“There's no answer that makes him look good.”
The Rooster broke the news late Friday night to stick it to Vivek Ramaswamy's team.
This dispatch is too long for email. Please open your browser to read in full.
Rooster Worldwide is passing the hat this month on behalf of Central Ohio Rank-and-File Educators (CORE). Because we love our beautiful teachers, don’t we, folks?
These folks are on the front lines of education in Ohio, a state run by Republicans who don’t respect the profession.
The easiest way to help is to subscribe to their Substack, the Member Action Tea. Like The Rooster, even subscribing for free and opening the occasional unlocked dispatch is helping keep the lights on.
You can also help subsidize their organizing operation through multiple payment processing platforms:
If you subscribe to their newsletter or send a donation of $10 or more, please email me, and you will be entered for a chance to win one of five free pieces of merchandise from the dry goods store.
If you don’t want to spend money, you can also help their cause by following CORE on Instagram.
Thank you for your attention to this critical matter. Now, let’s get on with the show!
We have a lot to cover today.
The Notorious Conman done goofed!
I received some hot information through the anonymous tip box on Friday evening, if you can believe that.
The tipster alerted me to the fact that Republican gubernatorial frontrunner Vivek Ramaswamy had listed hundreds, if not thousands, of donation refunds in his latest campaign finance report.
I didn’t want to believe it at first, because that report got filed in July, after which Ramaswamy’s hangers-on bragged about their fundraising prowess, which also included a $10 million donation to their aligned Super PAC from anti-public education financier Jeffrey Yass.
But it checked out: By my math, Ramaswamy refunded 729 donors a total of $162,281.
I reached out to some Republican and Democratic friends, and the consensus was that it was nothing short of bizarre. Of the roughly 10 contacts I asked, none could recall seeing anything close to 726 refunds in a single report.
“There’s no answer that makes [Ramaswamy] look good,” said one Democratic state legislator.
Because here’s the thing: Refunds are illegal, at least by the letter of Ohio campaign finance law:
As one friendly legislator explained, this is why, when campaigns refund donations from toxic sources, they always do so by donating the same amount to charity rather than to the individual or entity that donated in the first place.
The other explanation would be that Ramaswamy is returning illegal donations. An ostensibly easy answer could be that Ramaswamy’s team tried to funnel money from his presidential campaign fund into the state level.
But a prominent Republican discarded that theory.
“Eh,” they said. “Different WinRed accounts. Different bank accounts.” (WinRed is the Republican payment processing platform, the counterpart of the Democratic ActBlue.)
But another interesting point is that many of the names on the refund list don’t appear on Ramaswamy’s donor report. And there are some with different filing names as well.
Unfortunately, I can’t contact Ramaswamy’s team and ask for a comment because of the one time I tricked Ramaswamy into thinking he was meeting Ohio State head football coach Ryan Day at a local chicken shack.
In retrospect, I should have sat on the info and come out strong on Monday to set the tone. But I chose to ruin his team’s Friday night by tipping my hand early. And I’m going to try to cull that petty reflex in the future.
I do, however, wonder why this information fell to Ohio’s premier sewer blogger rather than the Ohio Democratic Party or Dr. Amy Acton’s gubernatorial campaign team.
I don’t expect this story to decide the election, barring some further investigative efforts. But it’s a simple story that the average voter can understand. And when your enemy makes a mistake, it’s always worth hitting them over the head with it.
Ramaswamy’s team didn’t want to talk about it at any time over the past five months. As of this writing at 11:30 p.m. Sunday night, his team has yet to issue a comment on social media, or even to a friendly reporter to have them tweet.
No matter what excuse they conjure, it won’t change that this is an embarrassing blunder that wouldn’t have been possible if the Ramaswamy campaign were the well-oiled machine that his hangers-on have been claiming it to be for the past year.
That this cudgel was sitting there for me to use on a random Friday night is good for my business. But it also speaks to some failures by entities with much more resources than The Rooster.
Nevertheless, it’s a reminder that I need to spend more time reviewing campaign finance reports, despite nobody ever calling me “Don Numbers.”
Dave Thomas shows how the game is played
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Rooster to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.