Millionaire candidates pour cash into Ohio, Pa. Senate races
COLUMBUS, OHIO » Millionaire candidates and billionaire investors are harnessing their considerable personal wealth to try to win competitive Republican primaries for open U.S. Senate seats in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Mike Gibbons, an Ohio investment banker, leads the pack of self-funders in both states after lending his campaign almost $17 million. Three other wealthy candidates in the Ohio race — state Sen. Matt Dolan, whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians baseball team; former Ohio Republican chair Jane Timken, whose husband’s family founded the steel giant Timken Co.; and “Hillbilly Elegy” author JD Vance — have lent or contributed a combined $14 million to their campaigns.
In Pennsylvania, heart surgeon-turned-TV celebrity Mehmet Oz, former hedge fund CEO David McCormick and former realestate investment firm CEO Carla Sands report that they have lent their campaigns more than $20 million combined.
Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, has poured money into a super PAC backing Vance, while hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin has contributed millions to a super PAC supporting McCormick.
The influx of money into the Ohio and Pennsylvania primaries illustrates the importance of the two Senate seats, which could help determine party control of the chamber in November. The highly competitive races for the seats being vacated by Ohio GOP Sen. Rob Portman and Pennsylvania GOP Sen. Pat Toomey are expected to be among the most expensive contests in this year’s midterm elections.
While the money alone may not determine who wins, it can definitely help.
Fighting ‘fire with fire’
Sheila Krumholz, executive director of OpenSecrets, a research group that tracks campaign spending, said self-funding has become an increasingly appealing option for wealthy candidates because the lack of limits on personal giving allows them to “fight fire with fire” against deeppocketed super PACs and dark-money groups.
“The massive spending by super PACs and outside groups with anonymous sources means that candidates really can never stop fundraising,” Krumholz said. “They can never have enough money, so self-funded candidates have that built-in advantage. You’re not only raising money to fight an opponent or opponents, you need money to fend off attacks that could come from anywhere, at any moment, in any amount of money.”
In Pennsylvania, the state’s seven-way Republican Senate primary election on May 17 has been transformed by three wealthy and well-connected candidates who moved from blue states to spend their riches on a campaign in the presidential battleground.
In their financial disclosures, Sands, Oz and McCormick report being worth tens of millions if not hundreds of millions, and owning properties across the country.
McCormick, who resigned from his $22 million-a-year job as CEO of a hedge fund in Connecticut to run for the Senate, grew up the son of a college professor, administrator and president who became the chancellor of the state’s university system. McCormick often talks about working on a Christmas tree farm owned by his family.
But asked if someone as wealthy as he is can understand average Pennsylvanians, McCormick told KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh that “I didn’t have anything” growing up.
His campaign later said McCormick had a “humble upbringing” and had been trying to explain that he worked for the wealth he has now.
A rival Republican candidate, Kathy Barnette, who has talked of being the product of rape when her mother was 11 and growing up on a pig farm in a house with no running water or insulation, took aim at what she called the GOP’s habit of electing “the richest person.”
“How has that served us? Picking the richest person, just because they are the richest person,” Barnette said at a forum in late March.