Two right-of-center candidates backed by Democratic-aligned operatives secured significant vote shares in Wisconsin’s closely-decided Senate race.
Thomas Leager and Phillip Anderson, an independent and a Libertarian, ran in the 2024 Wisconsin Senate election with the support of political operators tied to the Democratic Party, according to multiple media outlets. Eric Hovde, the Republican nominee for Senate, lost to incumbent Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin by around 30,000 votes while Leager and Anderson collectively garnered over 70,000 votes, according to NBC News.
Patriots Run Project, a seemingly unregistered organization that an Associated Press investigation found was affiliated with Democratic consulting firms, recruited Leager to run for Senate in Wisconsin and directed traditionally Democratic donors to support his campaign. Individuals linked to the Democratic Party, meanwhile, sent out mailers in support of Anderson, CNN reported.
“I think it is a desperate, disgusting, dishonest move,” Anderson told the New York Post ahead of election day, disavowing the mailers. “Well-informed voters are the key to a functioning democracy, and while the ads didn’t lie, they’re not honest as to intent. Further, the internet ad has a fake disclaimer, and the mailer has none at all. Highly unethical.”
Votes that went to Leager and Anderson would not necessarily have gone to Hovde if the two weren’t in the race as those who supported the candidates may have stayed home if they were not on the ballot. A 2016 CBS News exit poll, for instance, found that 55% of Libertarian votes would have abstained from the election if there was no Libertarian on the ballot, with 25% saying they’d back a Democrat and 15% saying they’d support a Republican.
Patriots Run Project agreed to support Leager even after he disclosed to them that he was an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2020 plot to kidnap Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, according to the AP. An operative working with the group even said that Leager was the exact kind of candidate they were looking for. The effort to gather signatures to put Leager on the ballot was run by Urban Media LLC, a firm that usually works on behalf of Democratic candidates like Baldwin.
“They are trying to say I am some kind of Democratic operative, which is silly because I am more conservative than Hovde is,” Leager said.
Democrats weren’t the only ones playing dirty in Wisconsin’s 2024 elections.
Republicans launched a PAC called Badger Values in Wisconsin aimed at boosting Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein. The PAC ultimately spent well over $1 million on its pro-Stein campaign in the Badger State, campaign finance filings show.
In the end, Stein got just over 12,000 votes in Wisconsin, shy of the roughly 20,000 vote gap between President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, according to NBC News.
“When candidates and party committees use subterfuge to promote spoiler candidates just for the purpose of siphoning off votes to a viable opponent, this is not a fair and honest election tactic,” Craig Holman, an ethics lobbyist at Public Citizen, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Even though broadcast ads promoting a spoiler candidate will have some disclaimer, the ads appear to many voters as simple campaign ads on behalf of the spoiler candidate. The disclosure of who financed the ad often goes unnoticed. Other similarly deceptive campaign communications on the internet have no disclosure of who is financing the ad, and effective disclosure can also be obfuscated by laundering money from the candidate or party committee to third party groups. Either way, the intent is the same: to artificially inflate the support of a spoiler candidate in order to weaken the viable opponent. These are deceptive campaign practices.”
Holman said reform to combat these tactics would be difficult, recommending enhancing disclosure requirements for outside groups.
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