It was inevitable that Tiffany Smiley, a novice candidate, would lose her quixotic bid for a U.S. Senate seat as a pro-life candidate in a solidly blue state.
In the process, she burned through $20 million of Republican money (the bulk of which came from GOP megadonors, see story here), and ended up with $1 million of campaign debt. (Where are those donors when she needs them?)
It’s not unusual for campaigns to end with debt, but in her case, it’s more than just a detail. After the election, she set up a PAC and solicited donations to ostensibly help conservative candidates all over the country.
What she didn’t tell those donors, except in buried fine print, is that the first $2900 of every donation ($5800 for couples) would go to paying off her own campaign debt. While it wasn’t illegal, a campaign finance expert called it “misleading” (see story here).
This isn’t the first time Slippery Smiley has engaged in deception. To win the GOP nomination, she told GOP primary voters she was “100% pro-life,” but in the general election campaign she claimed to “respect” Washington voters’ decision to enact abortion rights into state law (see article here). I warned readers of this blog not to trust her.
Now, apparently, the people she’s hitting up for donations to her PAC can’t trust her representations, either. It’s one thing to ask for money to pay off the debts of a failed campaign; it’s quite thing another to go around saying the money will be used for winning future campaigns, then diverting it to a past campaign’s debts. Fine-print disclosure or not, legal or not, in my book that’s dishonest.
You might want to remember this if Smiley ever runs for public office again.