Democratic congressional candidate Matt Cartwright's background as a lawyer shows.
Besides boasting about his legal background and fighting for justice in campaign advertising, Cartwright raises a lot of his campaign money from fellow lawyers.
Lawyers contributed more than half of the money the Moosic Democrat raised in contributions in his bid for the 17th Congressional District seat in the first half of the year, according to a Scranton Times-Tribune analysis of his campaign finance reports.
Through June 30, Cartwright raised $561,161 in contributions with $312,414, or 55.67 percent, coming from lawyers, according to the analysis. Lawyers accounted for more than two-thirds (369 of 532, or 69.36 percent) of the individual contributions Cartwright's campaign received.
Cartwright also loaned his campaign $390,000. Counting his loan, the percentage of his campaign funded by lawyers climbs to almost three quarters of the campaign's funding. Cartwright raised $952,361 so far with 73.76 percent coming from lawyers and his personal loans.
The lawyerly contributions include $21,000 from six in-laws who, like Cartwright, are lawyers in Munley, Munley & Cartwright, the family law firm in which Cartwright and his wife, Marion, are shareholders.
Cartwright questioned whether reporting all the contributions to his campaign by lawyers was worthy of a story, but defended them nonetheless.
"My entire adult life, I have been standing up for working families, and I've been doing it in the courtroom," Cartwright said. "Almost everyone who is a lawyer who contributed has been doing the same thing, and they believe in the same things I believe in - standing up to insurance companies and corporations in court on behalf of working families."
Laureen Cummings, Cartwright's Republican opponent from Old Forge, has raised less than $6,200 so far, with none of it coming from lawyers.
Cummings said the numbers raise questions about Cartwright's claim that his fundraising shows his local support.
"That isn't true, because apparently his funding is coming from attorneys across the country, not people in our area," she said. "The other thing is we already have over 200 attorneys out in Congress and we have seven nurses. So I think it's time for a nurse out there."
In a statement after the campaign finance reports were made public Monday, Cartwright's spokesman, Shane Seaver, said the fundraising shows Cartwright's message of fairness for the middle class is "resonating" with Northeast Pennsylvanians.
Almost two-thirds of the contributions from lawyers (240 of 369, or 65 percent) came from attorneys outside Northeast Pennsylvania, the analysis shows. They contributed $172,233 of the $312,414 contributed by lawyers, or 55 percent.
Cartwright said where a lawyer who fights for working families lives does not matter.
"Whether you fight for them in Scranton or Seattle, it's all the same," he said.
Because of their relative wealth, lawyers have long played an outsized role in politics, contributing large amounts of money to political campaigns of all stripes and often getting elected to public office, especially Congress.
Their numbers in Congress have declined in the last three decades, according to a recent Congressional Research Service study. The percentage of lawyers elected to the Senate peaked at 51 percent during the 1971-72 Congress and is at 37 percent in the current Congress. In the House, the peak was at 42.6 percent in the 1961-62 Congress and 23.9 percent today.
In the last decade, lawyers became especially crucial to Democratic campaigns as Republicans in Congress began to argue for limiting damages awards in negligence and malpractice lawsuits. Democrats generally oppose limits.
Typically, two-thirds of the money contributed by lawyers to congressional campaigns goes to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign spending.
In the current, two-year election cycle, lawyers and lobbyists have contributed $130.2 million to members of Congress with 65.1 percent going to Democrats and 30.7 percent to Republicans, according to the center.