Analilia Mejia, who unexpectedly won the Democratic nomination for the April 16 special election in New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District this week, has assailed financial services corporations like Vanguard and State Street for having "bought politicians." Mejia and her husband are heavily invested in both, financial records show.
"I don’t know if you know, but three companies—if your listeners know—three companies essentially own, like, manipulate, own, have a stranglehold in our economy," Mejia claimed in an interview last month on the Kate for the People YouTube channel. "BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, they own majority shares on 95 percent of S&P 500 corporations."
Mejia continued, accusing those corporations of manipulating U.S. politics.
"So, why is the price of eggs going up?" she asked. "Why are—why is, um, gasoline or health insurance or anything increasingly unaffordable? Because they’ve bought elections, they’ve bought politicians, they’ve bought off—they pay off, you know, they facilitate their, their, um, their lobbyists have open-door policies, and all the while, regular people are saying, ‘Oh, I don’t talk about politics,’ right? ‘I want to check out.’ Well, you know, we’ve just given a free check. And the last thing I’ll say is that the combination—oligarchs are bad enough, authoritarians are bad enough, but when they combine, they don’t have a love for democracy."
Vanguard and State Street also have a stranglehold on Mejia’s financial portfolio, her disclosures show. The progressive activist, who served as political director for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I., Vt.) 2020 presidential campaign, keeps a retirement fund valued at up to $100,000 with Vanguard and another Vanguard Value Index mutual fund of up to $100,000, in addition to several other smaller investments. Mejia’s husband has up to $80,000 invested in State Street exchange-traded funds through two individual retirement accounts.
Revelations of the contradictions between Mejia’s rhetoric and her and her husband’s finances come just after she won an upset victory in the primary to replace New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D.) in the House of Representatives. Mejia’s chief opponent, former congressman Tom Malinowski (D.), conceded to Mejia on Tuesday after losing by fewer than one thousand votes. Mejia, who received endorsements from the likes of Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), is expected to win the general election on April 16 and join the far-left wing of the House Democratic Caucus.
Mejia’s financial disclosure shows that she has money invested in other companies that appear to contradict her stated values. A passionate anti-Israel activist, Mejia falsely accused the Jewish state of committing a "genocide" in Gaza and called for a ceasefire just days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack. Even so, her financial disclosure shows that she has up to $15,000 invested in Nvidia, a company that is planning a $1.5 billion project in Israel and whose CEO has expressed his admiration for the Jewish state.
Mejia’s opposition to AI data center construction would seemingly prevent her from investing in Nvidia as well as Amazon, which she has also accused of "aggressively suppress[ing] worker organizing across the country." According to her financial disclosure, though, she has another sum of up to $15,000 invested in Amazon.
Mejia, like her political allies, has positioned herself as a champion of the downtrodden.
"I’ve spent my entire life fighting for working families like ours," she notes on her website. "I remember many nights I went to bed hungry." In a campaign ad posted online just before the primary, she said, "I am not the candidate with millions of dollars from stock trades I shouldn’t have been making" in an attack against Malinowski, who faced a House Ethics Committee investigation for his failure to disclose stock trades.
While Mejia may not have earned millions from shady financial transactions, she is indeed a millionaire: Mejia and her husband, executive coach and veteran of multiple large banking institutions Robert Rogers, reported assets between $1,957,079 and $4,984,000. Mejia reported a salary of $224,000 from her work as co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy nonprofit, where she said she "work[ed] tirelessly." The group’s most recent 990 tax form, though, shows that Mejia reported an average workweek of 34.8 hours, significantly less than her support staff.
Mejia did not respond to requests for comment.
