Raining money: Donors drop $14M into crucial House race between Scott Perry, Janelle Stelson

From a scion of Walmart's founding family to Pennsylvania's wealthiest man, everybody's got an opinion about Pennsylvania's 10th Congressional District.

And boy, are they sharing.

A sweep of recent campaign finance filings conducted by a group of Syracuse University journalism students for and with PennLive showed that total spending in the political cage-match between incumbent U.S. Rep. Scott Perry and former newscaster Janelle Stelson has crashed through the $10 million barrier.

With the latest filings by the Perry and Stelson campaigns, the math shows that their investments, plus those from Washington-based political committees and other independent SuperPACs on their behalf, had hit $14.1 million as of the end of September.

And we're nowhere near done.

On Tuesday, a political action committee steered by Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson announced more than $200,000 in ad reservations to help Perry. That money was shifted from Eighteen Fifty-Four Fund, a Republican group named for the year the GOP was founded.

Days before that, Defend the Vote, a PAC motivated by "ensuring voting access, education and protection," joined with two other committees to launch a fresh $1.1 million ad buy in which a U.S. Army veteran named Ken Fletcher condemns Perry for his support of former President Donald Trump's election subversion activities.

It's long been known to central Pennsylvania observers that the 10th was going to be one of the most competitive districts in the nation in a cycle where majority control of the U.S. House is very much up for grabs.

But the level of outside investment has become super-charged by two factors: Perry's raised national profile as the former leader of the conservative House Freedom Caucus; and the relative bargain rates for air-time in a media market that's not, say, Philadelphia.

Who's playing in our sandbox? Peel back the layers of this year's reports, and you've got - if not Taylor Swift - several of America's major political influencers desperately vying for your attention in Hershey, York and Carlisle.

In Perry's corner, fighting for a Republican majority they trust to keep a lid on federal spending and tax rates, are Jeffrey Yass, a private equity investor from Montgomery County famous in Pennsylvania for bankrolling school choice crusaders, and Richard Uihlein, an Illinois businessman last seen in Pennsylvania as one of the top financial backers of 2022 GOP gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano.

Yass and Uihlein are two of the top three individual spenders nationwide for this election cycle, trailing only Wyoming-based Timothy Mellon, according to reporting by The Washington Post.

Efforts to reach them for this report were unsuccessful, but major donors often prefer to give to SuperPACs because they can accept unlimited sums from individuals and often work closely with campaigns despite rules against coordinating their advertising.

Together, Yass and Uihlein have surged more than $46 million into the Club for Growth Action Fund for the 2023-24 federal campaign cycle. Through the end of August, that represented more than 70 percent of the committee's total fundraising contributions for the cycle.

Club For Growth Action, in turn, has provided 70 percent of the funding for a much smaller political action committee, Win It Back, that started life in 2023 trying to discourage the renomination of former President Donald Trump but is now all-in on trying to keep GOP majorities in Congress.

And one of Win It Back's top beneficiaries this fall?: Scott Perry, as the group has channeled nearly $1.5 million into an advertising campaign opposing Stelson.

But this no one-sided game.

Overall, in fact, outside money coming in to support Stelson this year topped $3 million as of the end of August, outpacing the $2.7 million flowing in for Perry.

Stelson, through SuperPacs, has some of the biggest national Democratic donors involved in her campaign.

They include:

James and Kathryn Murdoch, who emerged as a power couple in Democratic campaign finance circles in 2020 after James, a son of News Corp. titan Rupert Murdoch, stepped away from the company that owns Fox News Channel.

Samuel Rawlings Walton, a grandson of the founder of the discount department store empire who has become a regular and major donor to Democratic Party candidates and causes;

Reid Hoffman, the founder of Linkedin.

All are major donors to WelcomePAC, a committee dedicated to building a "big-tent" Democratic Party "that reaches out to mainstream Americans; not just those who pass all the progressive purity tests."

Co-founder Liam Kerr said the group specializes in looking for districts that — at least initially — don't pass tests for support by more traditional Democratic Party playbooks, which tend to focus on places with an incumbent House Republican that Biden carried in the 2020 presidential election.

For WelcomePAC the 10th, Kerr said, pressed a lot of buttons.

Perry has never been able to win the district by a large margin, meaning if opponents could peel away just about one in 10 past Perry voters, he could be beaten. And voters in the district in 2022 showed their willingness to split tickets by giving Josh Shapiro a 12-point win in the governor's race at the same time Trump carried the presidential vote by four points.

And finally, Kerr said, Perry has a voting record and other baggage that, if voters were hammered with infomration about them in relentless 21st-Century media style, they might be enticed to move.

When Stelson, someone with good name identity as a former newscaster for WGAL News8 and some appeal to the political center, won the Democratic primary, the 10th had "all the elements we look for," Kerr said.

WelcomePAC has been at work since last fall through its support of "Republicans Against Perry," a messaging group that has put up billboards and digital ads stressing Perry's support for Trump's 2020 election subversion efforts and, as they see it, willingness to prioritize politics over governing.

(Perry would disagree; he argues his principled stands are exactly why voters in the 10th have sent him to Washington.)

Early work by groups like WelcomePAC put the 10th on the radar for other groups.

By now, the biggest outside funding source for Stelson through the summer has been the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Washington-based war room that focuses exclusively on electing Democrats to the House of Representatives.

The D-triple-C, as politicos know it, has pumped more than $1.4 million into a major air war consisting of negative ads against Perry, including one in heavy rotation this month that features a different veteran, who claims to have served with Perry, bemoaning what "Scott Perry has become...

"Scott Perry deserves to be court-martialed; not in Congress," the ad concludes. According to Mediaradar-CMAG, an ad-tracking firm, that particular ad has run approximately 800 times through Tuesday, making it #1 on the 10th District hit parade this fall.

Other major committees that have thrown in for Perry include the House Freedom Action Fund, a committee that primarily works to help members of the Freedom Caucus, which Perry served as chair of in 2023. It has invested $822,000 in opposition to Stelson.

What's it go for? If you've watched broadcast or cable television this fall, you already know. Since the late summer, the central Pennsylvania airwaves have been bombarded with commercials for or against the candidates.

Here's Stelson, reprising her role as a TV reporter, interviewing a woman about the necessity to protect Social Security benefits.

There's Perry, in a garage, talking frankly about how he wasn't sent to Washington to make friends, but to fight for the interests of his constituents. For much of his career, that has meant trying to contain what he sees as runaway federal spending.

This is the most-aired Republican ad in the 10th race, having been broadcast about 450 times through Tuesday by Mediaradar's count.

Some truths are being stretched to the breaking point: Stelson made an insensitive remark from her anchor desk about eating cats (ironic, isn't it) that got resurfaced by an opponent in this spring's Democratic primary; in Perry's world this justifies calling her a racist.

Stelson, in a statement issued by her campaign, acknowledged the incident, but she also complained about Daniels dredging something up from 10 years ago to go negative.

"My comment was wrong and I apologized for it at the time," Stelson's statement said. "I was live on TV for thousands of hours over 38 years and one inappropriate joke from a decade ago is the worst thing they can find?"

A pro-Stelson attack ad states Perry has been under investigation for election subversion. There is no proof of that: Yes, his cellphone was seized in Special Counsel Jack Smith's investigation. But Perry has not been charged, and his attorneys have contended he was never anything but a witness.

Still, the numbers are amazing.

According to an analysis of the 10th race by Mediaradar - CMAG, a total of $11,350,000 has already been spent or reserved on the local network affiliates through Election Day.

($7.4 million has already been spent on ads that will run through this week; another $3.9 million has been deposited to reserve time; the PAC leaders have the latitude — week by week — to shift that money elsewhere if there's another race that appears to be a better investment.

"We're still seeing movement in this race, so the total will likely go up," said Mediaradar analyst Chris Sebastian.)

Add it all up, and Perry has been outgunned, though there's no doubt that everyone has ample resources to get their messages heard.

The top buyers:

(Perry's own campaign, by comparison, has reserved just under $650,000 through Tuesday night, Sebastian said.)

Aside from broadcast advertising, the finance reports show lesser, but still significant amounts, being spent on ad production; digital, radio and cable television ads; mailers; polling and paid campaign staff.

Other PACs that have contributed directly to Stelson's warchest are the United Steelworkers, Casa in Action PAC, Emily's List, International Union of Painters and Allied Trades Political Action Together PAC, and International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers PAC.

Many of these are union-affiliated committees that have been traditional allies of the Democratic Party.

The top direct donor to Perry's campaign committee is "Protect the House 2024,′′ with $164,859.94.

Protect the House 2024 is a joint fundraising committee founded by former U.S. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. In January 2023, Perry played an instrumental role in helping McCarthy, a California Republican, retain his Speakership.

According to reporting from "Open Secrets," many of the top donors to McCarthy's committee come from the investment management industry. In the past few years, the Republican Party has defended significant tax benefits private equity firms and hedge funds qualify for, including the "carried interest loophole" which permits fund managers to classify their earnings as capital gains.

Pennsylvania's 10th District comprises all of Dauphin County, most of Cumberland County, and roughly the northern half of York County. In the 2020 presidential vote, Trump defeated Biden in the district by 4.1 percentage points.

Democrats widely see it as their top Congressional pick-up opportunity in Pennsylvania this year, but with majority control of the U.S. House up for grabs, Republicans are working just as hard to keep it in their column.

Election Day is Nov. 5, and the last day to register is Oct. 21.