Are we really going to let hedge-fund billionaires buy a Pa. Senate seat?

There’s a lot of things that scream out “not Pennsylvania” about Republican Dave McCormick, a former hedge-fund CEO who lived most of his recent adulthood in Connecticut yet has risen to a nearly 50-50 chance — according to the latest polls — of representing the Keystone State in the U.S. Senate for the next six years.

They range from his much-mocked “Yangling” mispronunciation of the commonwealth’s omnipresent local beer, to his Go Steelers tweet that he posted from an Eagles tailgate party, to the swank private jets that continued to ferry him back to the mansion he owns in the Nutmeg State even after his first, failed try at becoming Pennsylvania’s senator in 2022. But there’s something coming here from out-of-state that should trouble voters even more than McCormick himself:

His campaign money.

There is one thing. and one thing alone, that has propelled McCormick — who’d moved away from his native Pennsylvania to get filthy rich on Wall Street a while back and thus was virtually unknown here three years ago — into a dead heat with Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, scion of a Pennsylvania political family that’s as embedded here as deeply as the Eastern hemlock or your neighborhood Wawa (or Sheetz).

That would be the $45 million — and counting — that 70 of the world’s richest people have given to a “super” political-action committee, or super PAC, that was created solely to give McCormick a significant financial edge over Casey. That’s mainly to run the nonstop TV ads that have turned arguably our most milquetoast U.S. senator into a monster who’s down in Texas letting murderers through a hole in the border when he’s not in the supermarket marking up your eggs.

Although the list of donors to the Keystone Renewal PAC does include the richest man in Pennsylvania, the billionaire TikTok investor Jeff Yass, the vast majority of McCormick’s backers only know our commonwealth from the Allegheny ridges they see at 37,000 feet from their private jets, soaring to their next cryptocurrency deal or Silicon Valley.

There’s little evidence their Trojan-horse super PAC seeking to slip one of their fellow oligarchs into the Senate chambers has anything to do with actually renewing the Keystone State. These political investors — including four of the top 40 on Bloomberg’s ranking of world billionaires — want to keep their own taxes low and regulations on their businesses close to nonexistent. They seek a guaranteed vote to keep naming right-wing federal judges like the ones who allowed unlimited cash from the super-rich to buy our elections in the first place.

In another time, the gobsmacking spending for one U.S. Senate seat — already $240 million overall for both candidates, and still rising — would be a big story, but like everything else (worsening climate change, the death of free speech on college campuses) it’s been swamped by the life-or-death-for-democracy struggle between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Today, we’re finally talking about something I’ve been arguing for a while — that Trump would bring a form of fascism that would blow up the American Experiment. But the billionaire bucks in a Pennsylvania Senate race should remind us that unchecked kleptocracy played a major role in getting us here.

Andrew Mayersohn, a senior researcher with OpenSecrets, which tracks money in U.S. politics, told me that Casey-McCormick showdown is already the eighth most expensive Senate election in all of American history, adjusted for inflation, and it’ll probably climb into the top five by Election Day. It’s not, however, the costliest such race in 2024, thanks to the $30 million and counting that just one industry — cryptocurrency — is spending to oust a critic, Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown.

The amount of money spent in Pennsylvania, Ohio and elsewhere is especially galling for those of us who grew up in the shadows of Watergate in the 1970s, when Congress tried to rein in campaign-finance abuses. The shattered shell of that system — with its contribution limits aimed at encouraging smaller donors from a candidate’s home community — still exists 50 years later, and the latest numbers show that incumbent Casey has actually outperformed McCormick in these traditional campaign dollars.

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But the unlimited billionaire and corporate dollars unleashed by a right-wing Supreme Court, capped by the notorious 2010 Citizens United ruling, means that a billionaire-aligned challenger like McCormick can pump in a whopping $20 million more than old-school pol Casey. In addition to the massive Keystone Renewal haul, other PAC dollars for McCormick include $13 million from Americans for Prosperity Action — fueled by money from the oil-rich, Kansas-based Koch family — which may explain why even in a time of climate disaster McCormick has never met a fracking rig he didn’t like. The family of Trump’s former education secretary, Betsy DeVos, has chipped in $500,000.

The main engine that’s propelled McCormick into nearly a tie with Casey is the Keystone Renewal PAC, with 68 of its 70 donors, according to WHYY, coming from outside of Pennsylvania. The biggest and best-known is probably Chicago hedge-fund manager and $35 billion man Kenneth Griffin, who believes in unlimited campaign contributions and opposes both a higher minimum wage for fast food workers and higher taxes on people like himself, saying that “soaking the rich doesn’t work.” He has donated $15 million to the pro-McCormick PAC, and counting.

Other Keystone Renewal donors include Blackstone investment banker Stephen Schwarzman ($1.5 million), who famously compared a Barack Obama proposal for higher taxes on carried interest to Hitler invading Poland, and Yass ($1.25 million), the Philadelphia suburbanite and libertarian who’s at war with public education and desperately wants to stop the looming government action against TikTok.

You’ve surely seen their ads during the 6 o’ clock news or a recent Phillies game, which feature billionaire Griffin seated in a plush leather chair at a white-tablecloth club, saying: “Hello, this is Kenneth Griffin. I run a billionaire hedge fund in Illinois and I know Dave McCormick will fight for me in the United States Senate, to ensure I keep paying taxes at a lower rate than my secretary and that the regulators stay off my back. And so...”

And so, this tired joke again? In reality, the ads from Keystone Renewal and other PACs supporting McCormick would never mention who these billionaire donors are and what they really want. Instead, they turn up the volume on what their high-priced consultants tell them riles up the proletariat — shock imagery of migrants pouring across the border (at a moment when such crossings are sharply down), cherry-picked violent criminals, and the suggestion that mild-mannered Casey is the global mastermind of inflation. They want to raise the blood pressure of everyday voters by Election Day, so they’ll elect more politicians to undermine their own interests.

OpenSecrets’ Mayersohn said it’s all too common that the vast bulk of money from these super PACs funded by the mega-rich pay for negative TV ads. Typically, the campaigns use the dollars from the smaller traditional pool to run any positive biography ads, he explained, “leaving these super PACs to do the dirty work.”

The term “dirty work” feels too kind. What McCormick’s billionaire pals from the private-jet lounge are doing here in Pennsylvania is exactly the same thing that Trump does at his rallies — just minus the Arnold Palmer genitalia anecdotes. They are seeking to mold an anxious and fearful electorate that by this time next year will feel too beaten down or overcome by nihilism to care about the next super-rich tax cut or oil rigs in Yellowstone National Park or whatever.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Ken Griffin and Jeff Yass and Trump-supporting Elon Musk can buy your TV commercial breaks but not your actual vote (at least not according to the newest sternly worded letter from the U.S. Justice Department). On or before Nov. 5, Pennsylvania voters can do what’s actually best for Pennsylvania, then grab a cheesesteak (I’ll have to pass on the Yuengling), and track McCormick’s jet leaving our airspace for the very last time.

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