Panelists discuss the growing role of ‘dark money’ in local elections

Cathy Antunes, Jason Garcia and Conni Brunni shed light – and give advice – on PAC money.

By Noah Bookstein

Original Air Date: October 13, 2026

Host: An unusual panel on WSLR News’ Talk of the Town show this Saturday put the spotlight on dark money in local elections, and they provided hands-on guidance. Noah Bookstein brings us the highlights.

Noah Bookstein: With the midterms three weeks out, WSLR’s Talk of the Town asked who’s pumping money into local races. Host Carrie Seidman’s panel included investigative journalist Jason Garcia, publisher of the Florida politics substack Seeking Rents; Cathy Antunes, host of WSLR’s The Detail, who has spent years tracing political money in Sarasota elections; and Conni Brunni, founder of the Sarasota MAGA Patriots, who has filed several Florida Elections Commission complaints, including one against Republican Sarasota County Commission candidate Jim DeNiro.

Here’s Antunes on PACs:

Cathy Antunes

Cathy Antunes: They have names that sound like actual groups of people, but it’s really a funding mechanism so that donors can give unlimited amounts of money, and then that money can be spent in the support of an issue or a candidate. The shorthand for me is: It’s a way to buy local government.

NB: Garcia said politicians can use PACs to circumvent campaign finance regulation.

Jason Garcia: We all think of, “You can’t give more than $1,000 to your county commissioner’s election campaign,” but they can set up a “Friends of So-and-so” political committee for themselves that they control—that they decide how to spend—and you can literally write a $500,000 check to that.

NB: Other committees exist mainly to hide who is paying.

JG: These political committees report their own donors, but their own donors are just a bunch of other political committees. You can try and trace the money, and you just end up in a—it makes it impossible to ever say for sure where the money comes from.

NB: And it is no longer just a federal problem.

Jason Garcia

JG: You will now see in county commission races—in city council races—these PACs show up with a Tallahassee address or a post office box in Miami, funding hundreds of thousands of dollars of attack mail on a county commission in a way that is designed to make it impossible for you to know that it’s your local developers funding it.

NB: Antunes pointed to developer Pat Neal and said this region is often first in line.

CA: Pat Neal has given millions to political committees. I think of Sarasota Manatee as the petri dish for whatever is coming down the pike. It happens here.

NB: Garcia’s investigation of Florida’s 2020 “ghost candidate” scandal found consultants from both parties working for corporate clients like Florida Power & Light.

JG: The primary sort of motivation behind it is a donor’s interest. It is not even about partisan politics.

NB: Brunni, a longtime Republican activist, has filed complaints against candidates in her own party.

Conni Brunni

Conni Brunni: If it’s wrong, it’s wrong. I don’t care what you have after your name. What I learned the hard way is that you can’t trust what comes out of your own party.

NB: Seidman asked the panelists: What can voters do? Antunes said to start with your mailbox.

CA: Whoever is dumping mailer after mailer after mailer into your mailbox is probably the candidate that’s backed by dark money. The one who’s being attacked over and over and over again is the one that is being targeted by dark money—frankly, probably the person who is most likely to work for you.

You’ve got to loosen the hold that your political affiliation has on you. You have to be willing to step outside “I’m a Democrat,” “I’m a Republican” because those identities are exploited by the committees.

NB: Garcia offered a rule of thumb.

From left to right: Cathy Antunes, Jason Garcia, Conni Brunni and Carrie Seidman

JG: At minimum, you should just ignore everything in that ad. You should treat that as if it never came. At maximum, you should treat that as a negative for the candidate who benefits from it.

You might think of contributions from people that you dislike as cockroaches. If you see $1, you can assume there are millions more around.

CS: And as soon as you step on one, they multiply.

CB: Yes, they do.

NB: Jason Garcia proposed a ban on transfers between committees. He called it a Band-Aid on a bullet wound—but one that could potentially survive a court challenge.

JG: A very simple fix in Florida, for now, would be to stop a political committee from being able to transfer money to another political committee.

NB: RNC chair Joe Gruters once championed that idea when committees attacked him before he began using PACs heavily once elected. 

From left to right: Conni Brunni, Jason Garcia, Carrie Seidman and Cathy Antunes

JG: Let me tell you what issue Joe Gruders completely forgot about once he was in Tallahassee and started to benefit from this money and from this system. The problem is the people that can make the changes tend to be the ones that benefit from the status quo. It is incumbent on us as voters to demand of our candidates for office that you not take money from the special interests trying to buy these votes, that you not participate in a system where you’re going to allow an anonymous PAC to blow up your opponent and that you commit in advance to making these kinds of reforms.

NB: On Citizens United itself, the panel split. Brunni supported its logic, but Antunes and Garcia pushed back.

CB: Money that we earn is ours, and using it is a form of speech.

CA: Corporations are not people. And money is not speech.

JA: The idea that you have free speech in a world where a single billionaire can give $10 million to Byron Donalds and, somehow, the rest of the voters have an equal amount of free speech is absurd on its face.

NB: The full conversation is available on WSLR and Fogartyville’s YouTube channel. For WSLR News, Noah Bookstein.

WSLR News aims to keep the local community informed with our 1/2 hour local news show, quarterly newspaper and social media feeds. The local news broadcast airs on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6pm.