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Attorney General Andrea Campbell stood at the Salem Common bandstand a little after noon Sunday, gripping the microphone, and told about a hundred people that the political system had been built to keep candidates like Tram Nguyen out of the race entirely.
Nguyen, Campbell said, had built “a people-driven campaign against tremendous odds,” in a state where the party’s resources do not reliably follow what she believes to be the most experienced candidate. She pointed at the rows-deep crowd fanned out on the grass below — volunteers in “WIN with NGUYEN” and “Team Tram” shirts — and said the people standing there were the ones who could level the playing field. Through Aug. 12, Dan Koh and self-financing John Beccia had raised $9.2 million between them. The other four Democrats in the race, Nguyen included, had raised $1.9 million combined.
At that moment, federal records also showed an outside political committee had already reported spending $500,000 on advertising to support Nguyen, none of it raised, controlled or spent by her campaign.
Both things are true, and together they describe the closing 48 hours of the 6th Congressional District Democratic primary, which is Tuesday, Sept. 1.
Nguyen’s supporters had converged on the bandstand area for a rally and canvass kickoff, campaign placards taped up the granite columns, an American flag snapping behind the stage. The rally was the bookend to a two-week stretch in which endorsements arrived from across Massachusetts and landed, one by one, on the same stage.
U.S. Reps. Ayanna Pressley and Lori Trahan spoke. So did Campbell, state lawmakers and Mariah Lancaster, who had ended her own 6th District campaign the day before and urged progressives to consolidate behind Nguyen.
And less than 24 hours later, Lancaster was on the same stage telling the crowd to spend the next 48 hours knocking every door and calling every voter, and calling Nguyen the next representative for the 6th District. It was the sharpest thing on the program: a rival who had been asking for those same votes on Friday now asking the crowd to hand them to someone else.
Coalition takes the stage
Trahan told the crowd the next member of Congress from this district has to be thinking about grocery prices, gas prices and housing costs. She argued for more women at the table. "We need those voices in Washington," she said, twice, while helping a small child up onto the stage.
Pressley, who called Nguyen a political refugee from a working-class family, said she does not hand out endorsements easily and that Nguyen had earned hers by governing and by building trust. She said Nguyen believes every child deserves a future, "from Haiti to Gaza, from Salem to Somerville, from Lawrence to Lynn." Then she told a crowd that already agreed with her why she was preaching to it anyway: "I need you to sing."
Nguyen stood a few feet from the podium through most of it, clasping her hands, smiling out at the crowd and occasionally wiping her eyes.
Flora Tonthat, who runs the Northeast Street House Bed and Breakfast in Salem, stood in the crowd and said she supports Nguyen because she sees herself in her.
"I'm an immigrant. I'm an Asian woman," Tonthat said. "She's very real. Real people can identify with her struggles."
Liz Brennan of Danvers, who first saw Nguyen speak at her town Democratic committee meeting, said she has watched every candidate in this race repeatedly and that Nguyen changed the most.
"I think she's got the momentum because of the endorsements," Brennan said. "Her message has developed more than anyone's. It's grown to sound congressional. She’s become more congressional.“
What the $500,000 is, and what it is not
The rally arrived after the Pro-Choice Majority Action, a hybrid political action committee registered with the Federal Election Commission on May 1, had reported an aggregate $500,000 in independent expenditures supporting Nguyen, according to the committee's filings. An Aug. 24 notice showed $250,000 in digital advertising, bringing the reported total to $450,000. A notice filed Aug. 28 added $50,000.
Independent expenditures are made by outside groups, not by candidate committees. Under federal law they may not be made in cooperation, consultation or concert with a candidate, or at a candidate's request or suggestion. The money is not given to Nguyen. She does not decide where it goes, what the ads say or when they run. The committee is unauthorized, meaning it is not hers and does not answer to her.
That matters here because of what The Marblehead Independent has documented since the June debate, when the fracture in an otherwise ideologically similar Democratic field turned out to be financial rather than philosophical.
By the July reporting period, Nguyen had raised roughly $711,000 with about $330,000 in cash on hand, no candidate loans and a donor pool concentrated in Massachusetts. That made her the best-funded candidate operating without the multimillion-dollar resources available to Koh and self-financing Beccia. Money determines which names became ambient to voters through repeated advertising, and which candidates depended on voters going looking for them. Nguyen had begun a six-figure advertising effort. She could not sustain saturation.
An outside committee is now buying that repetition on her behalf. What the spending does to votes is unknown; no public polling establishes it. What it changes is the volume of paid communication surrounding her name in the final days.
Nguyen is not the only candidate with outside money behind her
Federal filings show considerably more identifiable independent spending supporting Koh. New Leadership PAC reported a cumulative $764,278 by Aug. 11, and a separate committee, THINK BIG, reported $606,205 more in an Aug. 21 notice — at least roughly $1.37 million from those two groups alone.
A second committee, Save America Fund, reported at least $135,163 in direct mail supporting Nguyen through Aug. 20, separately funded from Pro-Choice Majority Action.
So the late intervention is very large relative to Nguyen's own campaign. However, it is not the largest outside operation in the race.
Asked about it, Nguyen's campaign responded through spokesperson Amanda Munger.
"Tram has never had any coordination with any outside groups, period," Munger wrote. She said Pro-Choice Majority Action is affiliated with Elect Democratic Women, which endorsed Nguyen, and that Nguyen "has not taken AIPAC money and is committed to refusing or returning any donations received from AIPAC and its executives." The campaign reiterated Nguyen's opposition to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's conduct in Gaza and her call to end U.S. military aid to the Israeli government.
The statement also said this: "We have a problem in our elections where unlimited personal and corporate spending are flooding races and amplifying wealthy interests while weakening the public's trust in government."
The written response did not directly address two questions the Independent asked: whether Nguyen welcomes the Pro-Choice Majority Action spending or wants the group to stop, and whether voters should be able to identify the original sources of money financing independent expenditures.
When the speeches ended, the crowd broke into canvass groups on the grass, clipboards out, sorting turf for the last two days. The advertising being purchased for Nguyen will keep running while they walk, and neither she nor they will have any say over a word of it.
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