A third-party conservative candidate running in a south suburban Twin Cities congressional district held by U.S. Rep. Angie Craig was recruited by a secretive group with ties to Democrat-aligned political consulting firms.
Tom Bowman (Courtesy of Tom Bowman)
Thomas Bowman, 71, who is running as a “constitutional conservative” against Democratic Congresswoman Craig and Republican Joe Teirab, was asked to run in the 2nd Congressional District by Patriots Run Project, a group recruiting right-wing candidates in competitive races across the U.S., according to a report from the Associated Press.
Bowman said he was approached by the group after “becoming vocal” about politics on Facebook. In an interview with the Pioneer Press, Bowman said Patriots Run Project asked him to run against Craig in a district more than 10 miles away from his Brooklyn Center address.
“The race was suggested to me,” said Bowman. He added that reporting about the group’s ties to Democratic groups doesn’t give him any pause about his candidacy.
“They’ve warned me that as soon as you run and you’re not in the Republican or the Democratic Party, the mud is going to fly,” he said. “So I’ll sit back and be amused. I haven’t done anything wrong.”
Help gathering signatures
Bowman, who is disabled following a kidney transplant, told the AP it was likely he was recruited to split the conservative vote, that Patriots Run Project had helped him gather signatures and that he couldn’t have gotten on the ballot without their help.
Bowman said his priorities if elected include enacting term limits and bringing fiscal restraint to government.
Tierab’s campaign called Patriots Run Project’s efforts “blatant election interference” and attempted to attach the activity to his opponent.
“Angie Craig talks a lot about corruption in Washington, meanwhile her party is attempting to manipulate the election in her favor,” Teirab said in a news release. “Angie Craig owes her constituents answers on what she knew about this election interference and if she will denounce her party’s corrupt tactics.”
In response to allegations of Democrat-aligned groups backing a spoiler candidate in her district, Craig’s campaign said it knew nothing about Bowman’s candidacy.
“The first we heard of Thomas Bowman’s candidacy was when he filed with the (Federal Election Commission) in April,” said campaign spokesperson Katie Kelsh. “The campaign has no knowledge of how he got on the ballot.”
The 2nd Congressional District is no stranger to third-party candidates getting accused of being spoilers.
In the 2022 and 2020 elections, Craig faced challengers from the state’s Legal Marijuana Now Party — both of whom faced accusations of ties to Republicans and both of whom died before Election Day.
In 2022, Paula Overby died on Oct. 5, a little over a month before Election Day, of what family members said was complications from heart valve trouble. In 2020, Legal Marijuana Now candidate Adam Weeks died in late September of an apparent fentanyl overdose, just a little over a month before Election Day.
Other candidates
Meanwhile, several other unorthodox candidates have emerged across the country — all backed by Patriots Run Project.
For the past year, the group has recruited supporters of former President Donald Trump to run as independent candidates in key swing districts where they could siphon votes from Republicans in races that will help determine which party controls the U.S. House next year, an Associated Press review has found. In addition to two races in Iowa, the group recruited candidates in Nebraska, Montana and Virginia. All six recruits described themselves as retired, disabled or both.
The group’s operation provides few clues about its management, financing or motivation. But interviews, text messages, emails, business filings and other documents reviewed by the AP show that a significant sum has been spent — and some of it traces back to Democratic consulting firms.
While dirty tricks are as old as American elections, the efforts this year could have profound consequences in the fight to control Congress. It’s also not an isolated example: allies of Trump have been working across the U.S. to get liberal academic Cornel West on the ballot in hopes he could play spoiler in the presidential election.
‘It’s a dirty trick’
Joe Wiederien was an unlikely candidate to challenge a Republican congressman in one of the nation’s most competitive House districts in Iowa. Wiederien was registered as a Republican until months earlier. A debilitating stroke had left him unable to drive. He had never run for office. For a time, he couldn’t vote because of a felony conviction.
But he arrived last month at the Iowa Capitol with well over the 1,726 petition signatures needed to qualify for the ballot as a conservative alternative to first-term Republican Rep. Zach Nunn.
“At that time I was thinking, well, it would be nice to be in Congress and get to work with President Trump,” Wiederien, 54, said. “It looks like it’s a dirty trick now.”
Wiederien withdrew his candidacy last month after he says it became clear he’d been manipulated into running against Nunn.
Nunn on Monday called the effort a plot “to steal this election.”
A deceptive recruitment drive on Facebook
On Facebook, Patriots Run Project operated a series of pro-Trump pages and ran ads that used apocalyptic rhetoric to attack establishment politicians in both parties while urging conservatives to run in November.
“We need American Patriots like YOU to stand for freedom with President Trump and take back control from the globalist elites by running for office,” one ad states.
Some candidates say they were contacted because of their political posts on Facebook. Two others said the group reached out after they completed an online survey.
Once recruited, they communicated with a handful of operatives through text messages, emails and phone calls. In-person contact was limited. Patriots Run Project advised them about what forms to fill out and how to file required paperwork.
In at least three races, petition signatures to qualify for the ballot were circulated by a Nevada company that works closely with the Democratic consulting firm Sole Strategies, according to documents, including text messages and a draft contract, as well as the firm’s co-founder. In Iowa, a different Democratic firm conducted a poll testing attacks on Nunn, while presenting Wiederien as the true conservative.
Despite the ties to Democratic firms, there is a scant paper trail to determine who is overseeing the effort.
Patriots Run Project is not a registered business in the United States and it is not listed as a nonprofit with the IRS. It has not filed paperwork to form a political committee with the Federal Election Commission. The only concrete identifying detail listed on the group’s website is a P.O. Box inside a UPS store in Washington, D.C.
Messages left at email addresses and phone numbers for the group’s operatives went unanswered.
DCCC responds
A spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, House Democrats’ campaign arm, said the organization had no knowledge of or involvement in the effort. House Majority PAC, the Democrats’ big spending congressional super PAC, was also not involved, a spokesman said.
Jason Torchinsky, a prominent Republican election lawyer and former Justice Department official, said investigators should take interest. “Given what is described, there could be a wide variety of federal and state criminal violations,” he said.
Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the effort “looks shady and unethical,” but added “it is hard to say whether any laws have been broken, which would depend not only on the facts, but also the statutes and precedents under state law.”
In Iowa, it is a crime to deprive or defraud voters of “a fair and impartially conducted election process,” while in Virginia “conspiracy against rights of citizens” is a felony.
It’s not the first time Patriots Run Project has drawn attention.
In June, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based watchdog, issued a report that found the network of Patriots Run Project pages on Facebook were likely controlled by a small number of people, deceiving users and violating Facebook’s policies on “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” The ads also violated the site’s standards because they did not include disclaimers showing who was responsible.
Facebook took down the pages. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, didn’t respond to a request for comment. The company reported receiving $48,000 for the group’s ads.
‘They got me a donor’
Unlike Wiederien, other candidates said they believed the group had done nothing wrong.
In Montana, Dennis Hayes was recruited to run as a Libertarian against GOP Rep. Ryan Zinke. The group found a donor to give him $1,740 to cover his candidate filing fee, Hayes recalled. The donor, whom Hayes would not identify, went to Hayes’ bank with him to deposit the check, which Politico previously reported.
“I told them I didn’t have the money to run or I would. They got me a donor so I could run for Congress,” said Hayes, 70.
Robert Reid, a widowed retiree running against Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans in southeastern Virginia, said he was contacted by Patriots Run Project after posting his views to Facebook. His sole in-person contact was when a man drove to his home in a Mercedes SUV to drop off his completed petition signature paperwork.
“They seem to be nice people,” said Reid, a Trump supporter who will appear on November’s ballot for the swing district seat. The thought, however, did cross his mind that “these guys want me to run to draw votes away from” Kiggans.
Operatives target a key race in Iowa
Wiederien, however, thinks the group had ulterior motives. The Iowa district he was recruited to run in has been fiercely contested in recent years. Nunn won by roughly 2,000 votes in 2022, while the Democrat who held the seat, Cindy Axne, eked out victories in two prior races that drew third-party candidates.
Patriots Run Project identified Wiederien through Facebook last fall, and an operative calling himself “Knox” urged him to run: “God bless you. You’re a true patriot. We are gonna save our country!”
Wiederien, who has attended several Trump rallies, had text and phone conversations over the ensuing months with operatives who identified themselves as “Will Haywood” and “Johnny Shearer.”
The AP was unable to confirm whether Haywood and Shearer were real identities. A John Shearer who Wiederien said was involved said he would not confirm or deny any participation.
“If I were in this covert political organization, I wouldn’t really admit to it, would I?” he said.
The operatives convinced Wiederien to change his party affiliation from Republican to unaffiliated so he could qualify. They assured him his 2013 felony conviction for his third operating-while-intoxicated offense, which cost him his right to vote and run for office until 2016, wasn’t disqualifying.
They urged him to list his affiliation on the ballot as “America First.” They arranged for a firm to gather signatures across the district.
Common Sense America
Those signatures were gathered by Common Sense America, a Nevada limited liability company created in February. A company disclosure filing in Colorado, which requires signature gatherers to register, lists a phone number for a co-founder of the Democratic consulting firm Sole Strategies.
“We work very closely with Common Sense America,” Zee Cohen-Sanchez, the co-founder, said when contacted. Lisa Cohen, the registered agent for Common Sense America who appears to be Cohen-Sanchez’s mother, didn’t return messages.
Sole Strategies has earned nearly $1.8 million over the past four years working for Democratic candidates and causes, including Democratic House members and candidates, records show.
Last month, a poll attacked Nunn as soft in his opposition to abortion, terrorists and Democrats — calling him “an errand boy for the uniparty elite” — while painting Wiederien as the pro-Trump conservative in the race.
A spokeswoman for the firm that operated the poll, Dynata, said that its client was Patinkin Research, which says it “has worked to elect dozens of Democratic candidates.” The spokeswoman later said she identified Patinkin in error and urged AP not to publish its identity. Patinkin’s founder didn’t return messages.
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