No Missouri politician should be able to extract recurring campaign donations the way Bill Eigel is from a Nebraska veteran tapped 35 times this year for more than $1,000, a Republican lawmaker said Monday.
State Rep. Jim Murphy of St. Louis used the first day of pre-filing for the upcoming legislative session to introduce a bill to ban solicitations that include recurring donations. The bill also requires each solicitation to state “in a clear and conspicuous manner” the candidate or political action committee that will use the money.
“If you want it, you have to call them back every month,” Murphy said.
The bill, he said, is in response to a report in The Independent last month about how Eigel — who is running in the Republican primary for St. Charles County executive — is continuing to reap donations from people who gave to his unsuccessful bid for governor in 2024.
Eigel attracted the out-of-state donors with strident messages on issues like immigration and by embracing Donald Trump, which drew a rebuke from the president’s campaign for using his name without permission. His campaign relies heavily on the work of a political action committee called BILL PAC, which provided $150,000 during the second quarter of the year.
BILL PAC solicitations this year have continued in the same vein. One sent in November accused Democrats of scheming to make citizens of undocumented immigrants, “permanently rigging the elections to vote Democrats for generations.”
Another, headlined “Antifa Insurrection Warning,” told recipients: “They want to destroy our country through violent uprising to install a Socialist ‘utopia’ where the law of the land comes from leftist ideology, not morals or principles.”
The appeals never mention Eigel or identify the purpose of BILL PAC, which is named as the recipient in small type at the bottom of the emails.
“I can’t speak to the motivation or what they were trying to do when they did what they did,” Murphy said, “but I don’t think it’s transparent enough, and I don’t think it’s fair.”
Eigel’s campaign did not respond to a message seeking comment.
The bill is the only one of more than 1,100 pieces of legislation filed Monday — 599 in the state Senate and 485 in the Missouri House — that addresses recurring political donations. The session starts Jan. 7.
The use of a pre-checked box to turn single donations into recurring donations has been incorporated into fundraising strategies for Democrats and Republicans and are often missed by unsophisticated donors, especially retirees.
Other states have proposed similar bans. Pennsylvania’s legislature considered a ban on the fundraising tactic in 2023, but it didn’t advance very far. New Jersey lawmakers pushed for a ban this year after reports in Politico about the fundraising of a Republican candidate for governor.
The Federal Election Commission recommended a federal ban on pre-checked recurring donations in 2021 but Congress has not acted.
Russell Wood, 92, of Cambridge, Nebraska, agreed to make a donation to Eigel’s campaign for governor in 2023. The single donation became a recurring weekly donation that stopped for only a few weeks in 2024 between Eigel’s campaign for governor and county executive when he did not have an active committee.
Wood’s donations, $30 each week, totaled $1,050 by Sept. 30, the closing date of the most recent disclosure report. Reached by telephone Monday, Wood said he has not heard from the Eigel campaign since speaking to The Independent and he has been unsuccessful in stopping the payments.
There are additional charges on the latest bill from the credit card he used, Wood said. He called customer service to end the payments, he said.
“The person I talked to was a nitwit,” Wood said. “He said ‘we can’t do that without (the Eigel campaign’s) approval.’”
Wood is one of 141 people nationally — including six from Missouri — who made multiple donations to Eigel’s 2024 campaign for governor who are also contributors to his St. Charles County executive race.
One retired woman in Texas, who made 143 donations to Eigel’s campaign for governor, has contributed $1,205 in 74 separate donations since December 2024.
Wood said he’s tried contacting the national Republican Party to stop the contributions, which he said were made initially in 2023 to support Republican candidates in five states. He is determined, he said, to stop the outflow of money.
“I am going to put the kibosh on this,” Wood said.
Eigel is relying heavily on the money from out-of-state donors to finance his campaign. The three-way primary includes incumbent Steve Ehlmann, executive since 2007, and Jason Law, mayor of Lake St. Louis.
Of the 1,074 itemized donations reported through Sept. 30 to Eigel’s campaign committee, only 11 are from Missouri, representing seven individual contributors. Only four live in St. Charles County.
There are more contributors to Eigel from New Jersey, Florida, Texas and California than Missouri.
An independent political action committee formed to back Eigel’s political activities, BILL PAC, is also heavily dependent on recurring and out-of-state contributions. Of 3,679 itemized contributions this year to BILL PAC this year, only 137 are from within Missouri. Fewer than half that number are from constituents who could actually vote in next year’s county executive election.
The practice of autochecking boxes for recurring donations is “misleading, at best, and deceptive, at worst,” Murphy said.
“I’m here to protect our citizens,” he said. “I didn’t think that they were being properly protected, so therefore we’re going to try to fix it.”
