Normally I don’t like to laugh at someone’s misery but fuck him:
As Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance fell far short of his Democratic opponent Tim Ryan in recent campaign donations, one of the Republican’s chief fundraising vehicles says it prioritizes paying off the campaign’s debt from the May 3 primary he won.
The campaign’s biggest creditor: Vance himself.
He loaned his campaign $700,000 for the primary, Federal Election Commission filings show. And because of a Supreme Court decision in May, in a case brought by Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, Vance and others who loan their campaigns big money have more flexibility to get contributors to pay them back, campaign finance experts said. The court case seems also to have spurred some past candidates, such as former California Democratic Rep. Harley Rouda, to inquire about paying off old loans, filings show.
The Cruz case may have sweeping consequences on the campaign trail, giving wealthy candidates a new advantage, while also stirring up old debts of candidates past and present.
Vance Victory, a joint fundraising committee that splits donations between Vance’s Senate campaign and two other committees, states in its formula for dishing out donor funds that the first $2,900 of an individual contribution would be “designated for 2022 Primary Election debt retirement.” The next $2,900 would go to Vance’s campaign for the general election, with the next $10,000 to the Ohio Republican Party and the following $5,000 to Working for Ohio, Vance’s leadership political action committee.
This is what happens when you need to rely on one single donor. In this case, it’s Peter Thiel:
“There’s a Thiel effect,” says a longtime Republican operative in Ohio, who requested anonymity to avoid angering members of his party. The operative says that many of the things that made Vance’s candidacy different from his peers (and which were largely the result of Thiel’s largesse) now look like vulnerabilities. During the primary, Vance largely eschewed normal door-to-door campaigning in favor of a strategy that focused on attracting media coverage. Rather than building a large campaign organization, he relied on ads and advice that Thiel and Thiel’s allies paid for.
In the first quarter of 2022, Vance’s campaign raised a paltry $39,000. Protect Ohio Values, the Thiel-backed PAC, helped make up the deficit, going so far as to publish its research on a public website because election law prohibits super PACs from coordinating directly with campaigns. After Trump traveled to Ohio for a rally and endorsed Vance on April 15, Thiel gave an additional $5 million to the PAC, which blanketed the airways with news of the former president’s support.
This donation helped Vance win the primary, but it also left him vulnerable. Since May, according to the GOP operative, major donors have avoided contributing large sums to Vance in part because they sense that their donations will be dwarfed by the record sum that Thiel has spent on the race, limiting their influence in shaping Vance’s policies should he win the election. Moreover, though Thiel has made a career of contrarian provocations, many wealthy donors in the state are wary about being associated with Vance’s views on abortion and other controversial issues. “Vance will have to be bailed out by outside groups with finite resources,” the operative says. “That makes the path to a Republican Senate majority that much harder. The question is, how much is Thiel going to put in?”
The sense that Thiel’s influence on Republican politics comes with downsides will only grow if Blake Masters, a Thiel protégé who’s fashioned his own far-right Senate candidacy in Arizona, wins his primary next month, as primary polls suggest he will. Masters, like Vance, is a political neophyte, with a fair amount of ideological baggage, facing an incumbent Democrat, Senator Mark Kelly. There hasn’t been much general election polling, but what polls there are show Kelly ahead of Masters.
Meanwhile, over on Team Blue:
A new TV commercial in Ohio’s high-profile Senate showdown by Democratic nominee Rep. Tim Ryan targets rival J.D. Vance over a non-profit organization the now-Republican nominee set up five years ago that partially aimed to help Ohioans hard hit by the opioid crisis.
"When JD Vance moved back to Ohio, he told us his new non-profit would help fix our state’s opioid crisis," says the narrator in the Ryan ad, which was shared first with Fox News on Tuesday. "But he failed to fund a single addiction program."
Ryan, a longtime congressman from northeast Ohio, and Vance, a former hedge fund executive and best-selling author, are running to succeed retiring GOP Sen. Rob Portman in a race that’s one of a handful across the country that could determine whether Republicans win back the Senate majority.
The spot charges that Vance "funneled tens of thousands" raised by the nonprofit, Our Ohio Renewal, "to his top political adviser and paid tens of thousands for political polling," and that "Vance did nothing to help Ohio, but did everything to help his political career."
Health and Democracy are on the ballot this year and we need to get ready to flip Ohio Blue. Click below to donate and get involved with Ryan and his fellow Ohio Democrats campaigns:
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