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AIPAC, AI, Crypto and Gambling Are Hiding Their Big Election Spends

Intercept staffers break down the latest election news and the front groups fueling the midterms.

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie was decisively ousted on Tuesday night in his Kentucky primary, a win for President Donald Trump, who had launched an all-out attack on the congressman for his role in pushing for the release of the Epstein files. But in Pennsylvania, the left had a lot to celebrate. Chris Rabb won by nearly 15 points in Philadelphia in a major win for progressives. And Bob Brooks, a retired firefighter and union head, sailed to victory with the support of both the left and moderates. 

Mysterious super PACs with ties to Republican donors poured millions into influencing the election results in both states with varying degrees of success. In Kentucky, AIPAC’s super political action committee and two other groups backed by pro-Israel donors spent more than $15 million in opposition to Massie or in support of his opponent, according to Federal Election Commission reports released through Tuesday. 

In Pennsylvania, advertisements from Lead Left — a super PAC that reportedly has ties to Republican donors — dropped ads attacking two of the candidates as not progressive enough, leading to speculation that Republicans were trying to prop up a weaker candidate for the general election. 

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington and politics reporter Matt Sledge break down the contentious primary races, the record-level campaign spending and how obscure groups funding the midterm elections are hiding donors’ tracks.

“Groups can kind of game campaign finance deadlines and create super PACs to funnel money to other super PACs so that reporting deadlines are missed and use these ‘pop-up super PACs’ to ensure that ordinary voters never find out who is funding ads before a campaign happens,” says Sledge. “Sometimes there’s even a second layer of pop-up super PACness where those bland-sounding groups send money to other bland-sounding groups. God help you if you’re an ordinary voter trying to track all this money.”

The consequential U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United 16 years ago has allowed courts to chip away at campaign financing restrictions. “Now here we are where any industry that’s facing regulation or any donors who support an unpopular cause can really just open the spigots and try to throw primaries their way,” adds Sledge.  

Certain industries have gotten smart about how to hide where the money is coming from. “Ordinary voters don’t generally like crypto, AI or gambling. They may tolerate it at a maximum, but they’re not motivated by the idea of electing pro-crypto, pro-AI, pro-gambling people,” notes Sledge. “But all of these industries have realized, ‘OK, we can use super PACs that run ads that have nothing to do with our industry and get our friends elected to Congress, and they are going to remember that we spent a lot of money on their races.’”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen.

Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

Matt Sledge: And I’m Matt Sledge, another politics reporter at The Intercept.

JW: Today, we’re going to dive right in because I know we’re both exhausted. We were both up late covering the Kentucky and Pennsylvania primaries. Matt, we’re speaking Wednesday morning, fresh off of that Kentucky primary election, where President Donald Trump endorsed Republican Rep. Thomas Massie’s opponent.

Massie decisively lost his race. Is this proof that despite inflation, gas prices, the war in Iran, Trump is still a kingmaker, or I guess in Massie’s case, a hangman?

MS: Certainly when it comes to the Republican Party and intraparty politics, some people thought Massie might pull this out, and instead it was a pretty humiliating defeat for a long-term incumbent in the House.

“This is a party-on-party fight. Trump took out a guy who votes conservative nearly all the time.”

“This is a party-on-party fight. Trump took out a guy who votes conservative nearly all the time.”

But you do have to step back a little bit and remember, this is a party-on-party fight. Trump took out a guy who votes conservative nearly all the time, and it’s a safe Republican district. So he spent a lot of political capital taking out one Republican to replace with another Republican, essentially because he was mad about the Epstein files.

JW: The Epstein files is an interesting part of all of this because Thomas Massie fought so hard to get the Epstein files released. We talked about it on the podcast with one of the attorneys for some of Epstein’s survivors, and it did seem like an issue that was breaking out politically.

Attorney for Epstein Survivors Warns That Justice Is Impossible With Bondi as AG 

Democrats have been speaking about it. I actually heard at the Center for American Progress’s event on Tuesday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries actually spoke about the Epstein files and talked about it as a top issue for Democrats. So we know this is something that they are trying to make an election issue, but it doesn’t seem like it worked for Massie. Why do you think that is?

MS: I think it’s because it cut against the president so much and, just in the larger picture, enraged the president and turned him decisively against Massie. They had their problems before. I think it was hard for Thomas Massie to argue in his district that getting the Epstein files released was a great coup but also that it didn’t harm the president, because it clearly did harm the president politically. Ultimately, the voters in his district decided that helping the president was more important than anything else.

JW: We also know that pro-Israel groups poured money into this race as well to try and defeat Thomas Massie. Is there anything that you can say about that?

MS: Yeah, it was a lot of money. It was over $15 million from two explicitly pro-Israel groups, super PAC affiliated with AIPAC and then a Republican pro-Israel group. Then also there was a kind of special purpose-created super PAC that was funded in large part by pro-Israel donors. So this was the most expensive House race in history. A huge percentage of that spending came from donors who were motivated by the issue of Israel.

Massie has always opposed foreign aid in general, but I will say he has seemed to take special delight in tweaking supporters of Israel. Obviously that is a minority position within the Republican Party, so these groups came for him, and they were successfully able to help the president oust him.

JW: We’re going to talk a little bit more about how super PACs are hiding where their money is going in this election. But before we do that, I wanted to touch a little bit more on Democratic primaries from last night. So Pennsylvania had some big primaries. Are there any top lines from that race you want to share?

MS: I wasn’t following Pennsylvania as much, but of course, everybody was watching that race in Philadelphia, where Chris Rabb was able to pull out a victory. That’s a huge win for the Democratic Socialist wing of the party. He was up against a more establishment Democrat, and it shows that there is this really energized cohort within the Democratic Party that’s really excited to elect progressives.

JW: As I mentioned at the beginning of this podcast, I was up covering that race. One really interesting thing, aside from the Philadelphia primary, was in Pennsylvania 7, the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, ended up backing — really heavily backing — Bob Brooks, one of the more progressive candidates in that race. We also saw Bernie Sanders backing him and the Working Families Party. So we saw this coalition effort between more mainstream center-left and progressives which is obviously different than what we saw in Philadelphia, but it’s interesting to see how those two coalitions could work together in Congress.

And Matt, I want to talk a little bit more about how super PACs are operating in this race. You have a new piece out this week that gets into all of that. So it’s about groups........

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