Jason Pizzo taps single donor for $36K gain in unopposed Senate re-election bid

Jason Pizzo came close, but Republicans shot him down.

Democratic Sen. Jason Pizzo may be running unopposed in Senate District 37, but that didn’t stop him from raising $36,000 last month to dissuade potential challengers from entering the race.

As of April 30, the Miami lawyer held more than $762,000 between his campaign account and political committee, New Opportunity Florida.

Of that, $500,000 came in January from a single source: Tristar Productions, a New Jersey-based marketing company for various cooking aids, gardening tools and other products.

Pizzo’s April gains also came from one donor: Mark B. Fisher, the founder and CEO of New York-headquartered commodity-trading firm MBF Clearing Corp.

The company is registered to do business in Florida through a Miami Beach address.

Pizzo spent nearly $29,000 in April. That included $12,000 on consulting fees, split evenly between Miami-based Edge Communications and Wilton Manors-headquartered Johnson Strategies.

His largest single expenditure, $7,500, was a sponsorship payment to Dolphin Democrats, an Oakland Park-based organization that touts itself as “Florida’s oldest LGBTQ+ political organization.”

He also paid a $5,000 sponsorship payment to the Florida Young Democrats and a $4,000 service retainer to Statecraft Digital, an Orlando-based marketing solution company.

A former Assistant State Attorney, Pizzo won his Senate seat in 2018 by defeating incumbent Democratic Sen. Daphne Campbell with 54% of the vote. He faced no General Election challenger that year.

For now, it appears his route to re-election will be even easier this year in recently remapped SD 37, which covers South Florida’s coast from Sunny Isles Beach in Miami-Dade County to Deerfield Beach in Broward County.

The state’s decennial redistricting placed him and Democratic Sen. Gary Farmer in the same district. Rather than opposing a member of his party, Farmer filed late last month to run for an open judge position on the 17th Circuit Court of Broward.

Candidates faced a Tuesday deadline to report all campaign finance activity through the end of April.