Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., flashed a smile alongside her mother, Maria Marcotte, as the pair took a selfie from an international terminal of the Detroit Metropolitan Airport.
“Lisbon, here we come!” Marcotte, a retired advertising executive, captioned her Instagram post on June 16, 2024.
Stevens and her mother then boarded a plane, seated in business class, according to a congressional ethics disclosure form. The following day, the pair checked into The Ivens, a luxury hotel where Stevens and other members of Congress spent the next four days attending a conference with panels that included a cryptocurrency industry executive, bankers and other corporate leaders. The conference was hosted by the centrist, pro-corporate think tank Center Forward, which has received donations to its nonprofit arm from major pharmaceutical companies and has a super PAC funded by big oil companies.
Center Forward covered the full $27,779.86 trip for Stevens and her mother — a drop in the bucket compared to what the group’s political funding arm would later spend supporting her run for U.S. Senate.
Now, as Stevens is embroiled in a contested three-way race for a vacant United States Senate seat, Center Forward and its super PAC have spent $2.4 million on television advertisements in Michigan, where the only campaign the group is known to be backing is hers, The Intercept found in a review of advertising data accessed from AdImpact. The group’s first round of ad purchases supporting Stevens, totaling $855,000, was reported last week by State Affairs. Center Forward Committee has also bought at least $50,000 in online ads for Stevens over the past two weeks, according to Google’s ad transparency tracker.
