives demonstrably exist. Second, the firm is partisan-aligned rather than a universal gatekeeper: 92.7% of its own political giving went to one party committee, and it is absent from Commission District 1 entirely. Third, the firm's reciprocal giving is trivial. Thirteen campaigns both paid Cornerstone and received money from it; they paid $3,199,590 and received $10,348 back — a ratio of roughly 309 to 1, in individual gifts of $42 to $3,000, at or below the statutory maximum and consistent with routine vendor-to-client political courtesy rather than any rebate.
A separate finding: $3,453,460 in venue payments
The second-largest payee line in Palm Beach County is not a consultant. It is a pair of venues. The Republican Party of Palm Beach County disclosed $3,453,460 in payments to Trump-owned properties between 2014 and 2026 — the Mar-a-Lago Club ($3,015,418) and Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter ($438,042) — across 50 payments filed under thirteen different spellings.
That sum is 39.5% of that committee's entire $8,742,864 in reported spending, and 9.65% of all campaign expenditures in the county from any filer. The disclosed purposes are consistently and specifically event costs: "march 18 event balance" $240,715; "event banquet costs" $238,936; "lincoln day event invoice" $216,175; "fundraiser" $207,141; "lincoln day banquet event expense" $206,847; "event mar a lago" $201,575; "banquet invoice ldd" $183,057; "50% deposit for march ldd event" $154,990.
What is and is not being said here
Paying a venue to host an event is an ordinary, lawful and fully disclosed campaign expenditure. Political organisations of every affiliation hold fundraising dinners at private clubs, hotels and golf courses, and an annual Lincoln Day Dinner at a landmark property inside the committee's own county is a conventional party practice. This report makes no suggestion that these payments were anything other than arm's-length purchases of event space, catering and banquet services, and it does not allege impropriety by the committee, the venues or their owner.
We make no claim about motive, benefit or value for money, and the filings do not disclose whether the committee netted a profit on the events. The publishable fact is narrower and purely arithmetic: scale and concentration. Four in every ten dollars this committee reported spending over thirteen years went to venues under common ownership by a single political figure. That is an unusual degree of vendor concentration for any organisation, and it is visible only because the committee disclosed it.
The trend is the other publishable fact. Venue spending rose in nine of twelve year-over-year steps, and the 2025 figure is 6.2 times the 2014 figure.
| Year | Paid | Year | Paid |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | $93,073 | 2021 | $308,364 |
| 2015 | $123,841 | 2022 | $427,177 |
| 2016 | $144,469 | 2023 | $390,009 |
| 2017 | $155,716 | 2024 | $394,674 |
| 2018 | $207,149 | 2025 | $575,622 |
| 2019 | $237,075 | 2026 (partial) | $338,292 |
| 2020 | $242,331 |
2026 is a partial year — the export ends 29 October 2026 — and must not be compared against full prior years. Mar-a-Lago and Trump National appear under thirteen spellings, including the misspellings "MAR A LARGO CLUB LC" ($184,291) and "MARALAGO L C" ($980). The single largest spelling captures only 29.9% of the total; naive counting would have missed roughly 70% of this figure.
For comparison, and stated as a factual contrast rather than an insinuation: the Palm Beach County Democratic Executive Committee paid $0 to Trump-owned venues across its $3,799,335 in spending. Its own venue and overhead spending concentrates elsewhere — the West Palm Beach Marriott at $492,698 (12.97% of its outlays), an office lease with TMT Properties at $324,670 (8.55%), and Partners of Kings Point at $207,837 (5.47%). This is the same category of expenditure at different addresses. Both committees disclosed it.
Two party committees account for 83.1% of the county's whole committee layer. The Republican committee raised $9,164,731 over 7,625 gifts and spent $8,742,864; the Democratic committee raised $3,912,419 over 16,198 gifts — more than twice as many individual gifts for less than half the money — and spent $3,799,335. The venue finding is a single-filer phenomenon, not a countywide one: every dollar of the $3,453,460 comes from one committee's filings.
Sugar: the gap between Tallahassee and the courthouse
Palm Beach County is sugar country. The cane fields south of Lake Okeechobee, the Glades towns, the Fanjul family's Florida Crystals and United States Sugar are all part of the county's economic and political furniture, and the assumption that sugar money dominates its politics is close to conventional wisdom. The county filings do not support it.
Strictly aggregated across corporate families — Florida Crystals and the Fanjul entities, U.S. Sugar, and the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida — the sugar bloc gave $249,560 to Palm Beach County campaigns over thirteen years. That is 0.67% of all contributions. It never exceeds 1.33% of any County Commission district. It is outweighed roughly 6.7 to 1 by real estate and development ($1,682,504, 4.48%) and 4.7 to 1 by law and lobbying ($1,168,354, 3.11%).
The sugar pattern in Palm Beach County is breadth, not depth. $249,560 — but spread across 58 campaigns and 26 separate ballot offices.
The Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative alone appears in 38 campaigns across 20 offices; Agro-Industrial Management, a Florida Crystals entity, in 26 campaigns; Americas Export in 23. Eight individually-named Fanjul family members — Alfonso, Andres, Emilia, Catherine, Raysa, Elodia, Maria Cristina Fanjul Ryan and Tina Fanjul Associates — appear giving between $45 and $1,000 each, many of them at the statutory maximum. The highest share sugar reaches in any office is 5.70%, in Port of Palm Beach Group 1.
That is a small bloc that touches almost everything. But the reason it looks small becomes clear only when the county layer is set against the state layer.
| Donor | Given locally | Given to state committees | Sector |
|---|---|---|---|
| Florida Crystals Corporation | $49,040 | $18,423,786 | Agriculture |
| United States Sugar Corporation | $31,850 | $13,338,129 | Agriculture |
| The GEO Group | $107,640 | $9,355,319 | Corrections |
| TECO Energy | $1,500 | $8,285,309 | Energy |
| U.S. Sugar (second filed form) | $1,500 | $8,204,200 | Agriculture |
| Florida Power & Light | $110,215 | $7,150,868 | Utilities |
| Comcast Corporation | $2,040 | $5,660,483 | Telecommunications |
| Centennial Bank | $100 | $4,246,323 | Financial services |
| Curaleaf | $25 | $3,000,000 | Medical marijuana |
| Ronald L. Book, P.A. | $18,500 | $2,285,525 | Law firm |
County figures from Palm Beach County SOE filings; state figures from donors of $1,000+ to Florida state political committees, 7 November 2018 to 28 October 2026. Sector labels are the occupation field as filed at state level. Refund rows were excluded before joining, and matches with a $0 local gift total were dropped.
Florida Crystals gave $49,040 to Palm Beach County campaigns. It gave $18,423,786 to Florida state political committees — 376 times as much. U.S. Sugar gave $31,850 locally against $13,338,129 at state level. Curaleaf gave $25 locally against $3,000,000; Centennial Bank $100 against $4,246,323.
Across the whole dataset, 2,447 donors appear in both layers, having given $8,364,862 to Palm Beach County campaigns and $215,723,392 to Florida state committees — a ratio of 25.8 to 1. Restricted to the subset where identity matching is most defensible, 657 donors gave $2,820,609 locally and $85,795,785 at state level, a ratio of 30.4 to 1.
Which crossover number to use
We publish both ratios because they measure different things, and the smaller headline figure is the upper bound on coverage rather than the defensible one for any named entity. The join matches on a normalised name, and in Palm Beach 73.2% of matches are on names of two words or fewer, which can collide between unrelated entities. Those short-name matches are leads, not findings. The 657-donor, 30.4x long-name-only floor is the figure that should be cited for any claim about a specific named interest, and it is the figure behind every entity in the table above. Our measured false-positive rate on this join was 8 matches, or 0.3%, after excluding refund rows — the control that matters, because campaigns receive refunds from retailers, which otherwise make national chains appear as donors who gave nothing.
The reading is not that sugar is politically weak. It is that sugar's county-level giving is a maintenance expense — a presence in 58 campaigns across 26 offices, mostly in $1,000 increments at the statutory cap — while the decisions that matter to an industry regulated by water-management districts, state agriculture policy and the Legislature are contested 400 miles north, in a channel with no contribution limit at all. Any claim that sugar money dominates Palm Beach county elections is not supported by these filings. Any claim that sugar is a minor political force in Florida is contradicted by the same join.
The seats, and what is genuinely competitive
| Office | Total | Candidates | Top share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sheriff | $3,116,024 | 12 | 60.0% |
| County Commissioner, Dist. 6 | $2,022,169 | 16 | 28.1% |
| County Commissioner, Dist. 4 | $1,491,309 | 9 | 48.6% |
| County Commissioner, Dist. 7 | $1,435,574 | 11 | 23.9% |
| Port of Palm Beach (5 groups) | $1,399,392 | — | — |
| County Commissioner, Dist. 1 | $1,158,822 | 6 | 43.7% |
| County Commissioner, Dist. 5 | $981,367 | 6 | 55.5% |
| County Commissioner, Dist. 2 | $952,460 | 14 | 34.3% |
| Clerk & Comptroller | $685,817 | 6 | 64.3% |
| Property Appraiser | $615,811 | 2 | 58.4% |
Totals aggregate every filer who reported in that office across the window, including multiple election cycles and, in several cases, the same person filing under name variants. A seat figure such as the Sheriff's $3,116,024 spans four cycles and is not a single-race total.
Several seats are genuinely competitive with diffuse funding, which argues against any uniform reading of consolidation. School Board District 1's best-funded candidate took only 20.9% of $544,046 across 13 candidates — the flattest distribution in the county. Commission District 6, the largest commission seat at $2,022,169, spread across 16 candidates with the leader at 28.1%.
Candidate self-funding is substantial and concentrated in the courts. $4,615,645 of reported contributions — 12.30% of the total — arrives as candidate loans across 226 campaigns, and judicial races are disproportionately self-financed: $170,000 in County Court Judge Group 15, $126,322 in Group 5, $126,069 in Group 11, $125,000 each in Groups 7 and 2. Six of the ten largest "donors" in the entire dataset are candidates funding their own campaigns, not outside money. Readers comparing candidate fundraising totals should subtract loans; this is reported-receipts accounting, not net fundraising.
Who funds whom, together
399 campaign pairs share 25 or more merged donors among the 179 campaigns with 40+ distinct donors. The strongest genuine cross-district coalition is Robert S. Weinroth (Commission D4) and Gregg K. Weiss (Commission D2), sharing 167 donors at 14.1% overlap. Michelle McGovern (D6) and Weiss share 142 at 14.9% — the highest overlap ratio of any pair of distinct people.
Weinroth appears in six of the ten highest-count pairs and Weiss in five, indicating a stable countywide commission donor pool that recurs across districts rather than district-specific local funders. The overlap ratios nonetheless top out near 15%, so what the data shows is a recurring core, not a controlling bloc.
One high-count pair is purely an artefact and should be disregarded: "Bradshaw, Ric" and "Bradshaw, Ric L." share 178 donors because they are the same person filing under two name forms. That is the name-variant trap, not a coalition.
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 payment or contribution — every figure here was filed as required, by the filer.
- No evidence of a quid pro quo, and no agreement to exchange anything of value for official action.
- No evidence that any public contract was awarded improperly, and no finding about any procurement.
- No evidence that any venue payment was anything other than an arm's-length purchase of event space and services.
- No evidence that Cornerstone Solutions acted as a gatekeeper, excluded competitors, or that any of its clients received or sought anything improper.
- No causal or electoral claim. These filings record money received and spent; they do not establish that spending caused any result.
The finding
Palm Beach County's campaign money is not concentrated in who gives it. It is concentrated in who receives it. One firm handled 16.19% of all county campaign spending across thirteen consecutive years and 31 of 67 ballot offices, including every countywide constitutional office — lawfully, and on the public record.
The second finding is that the spending side of campaign finance is where the structure lives, and almost nobody reads it. A committee can disclose that 39.5% of its outlays over thirteen years went to venues owned by one political figure, and the fact will sit unexamined in a public portal because the payee name is spelled thirteen different ways and the single largest spelling captures under 30% of the total. Naive counting would have missed roughly 70% of that figure, and 14.1% of the consultant's.
The third is the state–county gap. Florida Crystals' county giving is 0.27% of its state giving. For the interests whose regulation is decided in Tallahassee, the county filings are a rounding error — which means a county-only reading of any Florida industry's political presence will understate it by two orders of magnitude.
Limits of this analysis
Entity merging is deliberately conservative — a token-signature match plus a 0.86 character-similarity threshold, with the canonical form chosen by frequency — but it can still over-merge. Every concentration figure in this report, including the Cornerstone, venue, sector and donor-concentration shares, is an upper bound. The pre-merge figures are floors and materially understate reality.
2026 is a partial year — the export ends 29 October 2026 — so the $3,327,341 in 2026 contributions and that year's $338,292 of venue spending are incomplete and must not be compared against full prior years. 3,112 of 74,056 contribution rows (4.2%) and 2,478 of 38,471 expenditure rows (6.4%) carry amendment flags; amended and original rows may both be present, so some amounts may be double-counted or superseded. 1,191 rows contain unconverted HTML entities in the candidate-name field, fragmenting candidate identity further. $3,824,394, or 10.19% of contributions, has a blank contributor-type field, so the donor-type mix is approximate.
Refunds are never netted into contribution totals, and in this county the refund column is dominated by candidates repaying their own loans rather than by disgorgement of outside money — seven of the ten largest refunds name the candidate as counterparty, including a −$350,000 entry. It should not be read as returned outside money. Loans are included in the $37,525,219 contribution total ($4,615,645, 12.30%).
Office-lease and single-venue payees are single-filer overhead — Tower 1555 LLLP, TMT Properties, Partners of Kings Point, Frost Florida Lighting, the West Palm Beach Marriott — and are not comparable like-for-like against multi-campaign consulting relationships. Sector blocs use published regex rules, overlap, and must not be summed; a donor can match more than one bloc, which is why the strict sugar corporate-family aggregation ($249,560) is reported separately from the broad agricultural bloc ($587,756) and should be preferred for any claim about sugar specifically. Seat totals aggregate cycles rather than describing one election, and the same person files under name variants, so the count of 365 candidates overstates distinct individuals. This export covers county filings only: municipal filings, state-level candidates representing Palm Beach districts, federal races and independent-expenditure groups reporting elsewhere are out of scope.
Corrections and challenges to any figure in this report: corrections@florida.institute. We publish corrections in full, and we will correct any figure shown to be wrong, including by the parties named.