What this page tracks
Most campaign money is easy to understand: it supports a candidate. This page is about the other kind — major influence campaigns that spend money to demote, damage, or quietly sideline an opponent.
Each case below has three parts: what happened (documented facts), who’s behind it (what we can verify about the network), and why we think they’re doing it — our read on the motive, clearly labeled as analysis, not fact. When the evidence doesn’t support a conclusion, we say so.
Case 1: The $181K spoiler in Ohio
In October 2026, a super PAC that didn’t exist a month earlier spent $181,380 on mailers supporting Gregory Levy — the socialist independent running in Ohio’s U.S. Senate special election against Republican Jon Husted and Democrat Sherrod Brown.
The facts
- The PAC
- Enough Promises Ohio, FEC #C00962563 — registered as a super PAC on September 29, 2026.
- The spending
- $181,380 in independent expenditures (printing/postage) supporting Gregory Levy, reported in 48-hour FEC notices on Oct 7 and Oct 10, 2026.
- Treasurer
- Johnmark Roller, Reynoldsburg, Ohio. No public political profile found.
- Donors
- Not disclosed yet. As a newly registered committee, its first donor report isn’t due until after the election window.
- The race
- Ohio’s Senate special election (Vance’s former seat): Husted (R, appointed incumbent) vs. Brown (D, former senator) vs. Levy (I) vs. Redpath (L). See the race →
A spoiler operation to bleed Brown’s votes
In a tight Husted–Brown race, a socialist independent on the ballot pulls votes disproportionately from the Democrat. Spending $181K to boost Levy’s visibility doesn’t need to elect him — it just needs to peel a point or two off Brown. That’s the classic spoiler play: you don’t attack your opponent; you fund his opponent’s opponent.
We can’t prove who’s funding it until donors are disclosed. But no socialist organization spends its own money through a 12-day-old PAC with a Gmail address. The structure says “built for one job” — and the job it does helps exactly one candidate: Husted.
Case 2: The pop-up blitz against Brown
The Levy spoiler isn’t the only outside operation in Ohio. In September 2026, Reuters reported that the Senate Leadership Fund and five other Republican-aligned super PACs accounted for a $14 million advertising blitz against Sherrod Brown in a single week — and that some of the newest spenders were “pop-up” PACs designed to keep their donors hidden until shortly before Election Day.
The facts
- The PACs
- Ohio Flyer PAC and Buckeyes PAC spent over $3 million combined on anti-Brown ads in one week (Sept 2026). No Going Back PAC (tied to Trump’s MAGA Inc.) spent $6.7M; Musk’s America PAC also attacked Brown.
- The treasurer link
- Ohio Flyer PAC and Buckeyes PAC share a treasurer with a pro-Trump super PAC from the 2016 campaign founded by then-campaign manager Paul Manafort and billionaire donor Tom Barrack. (Reuters, Sept 18, 2026)
- Donors
- Undisclosed at the time of the blitz. OpenSecrets’ Brendan Glavin noted the PACs’ recent registration dates meant they wouldn’t have to identify donors until mid-October.
- The ads
- Attacked Brown over transgender rights, bank bailouts, and sought to portray him as aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America. (Reuters)
Soften Brown early, hide the money until it’s too late to matter
The motive here needs less inference: it’s a straight negative blitz to define Brown before he defines himself, in a race both parties see as deciding Senate control. The interesting part is the structure — new PACs, generic names, shared treasurers with old Trump operations, donor disclosure timed to land after the damage is done. The pop-up isn’t hiding what it’s doing. It’s hiding who’s paying for it until the ads have already aired.
Case 3: $20M to stop El-Sayed
In Michigan’s 2026 Democratic Senate primary, AIPAC’s super PAC — the United Democracy Project — spent $20,234,525 opposing Abdul El-Sayed, the pro-Palestine progressive, while backing his opponent Haley Stevens with another $10.5 million.
The facts
- The PAC
- United Democracy Project (FEC #C00799031), AIPAC’s super PAC. Created January 2022; CEO Rob Bassin was AIPAC’s political director for 22 years.
- The spending
- $20,234,525 in independent expenditures opposing El-Sayed; $10.5M supporting Stevens. 57% of UDP’s entire 2026 spending went to this one primary. Full audit →
- The result
- El-Sayed won anyway — by about 1 point. The money showed the scale of the effort; the result showed its limits. Full case study →
Block a pro-Palestine voice before he reaches the Senate
El-Sayed was the kind of candidate AIPAC’s network works hardest to stop: a progressive with a real shot who wouldn’t be a reliable vote for its priorities. Spending $20M+ in a primary — before most voters are paying attention — is about shaping who the nominee is, not winning November. The strategy is the same one UDP ran across 2026: $47 million of its $53.5 million targeted Democratic primaries, because that’s where the network’s preferred candidates get installed with the least scrutiny.
The pattern
Different networks, same toolkit:
1. Pop-up PACs with generic names. “Enough Promises Ohio.” “Ohio Flyer PAC.” “Buckeyes PAC.” “United Democracy Project.” Names that say nothing about who’s behind them — the generic name is itself a layer of obscurity.
2. Donor disclosure timed to miss the moment. Register late, spend fast, disclose after the ads have aired and the votes are nearly cast. By the time anyone knows who paid, the operation has already done its work.
3. Shared personnel across supposedly separate groups. Treasurers, vendors, and operatives recur across PACs that present themselves as independent — the Manafort/Barrack-linked treasurer behind the Ohio pop-ups, the AIPAC lifers running the UDP.
4. Primaries and spoilers over general elections. The cheapest time to kill a candidacy is before it becomes the nominee — or to quietly boost a third candidate who splits your opponent’s vote.
How we label what we know
Every case on this page separates documented facts (FEC filings, named reporting, on-the-record data) from our read (motive analysis — clearly boxed and labeled). Facts get sources. Reads get reasoning you can check. When donors or principals are still hidden, we say that instead of guessing.
New operations get added here as they surface and can be documented. The dashboard’s election-news feed logs them first; this page is where the full picture lives.
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