“The biggest single reason I give political donations,” writes Daniel Hildreth in an email to the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, “is my deep concern about global warming. It is a truly catastrophic threat to the global economy, to our ability to produce food, and to the environment that we depend on.”
Hildreth writes that he also cares “about other issues such as health-care access, increased economic inequality, and voting rights,” and has turned those concerns into big dollars for federal candidates, committees, and PACs. He has given $94,800 during this campaign period.
In this last election cycle, most of his contributions have been to efforts to elect Democratic U.S. Senate candidates, including those from Michigan, New Mexico, Alaska, Kentucky, Georgia, Alaska, Maine, and Massachusetts, as well as to environmental PACs run by the national League of Conservation Voters and to progressive and Democratic party PACs and committees.
The remaining contributions have gone to Maine candidates, Democratic party committees, and an environmental PAC.
Why spend so much more at the federal level than on political campaigns in the state where he lives and works?
“I’m hoping to provide a small counterweight to the influence on politics exerted by the conservative movement. Most of my giving is at the federal level, where my giving is small compared to the total amounts being spent. However, our most important problems can only be fully addressed at that level,” writes Hildreth.
Hildreth has also put his time where his money is, not only donating $5,200 to Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Shenna Bellows, but also serving as her campaign treasurer.
Hildreth comes from a family long prominent in Maine politics and civic life. His Republican grandfather, Horace A. Hildreth Sr., was described in his New York Times obituary as a “lawyer, broadcast executive, college president, and two-term Governor of Maine was capped with four years’ service as an Ambassador.”
His father, Horace A. Hildreth Jr., known as “Hoddy,” is a lawyer and former Republican state legislator whose devotion to the environment has earned him the respect of, and seats on the boards of, Maine’s most prominent conservation groups, from Maine Audubon to the Maine Coast Heritage Trust, The Nature Conservancy, and the Maine League of Conservation Voters.
The senior Hildreth founded a family communications empire that began with the purchase of a radio station license in Bangor in 1949. That was followed by the launching of Maine’s first television station, WABI-TV, in 1953. The company now describes itself as “a family-owned company with local roots and global reach” that organizes trade shows and expositions, publishes industry journals such as National Fisherman, and still owns WABI-TV in Bangor.
“Hoddy” Hildreth is a former president and chairman of Diversified Communications; Daniel Hildreth is now chair of Diversified’s board of directors, where he worked for 12 years before assuming that role.
Like his father and grandfather, Daniel Hildreth has been civically active, particularly with organizations whose work focuses on state policy. He’s served as board chair of GrowSmart Maine, which is described on its website as “promot(ing) sustainable prosperity for all Mainers by integrating working and natural landscape conservation, economic growth and community revitalization” and is a donor to organizations such as Maine Audubon, the Environmental Health Strategy Center ,and the liberal Maine Center for Economic Policy.
Disclosure: Horace “Hoddy” Hildreth is a donor to the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting.
