Say what you will about Ed Bosarge, one of Maine’s biggest individual donors to political campaigns – and the single biggest donor to Republicans – but never say, “He’s no rocket scientist.”
Because he was.
The resident of Southport and Houston, Texas is a math whiz who once programmed Saturn rockets for NASA and later went on to make his fortune developing methods for managing large Wall Street investments.
All of his $180,000 donations in the recent campaign reporting cycle went to the state’s Republican Party, which uses the money in legislative races to support GOP candidates and oppose Democrats, often through various forms of advertising. No other individual donor has given more to the party in the last two years.
The $180,000 doesn’t include $3,000 that Bosarge gave from his Texas address to the campaign to re-elect Gov. Paul LePage.
In the previous election cycle (2011-2012), Sunlight Foundation data show he gave $374,800 to the Maine Republican Party and $900,000 to a Texas conservative political action committee, according to the Sunlight Foundation. In 2010, he gave $500 to the campaign of independent Eliot Cutler, who came in a close second in the governor’s race and is running again.
He has also been a major contributor to national campaigns, including nearly $1 million during the 2012 election cycle to American Crossroads, which is affiliated with Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s former top political adviser.
Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit that provides campaign data to the public and journalists, has reported that Bosarge is a Maine native, but that could not be confirmed.
Acccording to Sunlight, one of Bosarge’s businesses, Quantlab Financial, which “makes huge numbers of automated trades, has been lobbying Congress and regulatory agencies over rules in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act since 2012 … that aims to limit risky bets that large banks can make with their own money.”
Bosarge and his wife recently listed their 27,000-square-foot Houston chateau for sale at $43 million, the priciest listing in that city’s history, according to the Wall Street Journal. Like his fellow Southport Republican donor Paul Coulombe, his home, too, has a section modeled after Versailles, the French palace.
National and local media reports characterize the Bosarges as generous philanthropists, especially to the arts, and he usually shows up on the society pages dressed in back and wearing a black beret. He is also known for his collection of antique cannons.
Bosarge could not be reached for comment.
