Sunlight’s work uncovering superdelegate lobbyists featured on ‘Full Frontal with Samantha Bee’

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Sunlight has finally made it big on basic cable: Our investigative work tracking lobbyist superdelegates at the Democratic National Convention was featured on “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee!”

There are 712 so-called voting superdelegates composed of former and current elected officials as well as members of the Democratic National Committee. Superdelegates can support whomever they choose and are not bound by any primary or caucus result. And, as we found in our report, some of the superdelegates also happen to be lobbyists for special interests.

We chatted with the Full Frontal team beforehand to talk about our findings and point to a few of the most interesting lobbyist superdelegates, including Andres Ramirez, a superdelegate from Nevada. From our July 28 report: “According to disclosure documents from the Nevada legislature, as recently as 2015 Ramirez represented a company called Community Loans of America Inc., which is the parent company of several payday and title loan lenders.”

Bee had a lengthy, awkward and pointedly funny conversation with Ramirez about his role as a lobbyist who also is a superdelegate, which you can watch above. 

Read our full piece, “Influence at the DNC: More than 60 superdelegates are registered lobbyists,” and thanks to our (new) friends at Full Frontal, which airs Monday nights on TBS.

UPDATE: We are now Twitter friends with the folks over at Samantha Bee. Glad to help out with a great story.