Bills, Backers, and Blocs: A Data-Driven Look at Lobbying in Hawai‘i

by Trey Gordner and Colin Moore, UHERO, June 23, 2025

When the Hawaiʻi State Legislature mandated the Legislative/Administrative Action Report (LAAR) beginning in 2025, it launched one of the country’s most detailed state-level lobbying datasets. The final filing for the 2025 session (due June 2) revealed 7,188 positions taken by 340 organizations on 1,747 bills.

What we found

Support overwhelms opposition. Of 5,050 unique positions, nearly two-thirds (63%) “Supported”, 17% “Opposed,” and the balance filed comments. Lobbying in Hawaiʻi appears geared more toward advancing proposals than blocking them.

A small number of organizations are disproportionately active. The typical organization weighed in on just six bills, but the 3 most frequent participants—the Hawaii Farm Bureau Federation, Plumbers and Fitters Local 675, and Hawai‘i Laborers’ Union Local 368—each took about 170 positions, or over 28 times as many.

Figure 1: Top 10 Most Active Organizations in 2025, with Position Type

Some organizations focus on advancing new policies, while others work primarily to block or amend them. The Ulupono Initiative and the Hawai‘i Primary Care Association, each with 71 unique positions, lobbied in support over 95% of the time. Healthcare organizations, social service providers, and progressive advocacy groups were similarly among the most active supporters of proposed legislation. Other organizations lobby in opposition the majority of the time, indicating a preference for the status quo. These include utilities, insurance companies, and vice industries (tobacco and alcohol). The first two may be overrepresented in this session, given urgent debates over policy responses to the Lahaina wildfires.

Table 1: Organizations who regularly testified in opposition in the 2025 session

* A subsidiary of Reynolds American Inc., the U.S. parent company of, among others, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company

** Philip Morris USA Inc., John Middleton Co., U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Co., Helix Innovations LLC, & NJOY, LLC

*** A holding company for Reyes Beverage Group, the largest beer distributor in the United States, and Reyes Coca-Cola Bottling

Some organizations also filed comments every or nearly every time, which could be a strategy to influence legislation without taking a hard yes/no stand. Examples of these more cautious organizations include private sector unions, major corporations, and trade associations.

Different sectors and interest groups show distinct patterns and levels of participation. We categorize all organizations into one of 15 interest groups or economic sectors. Advocacy groups, health organizations, trade associations, and private sector unions are the top 4 most active by position count, making up 39% of all organizations but a disproportionate 55% of all positions. Sectors also display patterns of offense, defense, and caution, supporting the organization-level interpretation above.

To better represent intensity of participation by group/sector, we calculate an “influence factor,” which is the average number of positions per organization within a group/sector divided by the median of all lobbying organizations. Public sector unions top the chart with 8.5, meaning they take positions more than eight times as often as the median organization. They are followed by private sector unions (6.0), Nonprofits / advocacy (3.9), and Agriculture (3.8). While these groups/sectors may not have the largest number of organizations, they tend to be far more engaged in the legislative process.

Figure 2: Influence Factor by Interest Group/Economic Sector

Why it matters

Academic value. Political‐science datasets such as CHORUS trace interest-group alignments in a handful of states, but Hawaiʻi’s LAAR is unique: it is compulsory, filed contemporaneously, and cleanly matches every lobbyist and client to the exact bills they acted on. This offers scholars a laboratory for theories of coalition formation, issue framing and policy diffusion that previously relied on costly hand-coding, uncertain AI techniques, or small-scale qualitative studies. Coupled with open data on floor votes and campaign donations, LAAR data could allow researchers to test whether lobbying activity predicts legislator behavior and bill outcomes—shedding light on pathways from money to policy.

Civic value. For the public, LAAR filings transform opaque State Capitol conversations into traceable digital footprints. Citizens can now see, at a glance, who tried to change the law or budget versus who defended the status quo, which organizations work together in formal and informal coalitions, and whether the biggest campaign contributors were equally active in the committee rooms. Moreover, journalists can cite clean, transparent datasets rather than piecing together patterns from the legislative record.

Limitations

Coverage gaps built into Hawaiʻi’s lobbying law. HRS §97 exempts several categories of actors from registering and reporting as lobbyists—including private citizens speaking only for themselves, federal/state/county officials acting in their official capacity, and elected officials. Consequently, the LAAR does not capture the full universe of voices that shape legislation. In particular, the positions of state and county executive branch agencies on matters within their jurisdiction often carry great weight with legislators but are absent from this dataset.

Two coarse filing windows per session. The LAAR requires reports only at the mid-session and end-of-session marks. If an organization supported an early draft of a bill but opposed a later version—or weighed in only during conference committee—those twists are compressed into a single line item or disappear altogether. Without draft numbers or time stamps, analysis cannot always distinguish evolving positions from consistent ones, or organizations participating at every opportunity versus intermittently.

Positions ≠ sentiment. A position is a strategic choice at a particular moment, not a comprehensive statement of an organization’s policy preferences, much less the views of its individual members or the public at large. Aggregate patterns should be interpreted accordingly.

Dependence on timely and complete compliance. Our analysis assumes that every covered lobbyist met the statutory filing deadlines. In practice, late, incomplete, or subsequently amended reports could escape the snapshot downloaded for this post, leading to under-counts of both organizations and positions.

Subjective group/sector classifications. Tags were assigned manually using public data and professional judgment. Conglomerates that straddle multiple lines of business, umbrella associations, and single-issue coalitions often defy neat categorization. Ambiguous cases could therefore inflate or deflate influence measures attributed to a given interest group or economic sector.

Conclusion

The new LAAR filings render lobbying in Hawaiʻi more transparent than ever before. With thousands of positions, hundreds of organizations, and clear patterns and strategies, the dataset turns anecdote into evidence. For academics, it represents new data to understand legislative influence. For citizens, it offers a clear new window into state politics. And for legislators, it provides a reminder that viewpoints may be over- or underrepresented in their deliberations. In our next blog post, we will explore the data at the bill level, highlighting contested policy areas, organizational coalitions, and correlations between lobbying activity and bill progress.

---30---

CB:  The Sunshine Blog: Influence Peddling By The Numbers - Honolulu Civil Beat