A collection of liberal activists and donors from around the country suddenly decided to send tens of thousands of dollars to right-wing, third-party candidates who could act as spoilers and help Democrats win pivotal races in the battle for control of the House and Senate.
Ballots in a trio of swing-district races in Montana, Iowa and Virginia will include candidates recruited on Facebook by a shady, now-defunct group that relied on money from Democrats to pay for filing fees and ballot access signatures.
In Wisconsin, some of the same Democrats have donated thousands of dollars to an “America First” conservative candidate who could serve as a potential spoiler in the highly competitive U.S. Senate race that could determine control of the chamber.
Nearly $20,000 has been dumped into putting Thomas Bowman, 71, on the ballot in Minnesota’s 2nd Congressional District race.
A group called Patriots Run Project recruited Mr. Bowman earlier this year after surveilling his Facebook posts opposing illegal immigration and COVID-19 vaccines.
Representatives from the group convinced him to run as a “constitutional conservative” in the closely divided district, where Rep. Angie Craig, a Democrat, is running for a second term. Ms. Craig, 52, is favored in the race but faces a competitive challenge from Republican Joe Teirab, 36. Putting Mr. Bowman on the ballot could keep the blue seat safe by drawing votes from conservative Republicans who might otherwise vote for Mr. Teirab.
Much, and potentially all, of the $19,800 donated to Mr. Bowman’s campaign came from Democrats. Mr. Bowman said all the money was spent on gathering the 1,000 signatures he needed to get on the ballot. He doesn’t know the donors and is not sure how the money was collected, he told The Washington Times.
Mr. Bowman has never run for office and lives about 10 miles outside the 2nd District.
A disabled veteran, Mr. Bowman is recovering from a kidney transplant and has not received additional help for his campaign from the Patriots Run Project. He has not heard from them in months. Calls by The Times to Patriot Run Project organizers’ phones were not returned or the phones were disconnected. The website is no longer active.
“I just need to buy a domain, a website, and get all that jazz built, but I don’t have any resources. I’m living off Social Security, basically,” Mr. Bowman said.
Democratic donors who funded the collection of signatures for Mr. Bowman’s candidacy include Elizabeth Steinglass, a D.C.-based poet and author who has contributed large sums of money to the Democratic Party and individual candidates, including $41,300 to the House Democrats fundraising arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and $21,560 to the Senate Democrat fundraising arm, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
Ms. Steinglass gave the maximum $3,300 to Mr. Bowman, even though he is a staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump and is running to the right of the GOP candidate in the 2nd District race. She did not respond to an inquiry from The Times.
Other donors include Massachusetts-based publisher Josh Groves, who gave the maximum $3,300 to Mr. Bowman’s campaign two months after he donated to ActBlue, the main fundraising website for the Democratic Party. He did not respond to an inquiry.
Retiree Lynn Brody of New York City gave $3,300 to Mr. Bowman on June 3. A few weeks later, she donated $3,300 to Vice President Kamala Harris.
None of Mr. Bowman’s campaign donors live in Minnesota. A donor named Joe Fox, based in Charlottesville and Alexandria, Virginia, gave Mr. Bowman $3,200. He also donated to the Senate campaign of Jon Tester, Montana Democrat.
“That’s a lot of money to max out to an unknown candidate, particularly one that is not a Democrat,” Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of Americans for Public Trust, a conservative watchdog group, said.
Americans for Public Trust filed a complaint with the FEC, arguing Patriots Run Project is violating campaign finance law by failing to file federal disclosure reports.
Some of Mr. Bowman’s donors have posted pro-Democrat messages on social media or have contributed to Democrats in the past. Despite the obscurity of Mr. Bowman’s candidacy, he received the maximum $3,300 donation from gaming entrepreneur and investor Rick Thompson, who is co-founder and managing director at Signia Venture Partners. Mr. Thomson lives in Jackson, Wyoming.
His social media posts suggest he backs Democrats. In February, he reposted a Democrat website, stepasidejoe.org, calling for President Biden to quit the race so that a stronger party candidate could run in his place. “For the love of God. Joe Biden stand down!” Mr. Thompson posted on Feb. 12.
Mr. Teirab, the Republican candidate in Minnesota’s 2nd District, called the Patriots Run Project recruitment “blatant election interference” and pinned it squarely on the Democrats and his Democratic opponent, Ms. Craig. Democrat Party officials said they have nothing to do with it. Ms. Craig’s campaign did not respond to an inquiry from The Times.
Several of Mr. Bowman’s donors, including Mr. Thompson, gave the maximum $3,300 to another conservative spoiler candidate, Thomas Leager, who is running as a pro-Trump, pro-Second Amendment independent in Wisconsin’s U.S. Senate race.
The latest polling shows Mr. Leager could influence the outcome of a close race.
Incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat, is leading Republican challenger Eric Hovde by just 3%, and Mr. Leager received 2% of likely voters in a Marquette Law School poll released earlier this month.
Mr. Leager’s social media posts criticize Mr. Hovde as a “fraud” who has worked with “Trump-hating media” and said the GOP “always compromises on conservative positions.”
It’s not clear whether Patriots Run Project recruited Mr. Leager, who did not return a phone call inquiring about his campaign. His campaign donations mirror Mr. Bowman’s.
Some of the donors to Mr. Bowman’s campaign gave more than $13,000 to Mr. Leager’s campaign, including Mr. Fox, Mr. Thompson and Ms. Steinglass’s husband, David, another hefty Democratic patron. Among the big donations Mr. Steinglass gave in recent months was a $25,000 check to HMP, a super PAC dedicated exclusively to electing Democrats to Congress.
In all, Mr Leager’s campaign banked $23,550, all of it spent on collecting more than 4,000 signatures needed to get him on the ballot.
Mr. Leager indicates on his website that he was recruited to enter the race as an “America First” candidate.
“I was approached by my community to run for U.S. Senate, a duty I accepted despite the challenges,” Mr. Leager wrote.
“America First means closed borders, protecting American markets and workers, restoring the American Dream, defending 2A, protecting children from radical gender theory, shrinking the federal government, and holding it accountable for weaponizing against citizens,” Mr. Leager wrote. “I also aim to end mandatory spending, bring troops home, and support President Donald J. Trump in Making America Great Again.”
Democratic donors likely helped get two other spoiler candidates on the ballot in key House races in Montana and Virginia.
The Associated Press found the ballot signature collection efforts for those candidates were funded in part by Carolyn Cohen, a Nyack, New York philanthropist and registered Democrat who backs liberal causes. She could not be reached for comment.
In three races, a Nevada company, Common Sense America, helped gather signatures to qualify candidates for the ballot. The company is associated with the Democratic consulting firm Sole Strategies. Neither company responded to an inquiry from The Times.
House Republicans control the majority with only a handful of votes, and the outcome in November is considered too close to predict. It could hinge on Virginia’s 2nd District.
Patriots Run Project recruited Robert Reid Jr. through Facebook to run as an independent in the 2nd District, where Rep. Jen Kiggans, a Republican, is seeking a second term. She won narrowly in 2022, beating Democrat Rep. Elaine Luria by 10,000 votes.
Mr. Reid, 78, told The Times a professional firm was “paid a lot of money” to collect the 1,000 signatures needed to get him on the ballot. He believes the effort cost “much more than $10,000,” but FEC data show no campaign contributions or expenditures.
Patriots Run Project has ghosted Mr. Reid, and he is left struggling to put together a campaign amid complaints from his GOP friends that he’s been duped onto the ballot to help the Democrats. Mr. Reid said he hasn’t been actively campaigning much for the seat.
“I feel that now I’m not sure whether I should be on the ballot,” Mr. Reid said. “I want the people to have a choice. That’s the main reason I’ve stayed in it. I would have backed out, but it’s too late. My name is on the ballot. The ballots have been mailed out.”
Patriots Run Project recruited Dennis Hayes to run as the Libertarian candidate in Montana’s 1st Congressional District, where GOP incumbent Rep. Ryan Zinke is running for another term. Mr. Zinke’s Democrat opponent is Monica Tranel, who he beat in 2022 by 3 points.
Mr. Hayes said he was recruited by Patriots Run Project through Facebook after they saw his posts about government corruption. They asked if he would run as the Libertarian candidate.
“I really didn’t know because I don’t know exactly what a Libertarian is,” Mr. Hayes said. “When I looked it up, it said, ’They believe in small governments and believe in the constitution.’ And I thought, ’Well, that’s right up my alley.’”
Mr. Hayes, 70, said he told Patriots Run Project he lives on Social Security and did not have the money to pay the filing fee. Someone showed up at his house and picked up one of his bank deposit slips, then went to the bank and deposited the $1,740 candidate filing fee on his behalf.
“There was a guy that lives in Helena. He came down to Townsend to give me a check, but I told him that I’m leaving in the morning on vacation, and I really don’t have time. So I gave him a deposit slip, and he went to the bank and deposited it.”
No donations show up under Mr. Hayes’s campaign in FEC data.
According to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, the Patriots Run Project had operated as a network on 26 domains, 10 websites, 15 pages on Facebook and 13 linked Facebook groups seeking candidates who would mirror the Trump agenda on gun rights, border security, immigration and election fraud. The group was manipulating Facebook users, the ISD determined, and it chastised parent company Meta for not moving more quickly to take down the pages, which were removed in June.
Patriots Run Project is linked only to a post office box in the District of Columbia and is not a registered business entity, tax-exempt organization or political action committee.
The online behavior of the group, ISD said, “suggest that the network was violating Meta’s coordinated inauthentic behavior policies by deceiving users and Meta about the ’identity, purpose, or origin of the entity that they represent.’ They were all likely managed by the same person or group of people, and whoever was responsible for setting them up took steps to mask their identity.”
• Susan Ferrechio can be reached at sferrechio@washingtontimes.com.