--- title: "Mystery PACs Spend Millions Telling Republicans Their Senators Aren’t Conservative Enough" description: "Groups tied to Wisconsin treasurer Thomas Datwyler are boosting longshots in Alaska and Ohio, and their donors stay hidden until after Election Day" author: "Nate Ledger" published: 2026-10-31T11:00:15.240Z modified: 2026-10-31T13:18:11Z url: https://rews.cc/a/mystery-pacs-spend-millions-telling-republicans-their-senato-4b409f language: en tags: ["politics", "elections", "dark-money", "senate", "alaska", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Mystery PACs Spend Millions Telling Republicans Their Senators Aren’t Conservative Enough *Groups tied to Wisconsin treasurer Thomas Datwyler are boosting longshots in Alaska and Ohio, and their donors stay hidden until after Election Day* By Nate Ledger · October 31, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/mystery-pacs-spend-millions-telling-republicans-their-senato-4b409f ## In brief - A DOJ probe is examining whether Democrats recruited a second Daniel Sullivan onto Alaska’s Senate ballot to confuse voters - PACs tied to treasurer Thomas Datwyler have spent over $3.75M attacking Sen. Dan Sullivan and promoting longshot Jerry Heikes - A Datwyler-linked PAC that spent $2.3M+ in the August primary was mostly funded by the liberal Sixteen Thirty Fund - PACs that start spending after the Oct. 14 close of books don’t have to name donors until after Election Day - In Ohio, Buckeye Freedom PAC has spent over $3.8M attacking Sen. Jon Husted and promoting libertarian William Redpath Suppose you’d like a Republican senator to lose. Attacking him from the left mostly won’t work, because the people who vote for him already disagree with you. The better move is to attack him from the right. Tell his own voters he’s soft on guns, or on spending, or on transgender issues, and point them to some candidate who is a “real conservative” and has no chance of winning. You don’t need anyone to vote for your guy. You just need them to stop voting for theirs. This is an old trick and a legal one, and it seems to be very popular in the 2026 Senate races. A Justice Department investigation is already looking at whether Democrats recruited a schoolteacher called Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. onto Alaska’s ballot to confuse voters who meant to pick the Republican incumbent, Sen. Daniel S. Sullivan ([more on that mess here](https://rews.cc/a/two-dan-sullivans-one-senate-seat-and-a-lawsuit-ordered-by-t-5e3d5b)). Now [a CNN investigation](https://cnn.com/2026/10/31/politics/alaska-senate-race-pac-spending-invs) has found a separate, much better-funded effort to prop up a different fringe name in that race, and a matching one in Ohio. Both Senate seats could decide who controls the chamber. The Alaska longshot is Gerald “Jerry” Heikes, a drywall contractor. He told the *New York Times* that a man had recruited him to run, promising to “make things happen for you,” and that he couldn’t remember the man’s name. Heikes doesn’t seem to have campaigned and hasn’t reported spending any money. He came fifth in the August primary and only reached the general election because another longshot, Democrat David Leslie, dropped out. He didn’t respond to CNN. He doesn’t really need to campaign, because other people are doing it for him. Two PACs that have listed Wisconsin consultant Thomas Datwyler as treasurer have spent more than $3.75 million since mid-October attacking Sullivan and promoting Heikes. Nearly all of that comes from Alaska Values PAC, registered last month, which had spent at least $3.75 million according to FEC filings made Thursday. Red Alaska PAC, registered this month, has added $10,000. Neither has reported a single donor. The ads are tailored to Alaska’s ranked-choice system. “Rank one name, leave the rest blank: Only rank Heikes,” says a narrator in one YouTube spot. Here’s how that works: under ranked-choice, if your first choice is knocked out, your vote moves to your next choice. A conservative who ranks Heikes first and Sullivan second still ends up helping Sullivan. A conservative who ranks only Heikes doesn’t help anyone once Heikes is eliminated. So the instruction isn’t really “vote for Heikes.” It’s “don’t let your vote reach Sullivan.” ## We’ve seen this one before It’s a rerun. Before the August primary another Datwyler-treasured PAC, Right for Alaska, spent more than $2.3 million in the last few days attacking Sullivan and boosting Heikes and Earl Southworth of the “Alaskan Party.” Its donors came out only after the vote. Almost all of the money came from the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a liberal dark-money group that has been a big funder of pro-Democratic PACs, and from Liberty Force Action Fund. That second group lists only a Virginia post office box in FEC records, hasn’t shown up as a donor in any other federal race and has no public paperwork as a nonprofit or political group. [The Alaska Beacon](https://alaskabeacon.com/2026/10/21/revealed-the-money-behind-the-last-minute-fringe-candidate-ad-blitz-in-alaskas-u-s-senate-primary/) covered the reveal. Right for Alaska shut down after the primary, which makes sense: it had done its job. Republicans played the same game. A Republican super PAC funded a PAC that spent more than $800,000 in the primary promoting a Green Party candidate and another minor Democrat while opposing Democrat Mary Peltola. ## The timing is the point The reason the money stays hidden is a calendar quirk. Under the FEC’s schedule, the last pre-election report, the Pre-General, [closed its books on October 14](https://www.fec.gov/updates/october-reporting-reminder-2026/) and was due October 22. Anything raised after that goes on the Post-General report, which is due December 3. That’s 30 days after the November 3 election. So if you set up a PAC, collect your money and spend it all in the final two weeks, the public learns about the spending almost straight away and learns about the donors a month after it could have mattered. This isn’t a one-off trick. [Twenty-two pop-up super PACs](https://rews.cc/a/22-pop-up-super-pacs-spent-637-million-before-voters-saw-a-d-b04e95) have used the same gap this cycle. In Ohio, Buckeye Freedom PAC, another Datwyler group, has reported spending more than $3.8 million on ads, texts and direct mail attacking Republican Sen. Jon Husted and promoting William Redpath, a libertarian longshot who has run before in Virginia and Illinois. In one ad a narrator with a gun accuses Husted of “pushing background checks and red flag laws” and calls Redpath “a real Second Amendment guy.” Redpath told CNN he’d never met Datwyler, didn’t know where the money came from and hadn’t seen the ads until CNN contacted him. “I don’t know who these people are,” he said. “They want to promote my candidacy, and that’s fine.” Datwyler himself mostly works for Republicans. He has faced a long list of campaign finance complaints around the country, and FEC records show him as treasurer of more than 180 PACs registered since the start of 2025. Last year he told a political website he had “served as treasurer for more conservative committees than any other professional in the US” in the previous cycle. In 2023, committees tied to George Santos listed him as treasurer, though his lawyer told CNN that happened without his authorization. This week a different Datwyler PAC, Sportsmans Alliance of Maine Action Fund, reported spending more than $62,000 to help Republican Sen. Susan Collins. So he isn’t loyal to one side so much as available. Datwyler didn’t respond to CNN. A woman who answered the door at his Wisconsin home said he “wouldn’t want to talk” about the Senate races. On Friday one of the PACs filed a new FEC registration naming a different treasurer. In an Instagram video last year he called press coverage “meaningless, meritless articles” and said critics “wouldn’t be attacking me or my clients if we weren’t an actual threat to them and their power.” Michael Beckel of Issue One, a bipartisan reform group, warned that “this type of gamesmanship can erode public confidence in the electoral process,” because voters who find out afterwards that the other side paid for an ad “may reasonably question what else they don’t know.” David Keating of the Institute for Free Speech disagreed: “I don’t really see a solution. It’s part of democracy. It’s a messy process.” The politics could turn ugly fast. Trump and other senior Republicans accuse Peltola’s campaign of recruiting the second Daniel Sullivan, after the *Times* quoted her former campaign manager making new claims about it. Peltola denies knowing about any such plan. If she wins, the PAC spending could draw federal scrutiny too, and by then the donor lists will finally be public. Still, Redpath’s experience says the most about how this works. He is the candidate in these ads, and he was the last person to see them. That’s fair enough. They were never aimed at him.