130 lobbyists, their family, and friends: Rep Decker’s campaign finances

This September 1st, State Representative Marjorie Decker will once again be challenged by Evan MacKay in a primary covering a big chunk of Cambridge. Since there’s no Republican challenger (or if there is they will never win), the primary is the critical vote that will decide who will represent this part of Cambridge in the State House.

As a starting point to understanding Rep. Decker, I’m going to dig into the contributions to her campaign, to see who her financial supporters are. You can follow along at the OCPF website, which tracks campaign donations in Massachusetts, and a separate database that records legally required lobbying reporting (search only for “decker” as the campaign name to make sure you get all contributions).

Two tips for searching OCPF records:

1. The “More filters” button lets you search more fields.
2. Sorting by descending Amount of contributions is how I usually start.

The big picture: Plenty of outside money

As of May 9, 2026, Rep. Decker’s campaign has received a total of around $203,000 over the 2025 and 2026 financial years. (Some donations recorded at the start of 2025 are legally from 2024, so I tried to omit those).

Of the $203,000, $173,000 are from individual contributors. The rest are from unions and PACs (mostly union PACs) and the the like; presumably some of their members work in Cambridge, and in any case they can be said to represent a broad set of the public. $32,000 of the individual contributions are from people in Cambridge, the people who she is being elected (at least in part) to represent.

That leaves around $140,000, or almost 69% of Rep. Decker’s campaign contributions, which came from individuals outside Cambridge. These are going to be the main focus of this article.

The lobbying network

Who are the Decker campaign’s individual donors from outside Cambridge, the source of more than two thirds of the campaign’s funds? How did they learn about her? Let’s start with one donor and see what we find.

$3,000 from the owner of Athena Health Care Systems

Athena Health Care Systems provides nursing care, at-home care, and rehabilitation centers, with a focus on seniors. The owner, Lawrence Santilli, donated total of $2,000 to Rep. Decker’s campaign over 2025 and 2026, and an additional $1,000 in August 2024.

Why are they donating to Rep. Decker? Since Rep. Decker is chair of the Joint Committee on Public Health, one can hypothesize they are engaged in some related lobbying. And in fact, shortly before that first contribution to Rep. Decker, Athena Health Care Systems hired a lobbyist, Dempsey Associates LLC. The goal, per public filing, was to lobby the Executive Office of Health and Human Services regarding “nursing home rates and regulation.” Athena Health Care paid Dempsey Associates $45,000 in 2024, and another $30,000 in 2025; the numbers for 2026 are not yet available.

As it turns out, the owner of Dempsey Associates LLC has also contributed to Rep. Decker (as has his wife), and he also knows Decker from his previous career.

Brian Dempsey brings in the big bucks

Dempsey Associates LLC is run by Brian Dempsey. Before Dempsey became a lobbyist he was a member of the House of Representatives, the chair of the powerful Ways and Means Committee; he overlapped with Rep. Decker for a few years. Having retired from the House in 2017, he has turned lobbying into a lucrative career.

For example, in 2025 Dempsey Associates had the following financials:

• Received almost $4.4 million in payments from lobbying clients.
• Paid Brian Dempsey a $725,000 salary, and another lobbyist $30,000.
• Had operating expenses of $300,000.

Beyond the $725,000 salary, as owner of the LLC Dempsey would also receive some or all of the profits. He may have partners, it’s unclear, but I’d be surprised if he made less than $1,000,000 in 2025, and quite possibly his income is more like $4,000,000.

Some of this money is, of course, an expense: donating to political campaigns. Since 2017:

• Brian Dempsey has donated $117,000 to various campaigns.
• Julie Dempsey, who lives at the same address as him, has donated $219,000.

Still, if you’re making millions a year, this isn’t a lot of money to pay out of pocket.

Back to Rep. Decker, since 2019 Brian and Julie Dempsey have donated a total of $5,100 to her campaign.

Another of Dempsey Associates’ clients is Suffolk Construction. In 2025 they paid Dempsey $220,000 for lobbying on the appropriations bill and a bill related to safety in the construction industry. The owner of Suffolk Construction, John Fish, has also donated to Rep. Decker’s campaign.

John Fish, the billionaire who hates paying taxes

John Fish is the owner of Suffolk Construction, with a personal net worth estimated at $3.6 billion. He and his executives have been very supportive of Rep. Decker’s campaign:

• John Fish personally gave $3,000 over 2024, 2025, and 2026.
• Nora Kennedy, Vice President in the Executive’s Office at Suffolk Construction, also gave $3,000.
• Sean Edwards, Executive Vice President for Education and Life Sciences at Suffolk Construction, gave $500.

That’s a total of $6,500 from John Fish and executives in his company in the past three years, $4,500 of which was in 2025/2026.

It’s not just Rep. Decker, of course: Fish is a significant political donor. In 2025, for example, he donated $95,000 to the Your City, Your Future IEPAC, alongside other billionaires, in an effort to elect Josh Kraft to Mayor of Boston. Most recently, as I’ll discuss next, he helped found and fund the Massachusetts Opportunity Alliance.

The tax-cut ballot initiative: Funded by the rich, for the rich

Fish is part of a group of local business leaders who really fucking hate paying taxes. His company is a member of the so-called Mass High Tech Council (MHTC), so-called because tech companies have a completely different trade group.

The MHTC’s real purpose is to fight against business regulation, and against taxes on the rich. After they lost the battle for the Fair Share amendment, which raised taxes very slightly on people who make more than $1 million a year, something had to be done, and John Fish and friends stepped in. As the Boston Globe explains, they created a new organization, the Massachusetts Opportunity Alliance (MOA). The opportunity here is to donate in secret, though to his credit John Fish at least has been public about his support:

“The alarm bells went off after the millionaires tax passed,” said Suffolk Construction owner John Fish, one of several big MOA donors. “There were a lot of regrets from the business community. What could have happened? What could have been done? … And I think that was a wake-up call.”

…

To fight the millionaires tax, some potential donors were reluctant to write big checks because their names would be made public. That will not be the case with the Mass Opportunity Alliance, which is set up as a 501(c)6 organization that does not need to divulge its donors.

And indeed, this fall, MHTC, MOA, and the Pioneer Institute (see below) are funding a ballot measure to cut income taxes; $1.6 million came from the MOA. If the ballot measure passes, this will decimate the state’s budget, hitting the poor and middle class. But John Fish and his friends will get to pay a little less taxes, and that’s what really matters.

John Fish isn’t the only Rep. Decker campaign donor with ties to this tax-cutting ballot initiative. Dempsey Associates LLC is also a member of the MHTC, as is ML Strategies, another lobbying firm whose employees have contributed to Rep. Decker’s campaign.

OCPF tip: You can search for contributions from a specific person in OCPF, in addition to finding contributions to a specific campaign.

The big picture: Registered lobbyists, their families, and other lobbyist-shaped people

These are just examples, so it’s also worth considering the bigger picture. Zooming out, there were around 130 different registered lobbyists who contributed a total of $24,000 to Rep. Decker’s campaign in 2025. In 2025, Decker got contributions from more lobbyists (~130) than she did Cambridge residents (~100).

Note: 2026 numbers are not available yet, and searching OCPF by occupation is tricky because lobbyists will list a variety of job titles.

Compare these 2025 numbers to some other local representatives:

Representative	$ from lobbyists	Number of lobbyists
Marjorie Decker	$ 24,000	130
Erika Uyterhoeven	$ 385	4
Mike Connolly	$ 500	3

It seems lobbyists won’t give money to just anyone, they pick and choose.

Back to Rep. Decker’s campaign, these numbers are just a subset of lobbyist donations. In addition to any 2026 contributions that will eventually end up in the lobbyist reporting, there’s also:

Unreported lobbying: Some lobbyists seemingly don’t bother reporting their donations to the state’s lobbying database. For example, Martin Corry Jr’s $200 donation is listed in the OCPF database, but he didn’t record it with the state lobbyist database so it’s not included in the $24,000 number.

Family members: While lobbyists are limited to $200 a year, their family members aren’t. The Boston Globe even wrote an article about this lobbying loophole. We’ve already seen Julie Dempsey’s donations (2024 and earlier), but there are more examples in the 2025-2026 data:

• Martin Corry Jr’s wife, Jane Corry, also contributed $1,000 to Rep. Decker’s campaign.
• Karen Cass donate $200 to Rep. Decker’s campaign, alongside lobbyist William Cass who lives at the same address who also donated $200.

Lobbyist-shaped people: Some donors aren’t legally lobbyists, but are somewhat lobbyist-shaped. For example, Rep. Decker’s campaign got $1,500 from April Anderson, whose business is an “economic development and government relations firm that specializes in forging efficient and productive relationships between business and government.”

April Anderson previously worked as Public Affairs Director at the Pioneer Institute. This is a right-wing think-tank, sponsored by the Koch network, that is also helping organize and fund the tax-cut ballot initiative (they also helped co-found the Massachusetts Opportunity Alliance). And in this recent LinkedIn post you can see Anderson at an event with Governor Healey, Brian Dempsey, Tara Gregorio (a lobbyist who also contributed to Rep. Decker’s campaign), and William Cass (as mentioned above, a lobbyist who has also contributed to Rep. Decker’s campaign alongside his wife).

Does lobbyist money matter?

Clearly there are companies and non-profits willing to pay for lobbying, and business owners and managers who are happy to give campaign contributions to elected officials. Of the two, lobbying certainly tries to change elected officials’ minds. But what about campaign contributions? They likely do hope to encourage officials to vote the way they want. But it’s also a way to support officials who already vote the in a way they approve of, by helping them get re-elected; more money means a stronger re-election campaign.

So what about Rep. Decker? In this article from The Crimson, they asked her about it and got the following response:

Decker denied ever being influenced by lobbyist contributions, writing that she has “stayed entirely consistent” over her time in the Legislature.

Let’s take her at her word, and consider:

• Per The Crimson, “from 2021 [to 2024], Decker has consistently been among the lawmakers who received the most individual lobbyist contributions.”
• In 2025, 130 different lobbyists gave $24,000 in total to Rep. Decker’s campaign.
• Not all Representatives benefit from lobbyists’ contributions; recall that Representatives Uyterhoeven and Connolly received almost no lobbyist money.

Rep. Decker suggests she isn’t influenced by lobbyist donations. At the same time, her campaign is getting large amounts of money from many lobbyists and company owners, over many years. This consistency suggests there is some ongoing reason for these contributions. Perhaps they are so happy with the actions Rep. Decker is already taking, that they are excited to fund her re-election.

Which leads to my question to you: Assuming you can vote in the relevant district, do you want Rep. Decker to be re-elected on September 1st?

A bit more

Take action: You can help Evan MacKay win the primary against Rep. Decker by donating or signing up to volunteer. And if you’re a citizen make sure to vote in the September 1 primaries, wherever you live.

Song of the day: The Lobbyist’s Song, by Paulus (based on a song by Brendan Shine).