More than eight million dollars in outside money has poured into Massachusetts primary races that will be decided Tuesday. None of it came from George Soros.
We checked, because the claim circulates constantly. Then we followed the money that is actually there, and it turns out to be a better story: private equity partners, a crypto industry super PAC, a sports betting company, and a family vehicle built for a California congressional race that wandered into a Massachusetts prosecutor’s contest.
Every figure below comes from Federal Election Commission and Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance filings, current as of August 30, 2026.
The Senate race: $7.8 million from outside groups
The Markey and Moulton primary has drawn the heaviest independent spending in the state, and the two sides are funded by strikingly different money.
Advance Progress has spent $3,329,004.93 opposing Ed Markey and another $2,265,933.84 supporting Seth Moulton. That is roughly $5.6 million from a single committee.
Its donors are finance. William H. Harris Jr. gave $300,000. David Peeler of Berkshire Partners gave $250,000. Richard Wells of Insight Partners gave $250,000. Joshua and Anita Bekenstein, of Bain Capital, gave $125,000 each. James Swartz of Accel gave $100,000.
Commonwealth Together PAC has spent $2,222,370.33 opposing Moulton. Its money is labor and local business: Robert Hale of Granite Telecommunications gave $350,000, John McQuillan gave $350,000, the Massachusetts Teachers Association committee gave $125,001, 1199 SEIU gave $125,000, and AFT Solidarity and AFSCME gave $100,000 each.
Neither candidate controls or coordinates this money. That is what independent expenditure means as a matter of law, and it is worth stating plainly because the phrase is routinely misused.
The Sixth District: $20 million from a crypto super PAC, one hop back
The open Sixth District seat has drawn the most interesting money in the state.
New Leadership PAC spent $1,055,318.67 supporting Dan Koh. Its largest donor is DK Crown Holdings, the parent of DraftKings, at $250,000. Rival John Beccia has made that check a campaign issue, tying it to Koh’s fantasy sports regulatory work a decade ago in the Walsh administration.
Think Big spent another $705,312.66 supporting Koh. Follow its funding one step back and you find $20,000,000 from Leading the Future, the artificial intelligence and crypto industry super PAC, plus $500,000 from investor Ronald Conway.
Pro-Choice Majority Action spent $500,000 supporting Tram Nguyen.
In the Eighth District, Leaders We Deserve spent $469,549.13 supporting Patrick Roath and opposing Stephen Lynch.
The Norfolk DA race: $23,000 in, $5,000 out, fully documented
The one district attorney race with outside spending is Norfolk County’s seven-way open primary, and the entire chain is on the record.
Results for Norfolk County Independent Expenditure PAC organized on July 15, 2026 with treasurer Vann J. Snyder of Lexington. It raised $23,000 from four named individuals: Rachel Cohen of Waban and Nina Ross of Brookline gave $10,000 each, Cynthia Rogoway of San Carlos, California gave $2,000, and Theresa Dillon of Canton gave $1,000. No institutional donors, no PAC funders.
Its single expenditure, disclosed in OCPF report 1039003 filed August 21, was $5,000 to the digital firm DSPolitical, dated August 19, “in support of Djuna Perkins.”
Perkins, a former Suffolk assistant district attorney now in Dedham, neither received nor controlled that money. That is what independent expenditure means.
Four neighbors funding a $5,000 digital ad buy is what most outside spending in a county race actually looks like.
One claim we could not verify, and are therefore not making. A figure has circulated attributing $37,581.61 in spending to a committee called VIABLE PAC supporting another Norfolk candidate, Adam Deitch. We could not corroborate it in any Massachusetts record. “VIABLE” returns nothing in OCPF’s filer listings, report log, or item search, and Deitch does not appear as an OCPF filer at all.
There is a plausible explanation worth stating. VIABLE PAC does exist federally, as FEC committee C00853119, funded by three individuals contributing $80,000 total. Its only federal independent expenditure was $37,500 on May 28 in California’s Seventeenth District, supporting a candidate named Ethan Agarwal against Representative Ro Khanna. That amount is within eighty-two dollars of the figure attributed to the Massachusetts race. We think the two may have been conflated somewhere upstream, and we are not printing the Massachusetts number as fact until someone pulls the filing.
In the Suffolk, Middlesex, and Cape and Islands district attorney races, there is no independent expenditure activity at all. None of the three Suffolk candidates appears anywhere in the 2026 independent expenditure filings. Rachael Rollins is running to reclaim the office she left in 2022, and no outside committee has spent a dollar either for or against her.
In Middlesex, where Marian Ryan faces David Solet, the candidates’ own fundraising is nearly even at roughly $262,000 and $264,000.
For scale, the entire 2026 Massachusetts independent expenditure universe is 84 reports totaling $1,876,202 across 18 committees, and the candidates named in them are overwhelmingly legislative and municipal.
So where is the Soros money?
Nowhere in Massachusetts. Here is the actual check, rather than an assertion.
Federal filings. Every itemized individual contribution in the 2026 cycle from anyone named Soros was pulled from the FEC’s bulk data and every recipient committee resolved against the commission’s master file. George Soros made 43 itemized contributions this cycle. Alexander Soros made 35. The recipients sit in 27 states. Not one is a Massachusetts candidate or a committee organized around a Massachusetts race. The only Massachusetts-registered recipient is ActBlue, which is a payment conduit in Somerville that passes earmarked funds through to the out-of-state candidates already counted.
Democracy PAC, the main Soros vehicle, took in $52 million from GEOSOR Corporation and $50 million from the Fund for Policy Reform this cycle, and transferred $36,791,000 to 31 committees. No Massachusetts recipient appears among them.
Justice and Public Safety PAC is the committee that actually funds prosecutor races. Its 2026 receipts are $561,000, all from Democracy PAC. Its operating spending totals $118,401, every dollar of it to law firms and consultants in Washington and California. It reported $0.00 in independent expenditures this cycle and made no payments to any Massachusetts payee, vendor, committee, or candidate.
One detail deserves a warning label. That PAC’s one identifiable 2026 candidate outlay was $173,000 to the Commonwealth’s Attorney race in Norfolk, Virginia. Norfolk County, Massachusetts has its own hotly contested district attorney primary Tuesday. Those are different races in different states, and conflating them would manufacture a story that does not exist.
State filings. An all-years OCPF search for contributions from anyone named Soros returns 31 records totaling $522,275, and nothing at all after 2022. The largest by far is $400,000 given in 2007 to a marijuana policy ballot committee. There are two $1,000 contributions to Andrea Campbell in 2022 and two more to a 2022 gubernatorial candidate who ended her campaign before the primary. Zero Soros contributions to any Massachusetts committee in 2025 or 2026.
The 2018 claim does not hold up either
The most persistent version of this story is that a Soros-funded committee spent heavily to elect Rachael Rollins as Suffolk County District Attorney in 2018. Rollins is on Tuesday’s ballot again, so the claim has fresh currency.
It does not survive the filings.
OCPF’s list of every committee that filed independent expenditure reports in Massachusetts in 2018 contains eleven names. They are housing, education, environmental, utility, realtor, teacher, and drug pricing groups. There is no Justice and Public Safety filer in Massachusetts in 2018 or in any year since.
Justice and Public Safety PAC’s entire federal operating spending in the 2018 cycle was $28,279.60 across nine transactions, to pollsters, a data vendor, and a check printer. None went to a Massachusetts payee.
Real Justice PAC, which did support Rollins in 2018, shows zero contributors named Soros in FEC records.
The contemporaneous journalism that would have carried such a story does not. The Appeal’s dedicated preview of that race, The Intercept’s primary night coverage, and CommonWealth Beacon all lack it. The Intercept’s only campaign finance detail is roughly $69,000 in police contributions to a different candidate.
The claim appears instead in national commentary that names no committee, no dollar figure, and no filing. There is a plausible origin for the confusion: the Washington Post reported in 2018 that Soros put $300,000 into a PAC supporting Kim Foxx in Cook County, Illinois. Different candidate, different state.
We should be candid that we repeated a version of this ourselves before checking it. The 2018 Massachusetts connection is not documented, and we could not document it.
One more distinction that gets abused
Fair and Just Prosecution is not a political action committee. It has no FEC committee identification number. It is a fiscally sponsored project of the Tides Center, a 501(c)(3) charity, and federal tax law flatly prohibits such organizations from intervening in political campaigns. It works with prosecutors already in office.
A claim that Fair and Just Prosecution “funded” a candidate describes something the organization cannot lawfully do.
What this all means for Tuesday
Outside money is shaping these primaries, and heavily. Roughly $5.6 million is being spent to defeat an incumbent United States senator. A crypto industry super PAC put twenty million dollars into a committee that is spending in a suburban Boston congressional primary. A sports betting company wrote a quarter million dollar check in the same race.
All of that is documented, all of it is verifiable through the links in the filings, and none of it required a conspiracy theory to find.
Common questions
Is George Soros funding any Massachusetts candidate in 2026?
No. FEC bulk data shows 43 itemized contributions from George Soros and 35 from Alexander Soros this cycle, none to a Massachusetts candidate or a committee organized around a Massachusetts race. OCPF records show no Soros contribution to any Massachusetts committee since 2022.
Did Soros money elect Rachael Rollins in 2018?
The filings do not support it. No Soros-linked committee appears among the eleven that filed independent expenditure reports in Massachusetts in 2018, and Real Justice PAC, which did back Rollins, records no contributor named Soros.
Who is spending the most in the Massachusetts Senate primary?
Advance Progress, at about $5.6 million combined against Markey and for Moulton, funded largely by private equity and venture capital figures. Commonwealth Together PAC has spent about $2.2 million against Moulton, funded by labor unions and local business owners.
What is an independent expenditure?
Spending by a committee to support or oppose a candidate without coordinating with that candidate’s campaign. The candidate does not receive or control the money, and coordination is prohibited by law.
Sources: Federal Election Commission bulk data and API, 2026 cycle, including committee master files and independent expenditure filings through August 28, 2026; Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance public API and filed reports through late August 2026. Pre-primary reports filed in the final days before September 1 are not yet reflected. General information, not legal advice.