Who’s Paying for Alexandra Duarte’s Campaign? Start With Big Tobacco.

At a candidate forum this fall, Alexandra Duarte said she was running “to be a senator for the people who can’t afford to buy one.”

Her own campaign filings show who can afford to give. In July, Philip Morris USA, the maker of Marlboro, gave Duarte for Senate 2026 $5,900, the most one donor may give a legislative candidate per election, while a vaping bill its lobbyists had reported working on was still pending. Her donors also include a hospital chain whose hospitals pleaded guilty in a kickback scheme, the company that owned a Los Angeles cemetery accused of discarding human remains, a farm labor contractor that settled a federal sexual harassment suit, and a mobile home park owner that tried to raise a Fresno park’s rent by $350 a month.

Together, the nine donors below have given her campaign $45,400. Several of them, or the industries they belong to, have business before the Legislature she is asking to join.

Why donors give

Companies and trade groups give to legislative candidates because lawmakers write the rules they operate under. A state senator votes on tobacco and vaping limits, health care oversight, labor protections for farmworkers, and the state law that governs mobile home parks and their tenants.

A contribution does not buy a vote, and nothing in the record shows Duarte has promised any donor anything. But donors who give the maximum expect to be heard, and Duarte has made money in politics part of her pitch. Voters can weigh her line about senators who can be bought against the list of who is paying for her campaign.

The contributions are legal and publicly reported. None of the cases below involve Duarte, and several of these donors give to candidates in both parties.

Big Tobacco

Philip Morris USA is the country’s largest cigarette company and a subsidiary of Altria Group, whose other businesses sell NJOY e-cigarettes and on! nicotine pouches. Its brands include Marlboro, Parliament and Virginia Slims. Its $5,900 contribution to Duarte is dated July 10, 2026.

Duarte was not its only target. State records show Philip Morris USA gave to at least 34 candidates for the Legislature and statewide office in 2025 and 2026, Republicans and Democrats, including Duarte’s Republican primary opponent, Suzette Martinez Valladares. Its contributions to candidates and committees in that period top $1.2 million.

The company also lobbies in Sacramento. Altria Client Services, which lobbies for Philip Morris USA and its affiliates, reported $1.54 million in lobbying payments from January 2025 through June 2026. Its reports list AB 762, which bans disposable vapes and was signed in September, and SB 1314, which would bar new smoke shops near schools. The reports do not say what position it took. Its $5,900 to Duarte came on July 10, while the disposable-vape ban was still before the Legislature; the state Senate passed it 30-9 in August.

Philip Morris USA has a long record on youth and health. In 2006, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ruled that Philip Morris USA, its parent and other cigarette makers had violated federal racketeering law by deceiving the public about the dangers of smoking, and found they had marketed to young people while denying it. An appeals court upheld the ruling in 2009, and the companies were later ordered to run “corrective statements,” including in stores starting in 2023.

In 2022, Philip Morris USA put about $9.5 million in cash and services into the campaign to overturn California’s ban on flavored tobacco, including menthol cigarettes and flavored vapes. Voters upheld the ban with 63% of the vote.

In 2018, Altria paid $12.8 billion for a 35% stake in Juul, the e-cigarette brand at the center of a surge in teen vaping. Minnesota’s attorney general alleged that Altria helped Juul reach young people, including by putting Juul ads on Marlboro packs popular with youth. In 2023, Altria agreed to pay $235 million to settle youth-vaping lawsuits over Juul without admitting liability, and it gave up its Juul stake.

“They are a legal company”

At the Ceres Chamber of Commerce candidate forum on Thursday, Oct. 22 (watch the recording), a moderator read Duarte a question from the audience: “In your opening statement, you mentioned senators beholden to large political donors. Can you defend your choice to accept max limit donations from large corporations with a history of political lobbying and federal racketeering charges, like Philip Morris tobacco?”

Duarte answered: “They are a legal company, that runs a business in California and at the federal level.”

She then turned to the state’s pension funds: “One of the stories from Sacramento that kind of horrified me is… we’re trying to balance our budget. When we look at what the state can invest retirement money in. They are banned by mandates from the state of investing in cigarette companies—which are legal—and they’re banned from investing in gas and energy products.”

“So, that comes back on our backs,” she continued. “That is the taxpayer that now has to bear the burden because we’ve got a state government, Sacramento, saying ‘you can’t invest in businesses that are legal.’ And that, that is horrific, and it’s hurting our working families.” She said it meant that young and old people alike “are having to make a choice to leave California because they can’t afford to stay.”

Democrat Jaron Brandon, whose campaign publishes this site, replied that she had been “asked about a donation purchasing influence from Philip Morris” and had then pivoted to “how can we get California to invest hundreds of millions or billions into Philip Morris with pension benefits to be able to make them more money.”

“They are a legal company, that runs a business in California and at the federal level.”

Alexandra Duarte, asked at the Ceres Chamber of Commerce candidate forum on Oct. 22 about the Philip Morris contribution

What the pension rules say

No state law bars California’s big public pension funds from owning tobacco stocks. The ban Duarte described is the funds’ own policy. The board of CalPERS, which manages retirement money for state and local government workers, voted in October 2000 to sell its tobacco stocks, then worth about $525 million. A bill that year that would have written a tobacco ban into law, AB 107, failed. In December 2016, after a review, CalPERS’s investment committee voted 9-3 to keep the ban and extend it to the outside firms that manage some of its money. CalSTRS, the teachers’ fund, has a tobacco divestment policy of its own.

The ban has had a cost. A report CalPERS commissioned from the consulting firm Wilshire estimated that leaving out tobacco lowered the fund’s returns by $2.08 billion to $3.04 billion through 2014. The board kept the ban anyway. “Investing in tobacco companies is harmful to public health and to our fiscal bottom line,” said John Chiang, then the state treasurer and a CalPERS board member, who opposed lifting it.

The funds are not banned from investing in gas or energy companies in general. A 2015 law, SB 185, requires CalPERS and CalSTRS to sell holdings in companies that make at least half their revenue from mining thermal coal, and only if talks with those companies fail and the boards find that selling fits their duty to members. A bill to make the funds sell their oil and gas holdings, SB 252, died in an Assembly committee in 2024.

Lifting the tobacco ban would let public workers’ retirement money buy shares in companies like Altria, the parent of Philip Morris USA, which gave Duarte’s campaign the maximum contribution in July.

A hospital chain, a cemetery company and a slaughterhouse

Tenet Health gave $2,500 in September. In 2016, Tenet and two Atlanta-area hospital subsidiaries agreed to pay more than $513 million to resolve criminal charges and civil claims. The subsidiaries agreed to plead guilty to conspiring to defraud the United States and violate the federal anti-kickback law, which prosecutors said involved paying prenatal clinics serving mostly undocumented Hispanic women to send patients to the hospitals, then billing Medicaid and Medicare.

The political action committee of Service Corporation International, the largest U.S. funeral and cemetery company, gave $2,000 in May. The company owned Eden Memorial Park in Mission Hills, a Jewish cemetery where a class action alleged that for about 25 years workers broke into burial vaults and discarded remains to make room for new graves. In 2014 the company settled for an estimated $80.5 million, including a $35.25 million fund for families. It denied wrongdoing.

A donor who lists his employer as Central Valley Meat in Hanford gave $5,900 in December 2025. In 2012, the U.S. Department of Agriculture suspended operations at the plant after an animal welfare group released undercover video of dairy cows, some unable to walk, being repeatedly shocked and shot. The plant reopened about a week later after agreeing to new handling rules and cameras.

Labor

Mid Valley Labor Services, a Madera farm labor contractor, gave the maximum twice, $11,800 in all. In 2012, it agreed to pay $150,000 to settle a U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit alleging that a crew supervisor subjected female vineyard workers in Sonoma and Mendocino counties to sexual remarks and propositions, and that two women who objected were fired.

Park owners and price setters

Harmony Communities, a Stockton mobile home park company, gave $2,500 in February. At La Hacienda Mobile Estates in Fresno, it sought a $350 monthly rent increase; the city’s rent commission approved $24.92, the most its ordinance allows. Harmony sued the city, and a judge temporarily barred it from closing the park without a city-approved plan and required court approval for evictions. Fresno Councilmember Miguel Arias accused the company of “aggressive evictions.”

The political committee of the Western Manufactured Housing Communities Association, which represents mobile home park owners, gave $5,900. The California New Car Dealers Association PAC gave $5,900, and the California Fuels & Convenience Alliance PAC, which represents fuel distributors and gas station owners, gave $3,000.

Alexandra Duarte, a Republican, is running for California State Senate District 4 on the Nov. 3, 2026, ballot. Read about the Duartes’ own political giving.