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      Peter Thiel, Major U.S. Political Donor, Is Said to Pursue Maltese Citizenship

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      Obtaining citizenship in Malta would provide another passport for Mr. Thiel, who is one of the largest individual donors for the U.S. midterm elections.VALLETTA, Malta — At the end of a narrow road, past crushed beer cans and the remnants of a chain-link fence, a weathered sandstone building overlooks the Mediterranean coast. The British tourist who answered the door of a third-floor apartment had no idea she was staying at the residence of one of the world’s richest men.Peter Thiel, the billionaire and Republican political patron, has declared the two-bedroom apartment that he rents himself as his address while he works toward a goal he has pursued for about a year: becoming a citizen of the tiny island nation of Malta, according to documents viewed by The New York Times and three people with knowledge of the matter.Mr. Thiel, 55, is in the process of acquiring at least his third passport even as he expands his financial influence over American politics. Since backing Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, the technology investor has become one of the largest individual donors in the midterm elections next month, spending more than $30 million on more than a dozen right-wing Congressional candidates who have decried globalization and pledged to put America first.The Malta apartment building that Mr. Thiel has listed as his residential address on the island.Ryan Mac/The New York TimesMr. Thiel has long expressed deep dissatisfaction with what he perceives as America’s decline, railing against bureaucracy and “a completely deranged government” ruled by elites. To address that, he has funded fellowships to push people to drop out of school and start businesses and supported political candidates who would push the country in his preferred direction.All along, Mr. Thiel has also hedged his bets. That includes obtaining foreign passports — Mr. Thiel was born in Germany and holds American and New Zealand passports — that would let him live abroad. He has sought to build a remote compound in a glacier-carved valley in New Zealand, and supported a “seasteading” group that aims to build a city on floating platforms in international waters, outside the jurisdiction of national governments.Through a spokesman, Mr. Thiel, who co-founded the digital payments company PayPal and was Facebook’s first professional investor, declined to comment. His net worth stands at $4.2 billion, according to Forbes.There is no obvious tax benefit to Mr. Thiel to gaining Maltese citizenship, lawyers and immigration experts said, though wealthy Saudi, Russian and Chinese citizens sometimes seek a passport from the island nation for European Union access and to hedge against social or political turmoil at home.It is unclear why Mr. Thiel’s nominal residence in Malta is listed as a 185 euro-a-night vacation rental on Airbnb. Maltese naturalization laws are straightforward for those who can pay more than €500,000 for a passport, but they prohibit would-be citizens from renting out their official residences while their passport application is pending.What is clear is that a Maltese passport would give Mr. Thiel an escape hatch from the United States if his spending doesn’t change the country to his liking. He has started developing business connections in Malta, and is a major shareholder in at least one company registered there in which his husband, Matt Danzeisen, is a director.Mr. Thiel has backed his friend J.D. Vance, who is running for the Senate in Ohio. Mr. Thiel previously employed Mr. Vance.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesIn the United States, the bulk of Mr. Thiel’s political donations have gone to support two friends who previously worked for him: J.D. Vance, a Republican running for Ohio’s open Senate seat, and Blake Masters, the Republican challenger in Arizona to Senator Mark Kelly. Mr. Vance worked at Mithril Capital, one of Mr. Thiel’s investment funds. Mr. Masters was chief operating officer of Thiel Capital, the billionaire’s family office.Both candidates have espoused a form of nationalism that, in part, blames globalization and leaders’ involvement in international affairs for American stagnation. Mr. Thiel has endorsed that worldview with his money and in speeches, including one at the National Conservatism Conference last year where he called nationalism “a corrective” to the “brain-dead, one-world state” of globalism.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.A Surprising Battleground: New York has emerged from a haywire redistricting cycle as perhaps the most consequential congressional battleground in the country. For Democrats, the uncertainty is particularly jarring.Arizona’s Governor’s Race: Democrats are openly expressing their alarm that Katie Hobbs, the party’s nominee for governor in the state, is fumbling a chance to defeat Kari Lake in one of the most closely watched races.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia reportedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, but members of his party have learned to tolerate his behavior.“In order for there to be any chance of reversing the wrong direction in which the country has been heading, in Arizona this year it’s Blake or bust,” he wrote in an endorsement on Mr. Masters’s website. Mr. Thiel has supported Mr. Masters’s run by hosting fund-raising dinners and spending $15 million.Mr. Masters was Thiel Capital’s chief operating officer when Mr. Thiel began his Maltese citizenship application. A spokeswoman for Mr. Masters, who left Thiel Capital in March, didn’t respond to questions for comment.Mr. Thiel has also supported the campaign of Blake Masters, who is challenging for one of Arizona’s Senate seats. Mr. Masters previously served as chief operating officer of Thiel Capital, Mr. Thiel’s family office.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesMalta, located in the Mediterranean between Europe and North Africa, has been a destination for traders and crusaders for centuries. Outside powers controlled it until 1964; since it gained independence from Britain, it has struggled to build a sustainable economy. The island, which has little industry and few natural resources, joined the European Union in 2004.Malta has found a lucrative economic lever in selling passports. Since 2013, the country’s investor citizenship programs have granted around 2,000 applicants and their families passports, generating millions of euros in revenue.Those offered citizenship on a fast-track route must pay €750,000 into a government fund and maintain a rental or purchased property throughout the 12-month application period and for at least five years after receiving a passport. After that, citizens are no longer required to maintain a residence or live in Malta, which has a population of just over 500,000.Joseph Muscat, Malta’s prime minister who resigned in 2019 amid protests about corruption and the murder of a journalist who was critical of his government, called the passport program “an insurance policy” for wealthy individuals “where they feel there is a great deal of volatility.”“It’s straightforward,” he said. “You pay into a national fund, and the national fund uses that money for infrastructure and for social housing.”The Auberge de Castille, the office of Malta’s prime minister.Darrin Zammit Lupi/ReutersMalta’s fast track for citizenship by investment, or what’s more commonly known as “golden passports,” can take from 12 to 16 months, according to Henley & Partners, a consultancy that developed the Maltese program and helps clients obtain passports around the globe.“We traditionally have had many Americans looking at that, and of those, quite a lot are from the tech sector,” said Christian Kaelin, Henley’s chairman. European Union officials have criticized Malta’s golden passport program. Last month, the European Commission referred Malta to the union’s Court of Justice over the program, noting that citizenship in return for payments “is not compatible with the principle of sincere cooperation” within the bloc. Maltese officials have signaled they will contest any legal challenge.Joseph Mizzi, the head of Community Malta, the agency responsible for selling passports, declined to comment on Mr. Thiel’s application.Mr. Thiel has laid the groundwork for life outside the United States for years. In 2011, he obtained a New Zealand passport after donating 1 million New Zealand dollars to an earthquake relief fund in the country.There is “no other country that aligns more with my view of the future than New Zealand,” he wrote in his passport application, which the local government released in 2017 after reporting from The New Zealand Herald. The news provoked outrage that lawmakers were selling citizenship.Mr. Thiel donated money to Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. Mr. Thiel met with Mr. Trump and Mike Pence at Trump Tower that year.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesMr. Thiel is going through a similar process in Malta, where he has started laying down business roots. He is an investor in a Malta-based venture fund, Elevat3 Capital, run by Christian Angermayer, a German investor, according to the firm.A spokesman for Mr. Angermayer, who has based his family office and other business ventures in Malta, did not respond to requests for comment.In early 2021, Thiel Capital also became a shareholder in a Malta entity through a byzantine series of developments. The deal involved Coru, a Mexican online financial advice start-up, which has a parent company incorporated in London.Entities controlled by Mr. Thiel and Mr. Danzeisen, his husband, were among Coru’s biggest owners, corporate filings show. The start-up needed additional funding in late 2020, but its investors could not reach an agreement to put more cash in, said two former investors. The company went into administration, the equivalent of bankruptcy.Around that time, Mr. Thiel, Mr. Danzeisen and several other Coru investors established a company in Malta called EUM Holdings Melite Ltd., Maltese records show. That company bought Coru’s shares out of administration for about $100,000, according to British records. The records do not detail EUM’s business activities.Now Coru is owned by EUM. Its shareholders include Mr. Thiel, Mr. Danzeisen, Richard Li — a son of Hong Kong’s richest man, Li Ka-shing — and a group with a former Nicaraguan government official and a scion of the Spanish family that made a fortune selling Lladró porcelain figurines.Mr. Thiel began exploring Maltese citizenship around that time, said people familiar with the process. By late 2021, documents show, he was far along in the application process and retained an agency that fielded questions from the Maltese government about his businesses and political activities.The questions included Mr. Thiel’s role with Palantir Technologies, a data analytics company he founded that works with governments and corporations, and his political activity supporting Mr. Trump.As he applies for Maltese citizenship, Mr. Thiel has cited a two-bedroom apartment in Valletta, Malta’s capital, as a residential address. The apartment is also listed on Airbnb as a short-term vacation rental.Maltese government documents seen by The Times show Mr. Thiel and Mr. Danzeisen listing the apartment in Valletta, the capital, as their address on the island.On a recent visit to the apartment by a Times reporter, a tourist opened the door and said a family member had booked the flat via a short-term rental service. The Times identified a listing for a “2BR Seafront Executive Penthouse” on Airbnb that used Mr. Thiel’s address.Maltese property records show the apartment is owned by Andrew Zammit, a Malta-based lawyer whose firm works on citizenship applications. Mr. Zammit’s wife was named as the host of the Airbnb listing.Mr. Zammit declined to say if he had rented the flat to Mr. Thiel or if the billionaire was applying for a Maltese passport. He also declined to say why the apartment was listed on Airbnb. Within days after The Times inquired about the Airbnb listing, it was made unavailable for future rentals. More

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      3 Senate Hopefuls Denounce Big Tech. They Also Have Deep Ties to It.

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      For Republicans running for the Senate this year, “Big Tech” has become a catchall target, a phrase used to condemn the censorship of conservative voices on social media, invasions of privacy and the corruption of America’s youth — or all of the above.But for three candidates in some of the hottest races of 2022 — Blake Masters, J.D. Vance and Mehmet Oz — the denunciations come with a complication: They have deep ties to the industry, either as investors, promoters or employees. What’s more, their work involved some of the questionable uses of consumer data that they now criticize.Mr. Masters and Mr. Vance have embraced the contradictions with the zeal of the converted.“Fundamentally, it is my expertise from having worked in Silicon Valley and worked with these companies that has given me this perspective,” Mr. Masters, who enters the Republican primary election for Senate in Arizona on Tuesday with the wind at his back, said on Wednesday. “As they have grown, they have become too pervasive and too powerful.”Mr. Vance, on the website of his campaign for Ohio’s open Senate seat, calls for the breakup of large technology firms, declaring: “I know the technology industry well. I’ve worked in it and invested in it, and I’m sick of politicians who talk big about Big Tech but do nothing about it. The tech industry promised all of us better lives and faster communication; instead, it steals our private information, sells it to the Chinese, and then censors conservatives and others.”But some technology activists simply aren’t buying it, especially not from two political newcomers whose Senate runs have been bankrolled by Peter Thiel, the first outside investor in Facebook and a longtime board member of the tech giant. Mr. Thiel’s own company, Palantir, works closely with federal military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies eager for access to its secretive data analysis technology.“There’s a massive, hugely profitable industry in tracking what you do online,” said Sacha Haworth, the executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, a new liberal interest group pressing for stricter regulations of technology companies. “Regardless of these candidates’ prospects in the Senate, I would imagine if Peter Thiel is investing in them, he is investing in his future.”Mr. Masters, a protégé of Mr. Thiel’s and the former chief operating officer of Mr. Thiel’s venture capital firm, oversaw investments in Palantir and pressed to spread its technology, which analyzes mountains of raw data to detect patterns that can be used by customers.Palantir’s initial seed money came from the C.I.A., but its technology was adopted widely by the military and even the Los Angeles Police Department. Mr. Masters and Mr. Thiel personally pressed the director of the National Institutes of Health to buy into it.Sharecare, a website whose consortium of investors included Mehmet Oz, answered consumer questions about health issues.Dr. Oz, the Republican nominee for an open Senate seat in Pennsylvania, was part of a consortium of investors that founded Sharecare, a website that offered users the chance to ask questions about health and wellness — and allowed marketers from the health care industry the chance to answer them.A feature of Sharecare, RealAge Test, quizzed tens of millions of users on their health attributes, ostensibly to help shave years off their age, then released the test results to paying customers in the pharmaceutical industry.Mr. Vance, the Republican nominee in Ohio and another Thiel pupil, used Mr. Thiel’s money to form his venture capital firm, Narya Capital, which helped fund Hallow, a Catholic prayer and meditation app whose privacy policies allow it to share some user data for targeted advertising.The Vance campaign said the candidate’s stake in Hallow did not give him or his firm decision-making powers, and Alex Jones, Hallow’s chief executive, said private, sensitive data like journal entries or reflections were encrypted and not sold, rented or otherwise shared with data brokers. He said that “private sensitive personal data” was not shared “with any advertising partners.”Peter Thiel has bankrolled Mr. Masters and J.D. Vance in their Senate campaigns.Marco Bello/Getty ImagesAll three Senate candidates have targeted the technology industry in their campaigns, railing against the harvesting of data from unsuspecting users and invasions of privacy by greedy firms.“These companies take this data and sell precisely targeted ads so effective they verge on predatory,” Mr. Masters wrote in an opinion article last year in The Wall Street Journal. “They then optimize their platforms to keep you online to receive ever more ads.”In a gauzy video posted in July 2021, Mr. Masters says, “The internet, which was supposed to give us an awesome future, is instead being used to shut us up.”Mr. Vance, in a campaign Facebook video, suggested that Congress make data collection illegal — or at least mandate disclosure — before technology companies “harvest our data and then sell it back to us in the form of targeted advertising.”In a December video appearance soon after he announced his campaign, Dr. Oz proclaimed, “I’ve taken on Big Pharma, I’ve gone to battle with Big Tech, I’ve gone up against agrochem companies, big ones, and I’ve got scars to prove it.”It is not surprising that more candidates for high office have deep connections to the technology industry, said Michael Rosen, an adjunct fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who has written extensively about the industry. That’s where the money is these days, he said, and technology’s reach extends through industries including health care, social media, hardware and software and consumer electronics.“What is novel in this cycle is to have candidates ostensibly on the right who are arguing for the government to step in and regulate these companies because, in their view, they cannot be trusted to regulate themselves,” Mr. Rosen said.He expressed surprise that “a free-market, conservative-type candidate thinks that the government will do a fairer and more reliable job of regulating and moderating speech than the private sector would.”Technology experts on the left say candidates like Mr. Masters and Mr. Vance are Trojan horses, taking popular stances to win federal office with no intention of pursuing those positions in the Senate.On his website, Mr. Vance says, “I’m sick of politicians who talk big about Big Tech but do nothing about it.”Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesMs. Haworth, whose group has taken aim at platforms like Facebook and Amazon, said states like California were already moving forward with regulations to prevent online marketers from steering consumers to certain products or unduly influencing behavior.She said she believed that Republicans, if they took control of Congress, would impose weak federal rules that superseded state regulations.“Democrats should be calling out the hypocrisy here,” she said.Mr. Masters said he was sympathetic to concerns that empowering government to regulate technology would only lead to another kind of abuse, but, he added, “The answer in this age of networked monopolies is not to throw your hands up and shout ‘laissez-faire.’”Multinational technology firms like Google and Facebook, Mr. Masters said, have exceeded national governments in power.As for the “Trojan horse” assertion, he said, “When I am in the U.S. Senate, I am going to deliver on everything I’m saying.”It is not clear that such complex matters will have an impact in the fall campaigns. Jim Lamon, a Republican Senate rival of Mr. Masters’s in Arizona, has aired advertisements tarring him as a “fake” stalking horse for the California technology industry — but with limited effectiveness. At a debate this month, Mr. Lamon said Mr. Masters was “owned” by his paymasters in Big Tech.But Mr. Masters, who has the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump, appears to be the clear favorite for the nomination.Representative Tim Ryan, Mr. Vance’s Democratic opponent in Ohio, has made glancing references to the “Big Tech billionaires who sip wine in Silicon Valley” and bankroll the Republican’s campaign.John Fetterman, the Democratic opponent of Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania, has not raised the issue.Taylor Van Kirk, a spokeswoman for Mr. Vance, said he was very serious about his promises to limit the influence of technology companies.“J.D. has long been outspoken about his desire to break up Big Tech and hold them accountable for their overreach,” she said. “He strongly believes that their power over our politics and economy needs to be reduced, to protect the constitutional rights of Americans.”Representatives of the Oz campaign did not respond to requests for comment. More

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      Where Trump’s Endorsement Record Stands in Primaries So Far

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      Most of the candidates former President Donald J. Trump endorsed in contested Republican primaries have won in this early phase of the 2022 midterms. Many of those he backed were running unopposed or faced little-known, poorly funded opponents. There have been some noteworthy losses, however.Here is a look at Mr. Trump’s endorsement record in some of the most closely watched races.Doug Mastriano, who was endorsed by Mr. Trump just a few days ahead of the May 17 primary, won the Republican nomination for Pennsylvania governor.Michael M. Santiago/Getty ImagesA victory in Pennsylvania, and one key race was too close to callDoug Mastriano, a state senator and retired Army colonel who has propagated myriad false claims about the 2020 election and attended the protest leading up to the Capitol riot, won the Republican nomination for Pennsylvania governor. Mr. Trump endorsed him just a few days ahead of the May 17 primary. In the state’s critical Republican Senate primary, it is not yet known how Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Dr. Mehmet Oz will play out. The race between Dr. Oz and Dave McCormick was extremely tight and an official recount is likely. Kathy Barnette, who had a late surge in the race, was in a strong third place.Representative Ted Budd won the Republican nomination for Senate in North Carolina.Allison Lee Isley/The Winston-Salem Journal, via Associated PressTwo wins and a loss in North Carolina Representative Ted Budd, who was endorsed by Mr. Trump and the influential anti-tax group Club for Growth, won the Republican nomination for Senate, and Bo Hines, a 26-year-old political novice who enthralled Mr. Trump, was catapulted to victory in his Republican primary for a House seat outside Raleigh. But Representative Madison Cawthorn crumbled under the weight of repeated scandals and blunders. He was ousted in his May 17 primary, a stinging rejection of a Trump-endorsed candidate. Voters chose Chuck Edwards, a state senator, in the crowded primary.J.D. Vance won his competitive Republican primary for an Ohio Senate seat with the help of Mr. Trump’s endorsement.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesVictories in OhioThe Senate candidate J.D. Vance won his hard-fought primary over a field of well-funded candidates, nearly all of whom pitched themselves as Trump-like Republicans. Mr. Vance, an author and venture capitalist, had transformed himself from a self-described “never Trump guy” in 2016 to an “America First” candidate in 2022. His long-shot campaign financially benefited from heavy spending by his former boss Peter Thiel, a billionaire founder of PayPal.Max Miller, a former Trump aide who denied assault allegations from an ex-girlfriend and was later endorsed by Mr. Trump, won his House primary after two other Republican incumbents there opted not to run. Representative Anthony Gonzalez, who had voted to impeach Mr. Trump, retired after just two terms. Representative Bob Gibbs, a Trump supporter, dropped out after his district was redrawn late in the campaign, pitting him against Mr. Miller.Mr. Trump also endorsed Madison Gesiotto Gilbert, a lawyer and former beauty queen who had been a surrogate for his presidential campaign. She won a seven-way primary for an open congressional seat being vacated by Representative Tim Ryan, a Democrat running for Senate.Representative Alex Mooney of West Virginia, right, with Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House minority leader. Mr. Mooney prevailed in his primary over Representative David McKinley.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesA win in West VirginiaIn an incumbent-on-incumbent House primary, Representative Alex Mooney prevailed over Representative David McKinley in a newly drawn congressional district that largely overlaps with the one Mr. McKinley represented for more than a decade.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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      How J.D. Vance Won in Ohio: A Trump Endorsement, a Fox News Stage and Money

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      A big endorsement was decisive, but a cable news megaphone and a huge infusion of spending helped pave the way to victory.CINCINNATI — It was only hours after J.D. Vance had announced his Senate campaign with an us-against-them speech last July that he stepped off the stage and sat down to make his case on one of the Republican Party’s biggest and most valuable platforms: “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News.Speaking from his hometown in Ohio, one that his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” put on the map as a symbol of left-behind Middle America, Mr. Vance lamented the “elites and the ruling class” and how they “have plundered this country.”Mr. Carlson lapped it up — “I love that,” he beamed — and all but endorsed Mr. Vance’s campaign on the spot. “I probably shouldn’t say this,” Mr. Carlson said. “I’m really glad you’re doing it.”J.D. Vance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” last July when he announced his run for Senate.Fox NewsThe victory of Mr. Vance, 37, in the Ohio Senate Republican primary on Tuesday was unquestionably fueled by the April 15 endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump, which catapulted Mr. Vance toward victory. But other factors had set the stage for the former president to play such a decisive role.Mr. Vance had received both behind-the-scenes and very public help: from Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son; from the not-so-quiet support of Mr. Carlson; and from the extraordinary and early investment of Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who is also Mr. Vance’s former boss.In the end, that group — Mr. Thiel, Mr. Carlson, and the two Trumps — formed a powerful alliance. Mr. Thiel’s $15 million appears to be the most ever spent by an individual megadonor to elect a single Senate candidate. Mr. Carlson’s program is the most watched on cable television and a trendsetter for conservative media. And the former president is the most popular politician in the Republican Party.Together, they helped deliver for Mr. Vance everything he would need for his Trump-toned, anti-corporate, nationalist message to succeed: funding, media attention and a late surge of momentum.Mr. Trump’s blessing was uniquely powerful in Ohio, where it effectively absolved Mr. Vance of his previous harsh denunciations of Mr. Trump — the focus of almost all the attacks on his campaign. Every race is different, and even Mr. Trump’s influence has limits: Mr. Vance won just over 32 percent of the vote, meaning most primary voters did not side with the former president’s pick.Still, given Ohio’s Republican leanings, Mr. Vance now enters the fall campaign as a favorite to enter the United States Senate largely owing his seat to the former president’s intervention.Supporters of J.D. Vance at a rally hosted by former President Donald J. Trump last month in Delaware, Ohio.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesMr. Vance’s emergence as a Make America Great Again standard-bearer in 2022 would have seemed unthinkable six years ago, when he was a self-styled “Never Trump” Republican and a fixture of the mainstream news media as a translator for liberals curious about the bombastic New Yorker’s cultural appeal. In early 2021, Mr. Vance sought to make amends. And it was Mr. Thiel who brokered and attended a meeting at Mar-a-Lago at which Mr. Vance began his rehabilitation and reinvention. Additional help came from the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, a Trump favorite, who connected Mr. Vance with Andy Surabian, an adviser to Donald Trump Jr.An Inside Look at Fox NewsThe conservative cable news network is one of the most influential media outlets in the United States.Tucker Carlson: The star TV host stoked white fear to conquer cable news. In the process, he transformed Fox News and became Donald J. Trump’s heir.Empire of Influence: ​​A Times investigation looked at how the Murdochs, the family behind a global media empire that includes Fox News, have destabilized democracy on three continents.What Trump Helped Build: Together, the channel and Donald Trump have redefined the limits of acceptable political discourse.How Russia Uses Fox News: The network has appeared in Russian media as a way to bolster the Kremlin’s narrative about the Ukraine war.Leaving Fox News: After 18 years with the network, the anchor Chris Wallace, who left for the now shuttered streaming service CNN+, said working at Fox News had become “unsustainable.”While rival Ohio Senate contenders pressured, and sometimes pestered, the former president for his support, Mr. Vance’s lobbying effort was more restrained. When four other candidates traveled to Mar-a-Lago for a fund-raiser for a House candidate and were corralled into an impromptu pitch session with Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance was not there. Two people close to him said he had stayed away deliberately, to avoid being seen as just one of a cluster of aspirants.The contrast, at that point, could have been unkind: The early G.O.P. front-runner was Josh Mandel, a former state treasurer and two-time Senate candidate. Two businessmen were also in the race — Bernie Moreno, a car dealer, and Mike Gibbons, a financial executive — as was Jane Timken, a former state Republican chairwoman.All of them, along with Matt Dolan, a wealthy state senator, could draw on millions of dollars of their own or from old campaign accounts. In contrast, Mr. Vance was a first-time candidate with no real national donor network, and was not rich enough to finance his own campaign.His super PAC, which received $10 million from Mr. Thiel months before he even entered the race, would be crucial.But there was a legal complication: Outside groups may not privately coordinate strategy with campaigns. So the super PAC found a workaround, publishing troves of internal data on an unpublicized Medium page where campaign officials knew to find it. The existence of the site was first revealed by Politico.The degree to which the super PAC worked as something of an adjunct to the campaign itself is remarkable. According to documents it posted, the outside group “recruited, vetted and hired staff who later joined” the campaign, sent text messages and robocalls to build crowds for Vance events and even paid for online advertising that directed donations to the Vance campaign.Yet for all his cash, Mr. Thiel absented himself from the super PAC’s operations, never once speaking to Luke Thompson, who ran it, so Mr. Thiel could legally continue to speak with Mr. Vance as an adviser, according to Mr. Thompson.Peter Thiel at a Bitcoin conference in Miami last month.Chandan Khanna/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Thompson called Mr. Thiel’s approach “a venture capital mind-set,” likening the campaign to a start-up. “J.D. is the founder and picks his team,” he said.Even with the early Thiel money, Mr. Vance relied on conservative media for attention, appearing on the programs of Stephen Bannon and Sebastian Gorka.Appearances on Mr. Carlson’s Fox News program were most valuable of all.He has appeared on the program 15 times since July, according to Media Matters for America, often drawing heavy praise from the host. “Occasionally, you run into somebody who could actually change things,” Mr. Carlson said during an interview on the eve of the election. “That would be J.D. Vance.”“Tucker was really, really important,” Mr. Thompson said. “It meant that our guy had a platform to go and talk to primary voters in Ohio — and small-dollar donors nationwide.”Then came the attacks.For weeks last fall, the anti-tax Club for Growth, which supported Mr. Mandel, pummeled Mr. Vance for his past denunciations of Mr. Trump. Mr. Vance’s own super PAC found that Ohioans knew little about him besides that he had once opposed Trump. By December, David McIntosh, the Club for Growth’s president, had repeatedly urged Mr. Trump to back Mr. Mandel, warning him that Mr. Vance’s candidacy was doomed.Josh Mandel conceding the primary race to J.D. Vance on Tuesday night in Beachwood, Ohio.Brian Kaiser for The New York TimesMr. McIntosh evidently was persuasive: Speaking with advisers, Mr. Trump mulled whether to get behind Mr. Mandel, saying that Mr. Vance was “dead, isn’t he?”“I like J.D. a lot, but everyone just tells me those ads killed him,” Mr. Trump told one adviser.In hindsight, however, Nick Everhart, a Republican strategist based in Ohio, said that “being shoved out of the first tier of the race” might have been “the best thing that happened to Vance,” because the attacks on him largely stopped.Records from AdImpact, the ad-tracking firm, show that ads attacking Mr. Vance slowed to a trickle in December and then stopped entirely in February.When ads supporting Mr. Vance began to run, he gained traction, though he still trailed. By April 4, his super PAC posted a memo saying Mr. Vance was no longer “primarily associated” with his prior criticisms of Mr. Trump.“J.D. showed a lot of resilience in this race — and when the political class in the Beltway wrote him off as dead in the water earlier this year, he clawed his way back into contention to get President Trump’s endorsement and ultimately win through his sheer determination and natural political talent,” said Mr. Surabian, who, along with Jai Chabria, ran Mr. Vance’s campaign. Indeed, Mr. Trump was swayed in part by how Mr. Vance handled himself on television. In one debate, when Mr. Mandel and Mr. Gibbons went toe to toe, Mr. Vance scolded them, rising above the fray — and impressing Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump was on a golf course, editing his statement endorsing Mr. Vance, when NBC News reported he was about to issue it. Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers, working with Mr. Vance’s opponents, were lobbying the former president not to, but the report only solidified his decision.Mr. Vance also benefited from a more accurate picture of the electorate.Mr. McIntosh, of the Club for Growth, repeatedly argued to Mr. Trump that the former president’s pollster, Anthony Fabrizio, who was also working for Mr. Vance, had modeled the Ohio primary electorate inaccurately.The Club for Growth’s polling last weekend showed Mr. Vance receiving 26 percent of the vote. Mr. Fabrizio’s polling had Mr. Vance at 32 percent.Mr. Vance finished with 32.2 percent.Jeff Roe, a Republican strategist who worked with the Club for Growth in Ohio, called Mr. Trump before the polls closed on Tuesday to concede. He told Mr. Trump that the former president was “100 percent responsible” for Mr. Vance’s win, according to a person briefed on the conversation.In his victory speech Tuesday night, Mr. Vance thanked, among others, Donald Trump Jr., Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson and, of course, the former president.Shane Goldmacher reported from Cincinnati, and Maggie Haberman from New York. More

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      Vance Wins Republican Senate Primary in Ohio After Nod From Trump

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      J.D. Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” won a G.O.P. race that saw nearly $80 million in television advertising. The author and venture capitalist parlayed an endorsement from Donald J. Trump into victory, beating out a crowded field of conservative challengers.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesCINCINNATI — J.D. Vance, the author whose memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” about life in Appalachia became a best seller, decisively won the Ohio Senate primary on Tuesday after a late endorsement by Donald J. Trump helped him surge past his rivals in a crowded primary field.Casting himself as a fighter against the nation’s elites, Mr. Vance ran as a Trump-style pugilist and outsider who railed against the threats of drugs, Democrats and illegal immigration, while thoroughly backpedaling from his past criticisms of the former president.The contest, which saw nearly $80 million in television advertising, was one of the most anticipated of the 2022 primary season for its potential to provide an early signal of the direction of the Republican Party.The result delivered a strong affirmation of Mr. Trump’s continued grip on his party’s base. But a fuller assessment of Mr. Trump’s sway will come through a series of primaries in the next four weeks — in West Virginia, North Carolina, Idaho, Pennsylvania and Georgia.Mr. Vance had been trailing in most polls behind Josh Mandel, a former Ohio state treasurer who had also aggressively pursued Mr. Trump’s backing, until the former president’s mid-April endorsement helped vault Mr. Vance ahead. A third candidate, State Senator Matt Dolan, ran as a more traditional Republican, sometimes mocking his rivals for their unrelenting focus on the former president instead of Ohio issues and voters.Cheers went up at Mr. Vance’s Cincinnati election party when The Associated Press called the race shortly after 9:30 p.m.“The people who are caught between the corrupt political class of the left and the right, they need a voice,” Mr. Vance said in his victory speech. “They need a representative. And that’s going to be me.”Mr. Vance is an unlikely champion of the Trumpian mantle, after calling the former president “reprehensible” in 2016 and even “cultural heroin.” But he had changed his tune entirely by 2022, and Mr. Trump called to congratulate him on his victory on Tuesday evening, according to a person briefed on the call.With more than 80 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Vance was leading across almost the entire state. But the results also captured some of the tensions and demographic trade-offs of a Republican Party pulled in different directions as Mr. Dolan was strongest in the voter-rich cities of Cleveland and Columbus.Trump-style Republicans did not prevail in the other top contest on Tuesday. Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a more traditional Republican who has held offices in the state for more than 40 years, finished far ahead of his multiple primary rivals after a strong right-wing challenge never gained traction despite some conservative backlash to Mr. DeWine’s early and assertive response to the coronavirus pandemic.Gov. Mike DeWine and his wife, Fran DeWine, greet their daughter Anna Bolton and grandson Calvin after voting in Cedarville, Ohio, on Tuesday.Paul Vernon/Associated PressMr. DeWine had almost double the votes of his closest rival, Jim Renacci, a former House member. In the fall, he will be running against Nan Whaley, the former mayor of Dayton, who won the Democratic nomination on Tuesday, becoming the first woman in Ohio history to be nominated by a major party for governor.In the Senate race, Mr. Vance will now face Representative Tim Ryan, a 48-year-old Democrat from the Youngstown area who has positioned himself as a champion of blue-collar values and has not aligned with some of his party’s more progressive positions.If Mr. Vance prevails in the fall, the 37-year-old graduate of Yale Law School and investor would become the second-youngest member of the Senate, the chamber’s youngest Republican and a rare freshman who would arrive in Washington with a national profile.Mr. Vance’s metamorphosis from an outspoken “Never Trump” Republican in 2016 to a full-throated Make America Great Again warrior in 2022 echoes the ideological journey of much of the party in recent years. Republicans have moved closer and closer to the former president’s hard-line policy positions on issues like trade and immigration, and to his combative posture with Democrats and on cultural issues that divide the two parties. For some Republican voters, the primary was animated by fears that traditional family values and a white American culture were under attack by far-left Democrats, establishment Republicans and elites.Mr. Vance also won the endorsements of some of the Make America Great Again movement’s loudest firebrands, including Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida, both of whom campaigned with him in the race’s final weekend, and Donald Trump Jr., who also traveled to the state. He also had a crucial financial benefactor: His former boss, Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor who pledged $10 million to Mr. Vance even before he joined the contest and who added millions more in the final stretch to trumpet Mr. Trump’s endorsement.The Senate primary was unusual in the extent that it unfolded in two places at once. In Ohio, there was the typical fevered competition for votes, in town halls, debates and television ads. In Florida, there was the battle for Mr. Trump’s approval at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s private club, with public shows of fealty, lobbying by surrogates and shuttle diplomacy. In one episode last year, multiple Ohio candidates vied for Mr. Trump’s support in front of one another at an impromptu meeting at Mar-a-Lago.In a verbal flub that seemed almost fitting to how the candidates ran, Mr. Trump accidentally conjoined the names of two rivals over the weekend. “We’ve endorsed J.P., right?” Mr. Trump said at a rally in Nebraska. “J.D. Mandel.”Mr. Trump’s endorsement set off a frenzy among Ohio Republicans who questioned Mr. Vance’s Republican credentials, with rivals circulating fliers online and at a Trump rally accusing him of being a Democrat in disguise and resurrecting his past comments against Mr. Trump.The Senate candidate Josh Mandel, center, with supporters, including Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, left, in Columbus, Ohio, last week.Joshua A. Bickel/The Columbus Dispatch, via Associated PressMr. Mandel had been the front-runner for much of the race, casting himself as the true pro-Trump candidate (“Pro-God. Pro-Guns. Pro-Trump” was the tagline in his TV ads). But that became an all-but-impossible argument to prosecute in the final weeks after Mr. Trump picked Mr. Vance.“If the whole issue in the campaign is who is most Trump-like, expect it to work against you when you don’t get the endorsement,” said Rex Elsass, an Ohio-based Republican strategist.At a restaurant in the Cleveland suburb of Beachwood on Tuesday, more than a dozen Mandel supporters and campaign volunteers struck an optimistic tone at the start of the night, expressing confidence. But it was not too long before Mr. Mandel took the podium to deliver the news. Mr. Mandel told the crowd that he called Mr. Vance “to congratulate him on a hard-fought victory” and would do what he could to help get him elected. “The stakes are too high for this country to not support the nominee,” Mr. Mandel said to a round of applause in the room.Beyond Mr. Vance, Mr. Dolan and Mr. Mandel, the crowded race included a single female candidate, Jane Timken, a former Ohio Republican Party chair, who was backed by the retiring incumbent, Senator Rob Portman, as well as Mike Gibbons, a businessman who poured millions of his own money into the race and at one point had vaulted to the top of the polls.Mr. Dolan had toiled for most of the contest far behind the polling leaders, avoiding direct attacks from his rivals. But he tapped into his own fortune to fund more than $11 million in television ads as he cut a path separate from the rest of the Trump-focused field by refusing to amplify the falsehood that the 2020 election was rigged. At one debate, Mr. Dolan was the lone candidate to raise his hand to say the former president should stop talking about the 2020 election.State Senator Matt Dolan greets supporters at a library opening in Bay Village, Ohio, last week.Dustin Franz for The New York TimesThe contest was nasty and lengthy, with nothing capturing the intensity more than a near-physical confrontation between Mr. Gibbons and Mr. Mandel at one March debate, where they bumped bellies as they lobbed verbal threats at one another.Mr. Vance scolded them both. “Sit down. Come on,” he said. “This is ridiculous.”Much of the race was shaped by huge sums spent on television — nearly $80 million, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact, with a lot of it coming from outside groups and out-of-state donors. The conservative Club for Growth spent more than $12 million on television ads aimed to boost Mr. Mandel or tear down his rivals. Mr. Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor, seeded a pro-Vance super PAC with $10 million in early 2021 — months before Mr. Vance even entered the race. Mr. Vance is one of two former Thiel employees — the other is Blake Masters in Arizona — running for Senate with Mr. Thiel’s hefty financial backing. Mr. Thiel had served as a key link between Mr. Vance and Mr. Trump, attending an introductory meeting between them in early 2021. The politics of Ohio have changed drastically in the Trump era. Once the quintessential presidential swing state, Ohio broke for Mr. Trump by 8 percentage points in both 2016 and 2020, ending a half-century streak of the state backing the national winner. Republicans have sharply run up their margins among working-class white voters and in more rural areas, offsetting the losses that the party has suffered in the state’s suburbs around cities like Columbus and Cleveland.Representative Tim Ryan, right, with Michael S. Regan of the Environmental Protection Agency in Youngstown, Ohio, where lead pipes will be replaced as part of new federal infrastructure spending.Dustin Franz for The New York TimesIn the Democratic primary, Mr. Ryan, who briefly ran for president in 2020, easily turned back a primary challenge from Morgan Harper, 38, a former adviser at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who ran as a progressive, banking $5 million for the general election.Mr. Ryan has already run an anti-China ad that focuses on Ohio jobs and his opening ad of the general election has him tossing darts inside a bar and seeking to separate himself from the broader Democratic brand, lamenting those who have called for defunding the police.But Mr. Ryan faces an uphill race in a state that has trended Republican and in a year when his party is saddled with President Biden’s low approval ratings. Some Republicans see Mr. Ryan as formidable — Mr. Trump among them — but the general election is not seen by either party as among the half-dozen closest contests that will determine control of the Senate, now divided evenly 50-50.Shane Goldmacher reported from Cincinnati. Jazmine Ulloa reported from Beachwood, Ohio. More

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      Ahead of Senate Primary Election, Ohio Republicans Embrace the Bombast

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      The slugfest for the Republican nomination for Ohio’s open Senate seat has buried the brand of good-natured, country-club conservatism that was once a hallmark of the state.COLUMBUS, Ohio — Republicans running for the seat of Ohio’s retiring senator, Rob Portman, appear determined to bury the soft-spoken country-club bonhomie that was once a hallmark of the party in this state, and replace it with the pugilistic brand of conservatism owned by Donald J. Trump and now amplified by the new band of Buckeye bomb throwers.The race descended into a brutal slugfest as the leading candidates, the author-turned-venture capitalist J.D. Vance, the former state treasurer Josh Mandel and a self-funded businessman, Mike Gibbons, entered the final weekend before Tuesday’s primaries accusing one another of being insufficiently right-wing or disloyal to the man in Mar-a-Lago.Ohio used to be known for the quiet conservatism of the state’s celebrated former senator George Voinovich and its current governor, Mike DeWine; for the Merlot-swilling happy-warrior days of the former House speaker John A. Boehner; for the moderation of John Kasich, a two-term governor; and for the free-trade, free-market ideology of Mr. Portman himself.Instead, affections for such Ohio leaders are now being weaponized — in broadsides from the candidates and advertisements by their allies — as evidence that rivals are paying only lip service to Mr. Trump and his angry populism.“Josh Mandel: Another failed career politician squish,” a new ad from a super PAC supporting Mr. Vance blared on Ohio television sets on Friday, calling Mr. Mandel, who is mounting his third Senate run, a “two-time loser” and “a moderate for the moderates.”After so much vitriol, Ohio’s primary will begin to shed light on just how much power the former president can still wield from his exile. But in the final days of campaigning, the leading contenders left no doubt about his ideological hold on the party.At an evangelical church near Dayton on Friday, Mr. Mandel campaigned with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who sought to blunt the impact of Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Mr. Vance two weeks ago. “At the end of the day, it’s not going to come down to who endorsed whom,” Mr. Cruz said before he and Mr. Mandel brought an older crowd to its feet with stem-winding paeans to conservatism and criticism of Democrats.How Donald J. Trump Still LoomsGrip on G.O.P.: Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.A Modern-Day Party Boss: Hoarding cash, doling out favors and seeking to crush rivals, Mr. Trump is behaving like the head of a 19th-century political machine.Power Struggle: Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, a band of anti-Trump Republicans is maneuvering to thwart the ex-president.Post-Presidency Profits: Mr. Trump is melding business with politics, capitalizing for personal gain.Just the Beginning: For many Trump supporters who marched on Jan. 6, the day was not a disgraced insurrection but the start of a movement.Some in the crowd of more than 100 worried that the endorsement of Mr. Vance had significantly lowered Mr. Mandel’s odds of victory. “I think it went down quite a bit,” said Paul Markowski, a retired police officer in a Trump 2020 cap. He said he had not forgiven Mr. Vance for comments he made in 2016 denouncing Mr. Trump and saying that some of his support was driven by racism.“I could get over him not supporting Trump,” Mr. Markowski said. “But when he bad-mouthed us, the voters, that pissed me off.”Mr. Vance, for his part, pressed his attack on Mr. Mandel, who had vied for the former president’s endorsement with ads calling himself “pro-God, pro-gun, pro-Trump.” Mr. Vance’s spokeswoman, Taylor Van Kirk, called Mr. Mandel “a phony, fraud and sellout, who claims to be ‘anti-establishment’ in public, but throws President Trump and the entire MAGA movement under the bus to the establishment behind closed doors.”Josh Mandel, a former Ohio treasurer, insists he is the true standard-bearer for Mr. Trump’s “America First” movement.Dustin Franz/Getty ImagesIn turn, the one Republican who has said the party needs to move on from the former president, State Senator Matt Dolan, castigated Mr. Vance for bringing members of the party’s extremist wing, Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida, into the state on Saturday — not because of their extreme positions, but because they are “outsiders” who are “telling Ohioans how they should vote.”In the rush to the right, Mr. Gibbons, who had styled himself a businessman in Mr. Trump’s mold and was once the front-runner in the Senate contest, pledged his fealty to a right-wing movement, called the Convention of States, to rewrite the Constitution to restrain federal power.All of the major candidates in the Republican Senate primary have insisted they are the true conservatives in the race, but only one, Mr. Vance, has the official imprimatur of the former president. That means the judgment that Republican voters render on Tuesday will go a long way to show whether even conservative candidates like Mr. Mandel and Mr. Gibbons can overcome a cold shoulder from Mar-a-Lago.“President Trump is a major factor in this state,” said Alex Triantafilou, the longtime chairman of the Hamilton County Republican Party, which includes Cincinnati. “He just is. He still motivates our base in a way that some people think is waning, but it’s not from my perspective.”Still, to call Tuesday’s Republican primary a referendum on the future of Trumpism — in Ohio and beyond — would go too far. The state’s low-key Republican governor, Mr. DeWine, does not appear to be threatened in his quest for re-election by a primary challenger, Jim Renacci, whose “Putting Ohio First” campaign adopted MAGA themes in its attack on Mr. DeWine’s pandemic-control efforts. Mr. Trump declined to endorse Mr. Renacci, seeing no prospect for victory.The former president’s attacks did chase the one Ohio Republican who voted to impeach him, Representative Anthony Gonzalez, into retirement, and he buoyed a former White House aide, Max Miller, who is running for an Ohio House seat, despite an accusation from one of Mr. Trump’s press secretaries, Stephanie Grisham, that he had physically abused her.But in other contests, such as a heated Republican primary in northwest Ohio, mainstream Republicans are expected to prevail against conservative showmen like J.R. Majewski, who painted his vast backyard into a 19,000-square-foot Trump election sign and posted a video of himself walking through a shuttered factory with an assault-style rifle.In the bellwether Senate race here, however, Mr. Trump’s influence is undeniable. The state was once a reliable birthing ground of center-right Republicans, such as Mr. Portman, Mr. Boehner and Mr. DeWine, who has been in Republican politics for 45 years, as a House member, senator, lieutenant governor, attorney general and governor.But the free-trade, free-market and pro-legal immigration sentiments that were once hallmarks of the party have been washed away by Trumpism.And the Ohio primary will kick off a four-week period that will reveal much about Mr. Trump’s sway with the party — and just how transferable his continued popularity is to others. After Ohio, his preferred picks in Nebraska, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia will all be tested in heated primaries.Mike Gibbons, who styled himself as a businessman in Mr. Trump’s mold, was an early front-runner in the Senate race.Dustin Franz for The New York TimesMr. Vance, buoyed by the endorsement bump and leading in a Fox News poll, is scarcely tacking to the center, confident in the support of the Republican base. On Saturday, he will barnstorm through Ohio with two figures from the right fringe of the party, Ms. Greene and Mr. Gaetz. On Sunday and Monday, he will be joined on the campaign trail by two other figures firmly in the former president’s camp, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri and Charlie Kirk, the bombastic leader of the far-right Turning Point USA.But after trailing in the primary contest for months, Mr. Vance enters the final stretch as something of a front-runner, with the other candidates training their fire on him. Providing air cover for Mr. Mandel, the business-backed political action committee the Club for Growth is broadcasting an advertisement repeating attacks that Mr. Vance made in 2016 against Mr. Trump and his supporters, suggesting the former president made a mistake with his endorsement.A pro-Vance super PAC, heavily funded by Peter Thiel, the Trump-aligned financier that Mr. Vance works for, fired back Friday with an ad running in Columbus, Dayton and Cleveland that portrays Mr. Mandel as a “squish.” Mr. Mandel’s embrace by the Republican nominees for the presidency in 2008 and 2012, John McCain and Mitt Romney, are treated in the advertisement like a scarlet letter, and kind words from Mr. Kasich might as well have come from Nancy Pelosi.“Josh Mandel, he’s for them, not us,” the narrator intones, a clear message that Tuesday’s primary is geared toward the Republican extremes, not the sort of voters who once backed Mr. Kasich and Mr. Romney.Mr. Gibbons, still in the hunt for the nomination, will trot out yet another Trump ally, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, on Monday to attest to his conservative bona fides. In a series of statements on Friday seemingly issued to appeal to the far right, Mr. Gibbons declared that a “dire need of real change” meant he would support a convention to rewrite the Constitution, and said that a new effort by the Department of Homeland Security to combat disinformation would be “a de facto ‘Ministry of Truth’” to crush dissent.Jonathan Weisman reported from Columbus, Ohio, and Trip Gabriel from Dayton. More

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      Wealthy GOP Donors Form Secret Coalitions to Wield More Influence

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      Eager to offset a Democratic advantage among so-called dark money groups, wealthy pro-Trump conservatives like Peter Thiel are involved in efforts to wield greater influence outside the traditional party machinery.A new coalition of wealthy conservative benefactors that says it aims to “disrupt but advance the Republican agenda” gathered this week for a private summit in South Florida that included closed-door addresses from former President Donald J. Trump and an allied Senate candidate at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, according to documents and interviews.The coalition, called the Rockbridge Network, includes some of Mr. Trump’s biggest donors, such as Peter Thiel and Rebekah Mercer, and has laid out an ambitious goal — to reshape the American right by spending more than $30 million on conservative media, legal, policy and voter registration projects, among other initiatives.The emergence of Rockbridge, the existence of which has not previously been reported, comes amid escalating jockeying among conservative megadonors to shape the 2022 midterms and the future of the Republican Party from outside the formal party machinery, and often with little disclosure.In February, another previously unreported coalition of donors, the Chestnut Street Council, organized by the Trump-allied lobbyist Matt Schlapp, held a meeting to hear a pitch for new models for funding the conservative movement.If those upstart coalitions gain momentum, they will likely have to vie for influence among conservatives with existing donor networks that have been skeptical of or agnostic toward Mr. Trump.One that was created by the billionaire industrialists Charles G. and David H. Koch spent more than $250 million in 2020. Another, spearheaded by the New York hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, hosted top Republican politicians in February.The surge in secretive fund-raising does not end there — a number of nonprofit groups with varying degrees of allegiance to Mr. Trump are also vying to become leading distributors of donor funds to the right.Taken together, the jockeying highlights frustration on the right with the political infrastructure that surrounds the Republican Party, and, in some cases, with its politicians, as well as disagreements about its direction as Mr. Trump teases another presidential run.The efforts to harness the fortunes of the party’s richest activists could help it capitalize on a favorable electoral landscape headed into this year’s midterm elections, and — potentially — the 2024 presidential campaign. Conversely, the party’s prospects could be dimmed if the moneyed class invests in competing candidates, groups and tactics.The willingness of donors to organize on their own underscores the migration of power and money away from the official organs of the respective parties, which are required to disclose their donors, to outside groups that often have few disclosure requirements. It also reflects a concern among some influential Republicans that the political right faces a disadvantage when it comes to nonprofit groups that support the candidates and causes of each party.How Donald J. Trump Still LoomsGrip on G.O.P.: Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.Power Struggle: Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, a band of anti-Trump Republicans is maneuvering to thwart the ex-president.Midterms Effect: Mr. Trump has become a party kingmaker, but his involvement in state races worries many Republicans.Post-Presidency Profits: Mr. Trump is melding business with politics, capitalizing for personal gain.Just the Beginning: For many Trump supporters who marched on Jan. 6, the day was not a disgraced insurrection but the start of a movement.An analysis by The New York Times found that 15 of the most politically active nonprofit organizations that generally align with the Democratic Party spent more than $1.5 billion in 2020 in funds for which the donors’ identities are not disclosed. That compared to roughly $900 million in so-called dark money spent by a comparable sample of 15 groups aligned with Republicans.The effort to close that gap — and to make gains in political consulting and technology that undergirds the right’s political infrastructure — has been a major subject of discussion among these coalitions.Former President Donald J. Trump addressed the Rockbridge Network on Tuesday night at his private club in Mar-a-Lago.Brittany Greeson for The New York Times“We need to show our side is organized and has the necessary institutional know-how and financial support, in order to have any shot at winning future elections,” reads a brochure for the Rockbridge Network.The brochure, which circulated in Republican finance circles this year, calls Rockbridge “a kind of political venture capital firm” that will “leverage our investors’ capital with the right political expertise” to “replace the current Republican ecosystem of think tanks, media organizations and activist groups that have contributed to the Party’s decline with better action-oriented, more effective people and institutions that are focused on winning.”Among the initiatives cited in the Rockbridge brochure are media-related functions — including public relations, messaging, polling, “influencer programs” and investigative journalism — with a combined budget of $8 million.A “lawfare and strategic litigation” effort with a projected cost of $3.75 million is intended to use the courts “to hold bad actors, including the media, accountable.” A “transition project,” with an estimated price tag of $3 million, is intended to assemble policy experts and plans to create a “government-in-waiting” to “staff the next Republican administration.”A “red state project” is intended to mimic a model pioneered by the left in which strategists coordinate the efforts of an array of movement groups to complement one another and avoid overlap. It is estimated to cost $6 million to $8 million per state, and is initially focused on the swing states of Arizona, Nevada and Michigan.A person familiar with Rockbridge described those projects, and their fund-raising goals, as aspirational, and said the coalition had so far focused on allocating donor funds to pre-existing groups to accomplish its goals, rather than creating new ones.The person said that the coalition had tested some of its plans, including a voter registration initiative, last year in Arizona, which is identified in the brochure as a case study.Arizona was the site of Rockbridge’s first summit, which was held last year. It featured a speech by Mr. Thiel, the billionaire tech investor. He and Ms. Mercer, the daughter of the hedge fund magnate Robert Mercer, were among Mr. Trump’s biggest donors in 2016, and worked closely together on his presidential transition team.Since then, Mr. Thiel has emerged as a key kingmaker, supporting 16 Senate and House candidates, some of whom have also been backed by Ms. Mercer. Many of their candidates have embraced the lie that Mr. Trump won the 2020 election.One, Blake Masters, a former employee of Mr. Thiel’s who is running for Senate in Arizona, spoke at the Rockbridge dinner reception at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday night before Mr. Trump, and conceivably could benefit from Rockbridge’s efforts.Mr. Thiel donated $10 million each to super PACs supporting Mr. Masters and J.D. Vance, an Ohio Senate candidate.It was not clear whether Mr. Thiel or Ms. Mercer attended the Rockbridge gathering this week, which included sessions at another hotel in addition to the dinner reception at Mar-a-Lago Tuesday night. The Mar-a-Lago dinner occurred just before another event there that drew Trump loyalists — the premiere of a movie critical of Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook parent company Meta, for providing grants in 2020 to election administrators struggling to cover the costs of holding an election amid a pandemic. Mr. Thiel has been a board member at Meta, but is leaving that position to focus on trying to influence the midterm elections. His involvement in Rockbridge suggests he could be branching into dark-money nonprofit spending.Rockbridge was founded by Christopher Buskirk, who is the editor and publisher of the pro-Trump journal American Greatness and has advised a super PAC supporting Mr. Masters.A spokesman for Mr. Thiel declined to comment. Efforts to reach Ms. Mercer were not successful.Mr. Schlapp, who helped expand the Koch brothers’ political operation more than 15 years ago, said he created the Chestnut Street Council because donors approached him after the 2020 election “expressing frustration with the more normal routes for funding political operations.”“We decided that it made sense to work with these donors to find better investment opportunities,” he said.He suggested that the group would support legal battles over voting rules.At a Chestnut Street Council meeting in February, donors heard a presentation from the veteran Republican fund-raiser Caroline Wren.Ms. Wren, who helped raise money for many Trump political initiatives, including the rally that preceded the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, said the right should try to replicate the left’s system of donor alliances and nonprofit funding hubs to incubate new groups and increase cooperation between existing ones, according to a person familiar with the presentation.While new funding hubs have emerged on the right in recent years, none have matched the sophistication or spending levels of those on the left.The Conservative Partnership Institute, has sought to become “the hub of the conservative movement.” It claimed in its 2021 annual report to have played a role in the creation of several new conservative nonprofits, including America First Legal, which is led by former Trump aide Stephen Miller; the Center for Renewing America, led by another Trump alumnus, Russ Vought; and the American Cornerstone Institute, led by Ben Carson, the former secretary of housing and urban development.Rebekah Mercer, right, was among Mr. Trump’s biggest donors in 2016, and worked on his presidential transition team.Andrew Harnik/Associated PressThe group also houses the Election Integrity Network, which is led by Cleta Mitchell, the conservative lawyer who was on the hourlong call with Georgia officials and Mr. Trump when the then-president pressured them to “find” enough votes to flip the result. The Conservative Partnership Institute received a $1 million infusion from Mr. Trump’s PAC last summer and held a donor retreat at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club, last spring.Such groups have far fewer disclosure requirements than campaigns and political action committees. Funding hubs like the Conservative Partnership Institute and another nonprofit network shaped by the judicial activist Leonard A. Leo are required to disclose their grants to other groups, but not the donors who supplied the cash, while donor coalitions like the Rockbridge Network and Chestnut Street Council will likely not be required to disclose either.The willingness of Mr. Trump and other officials and prospective presidential candidates to engage with these coalitions is a testament to their increasing centrality in American politics.Recent private gatherings hosted in Colorado and Palm Beach, Fla., by Mr. Singer’s coalition, the American Opportunity Alliance, drew appearances by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, former Vice President Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, a former United Nations ambassador.Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, was expected to speak at the Rockbridge Network meeting in Palm Beach this week. More

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      The Rise of the Tucker Carlson Politician

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      Two Republican Senate candidates field-test a new message honed in the cable-news studio.There are legal rules that govern political ads — say, the one that requires federal candidates to appear onscreen and “approve this message” — and then there are aesthetic rules. A candidate who’s touting education proposals, for instance, will invariably be shown sitting awkwardly in a kid-size chair, reading to elementary-school students. A promise to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States must be accompanied by footage of the candidate, preferably in a hard hat, nodding meaningfully at someone in a factory. The candidate should always appear with people — talking, listening, shaking hands — except when speaking directly to the viewer, which should be done from a living room, with a credenza cluttered with family photos in the background.Blake Masters, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Arizona, ignores these rules. In a series of online videos for his campaign, he appears all by himself, far from hearth and home, to make a slew of dire pronouncements. In one, Masters stands in the desert, flanked by cactuses, and declares: “Psychopaths are running the country right now.” In another, he’s in the middle of a hayfield, saying, “Our military leadership is totally incompetent.” In a third, he appears to have just walked out of a forest at twilight to announce, “Our schools are making our kids dumber.”This is Masters’s first campaign. He is 35, and before entering politics, he spent eight years working for the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. The unsettlingly intense gaze and untucked chambray shirt in his videos leave him looking more like a venture capitalist than a politician; even his name sounds like something Bret Easton Ellis might have dreamed up for a Silicon Valley novel. It’s clearly tempting to view Masters’s videos through that tech- and Thiel-inflected lens. When they hit Twitter, a Motherboard writer joked that it seemed like Masters would “flay you and wear your skin” if Thiel commanded it, while The Washington Post’s Michael Scherer observed that the spots were less like political ads and “more like MoMA installations, made to broadcast on the museum wall. It is always dawn or dusk, the tech oracles have returned from space and half of your countrymen want to destroy you.”But these campaign videos actually have a different, more prosaically political antecedent: Tucker Carlson’s monologues. Five nights a week, Carlson offers his populist message to more than three million Fox News Channel viewers. He tells them that the people who run our country, namely Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, are “a senile man and an imbecile”; that our military leadership, in the person of Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is “not just a pig, he’s stupid”; and that in our schools, “your children are being taught by some of the most ignorant people in the country.” Now Masters — along with another former Thiel employee, J.D. Vance, who’s running as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in Ohio — is trying to convert this rhetoric into an actual political campaign.Carlson is the rare Fox News host whose words carry weight with conservative intellectuals. He is especially popular with those who identify as “national conservatives,” or NatCons — writers and thinkers who tack hard to the right on culture-war issues, denouncing Critical Race Theory and drag-queen story hours, while sharing a set of economic concerns with the left, supporting child subsidies and industrial policy. Depending on your point of view, NatCons are either attempting to add intellectual heft to Trumpism or trying to reverse-engineer an intellectual doctrine to match Trump’s lizard-brain populism. Either way, they have found a champion in Carlson, who delivered the keynote address at the inaugural National Conservatism Conference in 2019, and delivers their message every weeknight in prime time. “At some point, Donald Trump will be gone,” he told viewers in 2019. “What kind of country will it be then? How do we want our grandchildren to live? These are the only questions that matter.”These stark positions have yet to be reduced to the simple shorthand images political ads normally rely on.It makes sense that Masters and Vance would subscribe to national conservatism. Their former boss and patron, Thiel — who has donated millions to super PACs supporting each candidacy — is a NatCon, giving the keynote address at last year’s conference. And they come by the ideology honestly. They are products of elite institutions — Vance graduated from Yale Law School, Masters from Stanford Law — and claim to have been radicalized by the experience. Their populism is a form of contrarianism and rebellion. “Dominant elite society is boring, it is completely unreflective, and it is increasingly wrong,” Vance recently told The Washington Post Magazine. “I kind of had to make a choice.”The challenge is turning that choice into votes. Trump created a constituency on instinct, but thus far there has been no way for politicians to signal affinity with it apart from pledging personal allegiance to Trump. Now that NatCons are trying to solidify that constituency ideologically, it seems freshly possible to align instead with Carlson, whose lead Masters and Vance have followed on everything from opposing vaccine mandates to sympathizing with Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical worldview. (Since the invasion of Ukraine, all three have recalibrated on Putin, with varying degrees of success.) Like Carlson, they go out of their way to troll liberals. Masters recently tweeted footage of a truck hauling lumber with the message: “I guarantee the guy driving this truck is conservative. Imagine a progressive dude driving a logging truck. You can’t.”It’s in Masters’s videos, though, where the alignment with Carlson is most awkwardly apparent. They employ the same issues, the same cadences, even the same words as Carlson’s monologues. “Does anyone still believe that cheaper iPhones or more Amazon deliveries of plastic garbage from China are going to make us happy?” Carlson once asked his viewers. Masters tells voters, “Amazon will send you some useless Chinese junk at the press of a button. But the things people actually need — housing, health care, education — this stuff just keeps getting more and more expensive every year.”Carlson delivers his monologues from the familiar setting of a cable-news studio. Masters isn’t a Fox host. But his stark positions have yet to be reduced to the simple shorthand images political ads normally rely on. He can’t declare that schools are making kids dumber over footage of himself talking to kindergartners. His living room would be an incongruously cozy place from which to convey the message that the country is run by psychopaths. So we get Masters, by himself, prophesizing doom from a desert or a hayfield, his ads radiating a weird, wordy energy.Carlson seems to appreciate the homages; Masters and Vance are frequent guests on his show. “The Republican Party is getting better, much better,” he told viewers last July. “We know that because of two new Republican Senate candidates” — Vance and Masters. Both have won the Tucker Primary. The question — for the candidates and, more consequently, for their party — is whether that’s enough to win an election.Source photographs: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images; Andrew Holt/Getty Images; Bill Hornstein/Getty Images: Screen grabs from YouTube More