Peter Thiel and Mitch McConnell Squabbled Over Who Should Fork Over Cash for PACs to Help Blake Masters’ Campaign: Report

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Peter Thiel are at odds over Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters’ floundering campaign and who should spend the millions of dollars needed to fund the PACs to help him in the final months of the campaign, according to a report by the Washington Post.

Masters has been trailing incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) in the polls, and recent headlines about the Republican’s history of controversial comments seem unlikely to help.

The Arizona contest was one of several states where GOP candidates backed by former President Donald Trump are facing uphill battles, which McConnell himself acknowledged in a recent interview where he said the House was more likely to flip than the Senate and blamed it on “candidate quality.”

The Senate Leadership Fund PAC under McConnell’s direction canceled millions of dollars in ad buys for Arizona, rescheduling a portion of them for later in October.

FEC campaign finance reports show that Saving Arizona, a PAC supporting Masters, raised over $16 million with $15 million of that coming from Thiel, and had less than $3 million cash on hand in mid-July. According to the Post, Trump’s Saving America PAC gave the legal maximum $5,000 to Masters’ campaign but has not donated to Saving Arizona.

Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and was an early investor in Facebook, doesn’t seem very enthusiastic about pouring more money into Masters’ campaign. The Post article describes “a high-stakes game of chicken” that played out as McConnell’s PAC canceled the ads in Arizona, the Kentucky senator unsuccessfully sought to get Thiel to donate more to another of the candidates he had boosted in the primary, J.D. Vance in Ohio, and several phone calls to Thiel made by McConnell and Stephen Law, his top fundraiser and head of the PAC:

McConnell told Thiel over the phone last week that Vance’s race in Ohio was proving more costly for the Senate Leadership Fund than anticipated, that money was not unlimited and that there was a need for the billionaire to “come in, in a big way, in Arizona,” as a person familiar with the conversation described his words. Law, in a call with Thiel the day before his group cut back on the Arizona ads, expressed concern about Masters as a candidate and pessimism about his campaign’s viability…

The message from McConnell and Law, according to people with knowledge of their pitch, was that they should essentially split the cost, with Thiel cutting a check to their super PAC matching whatever funds they put behind Masters. Another option, these people said, was that the Thiel-funded super PAC could take over the ad reservations initially made by the McConnell-linked group.

Thiel indicated to them that he was not interested in such arrangements — a posture, say people around the venture capitalist, that is informed by his approach of investing early and a belief that any more of his money would be used as a Democratic talking point; he is still hosting fundraisers for Masters in the coming weeks.

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