The heirs of late Walmart founder Sam Walton are backing Hillary Clinton for president.
Collectively, the leading members of Arkansas’ Walton family have given about $714,000 to the candidate and the Democratic Party during the current election cycle, federal records show.
The donations are an example of the longstanding ties between the Walton and Clinton families. It is an awkward situation for the candidate, a former Walmart board member, since most of her allies in organized labor and the broader liberal movement detest the Waltons, mainly because of the company’s anti-union stance.
Clinton has sought to distance herself from the family in recent years and has returned donations from the company in the past after they became controversial.
But the connections continue to follow her: Emails from when she was secretary of state that were publicly released Friday show that she met privately with top Walmart executives in 2011 and that the agency assisted the company’s effort to buy a South African retail chain called Massmart despite union opposition.
Federal Election Commission filings show that Alice Walton and Sam Rawlings Walton, respectively Sam Walton’s daughter and grandson, each gave $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund in late 2015 and early 2016.
The fund is a joint project of the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic committees of 32 states and Puerto Rico that allows wealthy donors to provide the maximum allowable donation to all 35 entities at once with one check.
The records also show that Alice and Sam Rawlings Walton each gave the Clinton presidential campaign $2,700 in 2015, the maximum allowed under federal law during the Democratic primary. Sam Rawlings Walton’s wife, Tillie Walton, gave another $2,700 during the primary.
Alice Walton also gave $25,000, the maximum allowed under federal law, to the super PAC “Ready for Hillary” during the 2013-14 cycle. Clinton family allies such as political strategist James Carville run the organization, now called the “Ready PAC.”
The Walmart Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation each has given between $1 million-$5 million to the Clinton Foundation, according to its website.
A search of election commission filings didn’t show any donations by the Walton family to Republican nominee Donald Trump’s campaign.
The various donations run counter to the widespread perception of the Waltons as staunch conservatives.
Clinton’s ties to the Bentonville, Ark., retail chain go back to 1986, when she joined its board of directors while serving as the state’s first lady. She remained on the board until 1992, when husband Bill Clinton ran for the White House.
Sam Walton himself had called Clinton and asked her to serve on the board, she recalled in a 2004 speech. At the time, the company was being criticized for its lack of diversity. A 2007 Los Angeles Times story reported that it was Alice Walton, who knew Clinton socially, who suggested her as a board member.
Clinton received $18,000 annually for serving on the board and a bonus of $1,500 for each board meeting she attended, a 2006 Associated Press story reported. The Clinton family amassed $100,000 in Walmart stock by 1993, which was put into a blind trust after Bill Clinton was elected president that year. The Clintons flew on the Walmart corporate jet 14 times during 1990 and 1991.
Labor leaders in particular hate Walmart for its anti-union stance. The company employs more than 1.3 million people in the U.S., making it the nation’s largest private-sector employer.
By all accounts, Clinton never challenged that stance during her time on the board. Instead, she reportedly pushed the company to hire more women and to focus on environmental issues. She was a public booster of the company.
“I’m always proud of Walmart and what we do and the way we do it better than anybody else,” she said at a 1990 stockholders meeting.
“She was not a dissenter,” said Don Soderquist, vice chairman during Clinton’s tenure, told the Los Angeles Times in 2007.
Clinton has distanced herself from the company in recent decades. He tenure on the Walmart board gets a single passing mention in her 2003 memoir Living History.
She returned a $5,000 donation from Walmart’s political action fund in 2008 after it became an issue in the Democratic presidential primary that year. She said at the time that the company’s policies “do not reflect the best way to do business and the values that I think are important in America.” Her campaign did not return another $20,000 in contributions from Walmart executives and lobbyists, though.
As recently as 2014, she held a book signing event for her second memoir, Hard Choices, at a Little Rock, Ark., Walmart.
Bill Clinton defended her board tenure in a 2008 interview with ABC, saying that they “lived in a state that had a very weak labor movement … She knew there was no way to change that, not with it headquartered in Arkansas.”
Correction: This article originally incorrectly attributed Samuel Rawlings Walton’s $2,700 donation in 2015 as having been made by his father, Samual Robson Walton.
