Millions Spent. 25 of 42 Contested Races Lost.

Chad Christensen paid McShane LLC of Las Vegas $30,917 to run his 2026 campaign for Idaho House District 35A. Make Liberty Win, the federal super PAC housed in a Fairfax, Virginia office building, kicked in another $9,220. Citizens Alliance of Idaho — a state PAC that gets 98 percent of its money from a Virginia federal PAC that gets 62 percent of its money from a Pennsylvania gambling-machine company — added $9,869. Three more Idaho PACs added $19,700 in independent expenditures. Christensen’s own committee raised $33,084 in direct contributions. All told, the network burned through more than $100,000 trying to put Chad Christensen back in the Idaho legislature.

A website called chadchristensen.org sat there the whole time for about ten dollars a year: his sworn deposition, his 2019 boycott campaign against a downtown Boise restaurant, his 2019 attempt to defund Boise State University over a gender-neutral bathroom, his documented Oath Keepers membership, his termination from Idaho State Probation and Parole, his rejection by the Blackfoot Police Department, and his own sworn testimony about the “family-values” record he ran on.

Voters in District 35A read it and picked Mike Veile by twelve points. There were 42 more races like it in the 2026 Idaho Republican primary.

Inside this report:

• The network spent millions trying to swing the 2026 Idaho Republican primary. In races where Idaho Republicans had to choose between two names on a ballot, the network’s candidates lost 25 of 42.
• The network went all-in on three races. David Worley for Senate D28 ($129K, lost by 6.6 points to Sen. Jim Guthrie). Kelly Golden for House D32A ($185K, lost by 14 points to Rep. Stephanie Mickelsen). Mark Fitzpatrick for Governor (self-funded, lost statewide to Gov. Brad Little).
• The Vegas firm the network kept hiring rebranded midway through the cycle and hid $1.65 million in Idaho billing behind five new names. McShane LLC became RMC Strategy in October 2025. Its Idaho employee, Bjorn Handeen, is simultaneously the Chair of the Idaho Republican Party Platform Committee.
• The “Idaho” money on your mail came from Virginia. Citizens Alliance of Idaho is 98 percent funded by a Fairfax federal PAC that shares a treasurer with Make Liberty Win, Ready for Ron, and Committee to Defeat the President. Sixty-two percent of that federal PAC’s receipts came from a Pennsylvania gambling-machine company.
• The amplifier network was loud all cycle. Greg Pruett’s Honor Idaho slate profiled seven far-right candidates. Five lost. The operators produced plenty of noise; they couldn’t produce a vote.
• Traditional Idaho Republicans decided to fight back with facts. In-district fundraising, in-state help, records on the table, and door-knocking outperformed a manufactured-outrage operation that ran on millions.

Section 1. The Chad Christensen case: what more than $100,000 in campaign money couldn’t beat

Chad Christensen has been in and out of the Idaho legislature for most of a decade. Ammon City Councilman Josh Wheeler beat him by 362 votes in the 2022 primary. Christensen sat out 2024. In 2026 he filed against Mike Veile — the appointed incumbent Gov. Brad Little had put in D35A eight months earlier — rather than face a rematch against Wheeler in D35B. He picked the weaker target.

The chadchristensen.org archive is one page. It cost about ten dollars a year to keep online. The receipts on it are Christensen’s own:

• Oath Keepers membership, reported by the Associated Press and the Post Register in September 2022. Federal prosecutors convicted the militia’s leadership on seditious conspiracy charges over the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack.
• Fired from Idaho State Probation and Parole for what he described in sworn deposition as being “too mean” to fugitives, including filling their voicemails with a rap song containing threatening lyrics. One fugitive filed a life-threat complaint. Blackfoot PD rejected his subsequent application after reading the personnel file.
• The family-values contradiction. Asked under oath in the same deposition to name women he had had sexual relationships with during the period he was running on family values, Christensen named two and estimated four or five others he could not remember.
• The Bacon restaurant boycott. February 2019: Christensen and a group of Three Percenters affiliates open-carried into a downtown Boise restaurant. When the owner asked them to close a booth curtain because customers were uncomfortable, Christensen went to Facebook and called for a public boycott. The Post Register’s editorial board said what needed to be said:

The archive links the underlying documents: deposition pages, wire-service reports, court filings. It is entirely Christensen’s own words and Christensen’s own records. He responded to it with a video calling it “full of lies.” His own sworn testimony is not lies. His own votes are not lies. For a candidate who cannot tell the difference between the truth and his own fiction, it is a wonder anyone voted for him in the first place.

On May 19, District 35A voters looked at all of it and chose Mike Veile. Christensen took 3,588 votes. Veile took 4,575. 44.0% to 56.0%.

The ledger of what the network paid to lose that race:

Amount	Payer	Purpose
$30,917	Christensen for Idaho	Payment to McShane LLC of Las Vegas for campaign management
$33,084	Christensen for Idaho	Direct contributions to the candidate's own committee
$12,800	36-18-1 PAC	Independent expenditures
$9,869	Citizens Alliance of Idaho	Independent expenditures
$9,220	Make Liberty Win (VA super PAC)	Independent expenditures
$6,939	Idaho Summit PAC	Independent expenditures

Sources: Idaho SOS Sunshine (state committees + IEs); FEC (Make Liberty Win federal super PAC).

The Traditional Idaho Republican side spent too. Defend and Protect Idaho put $12,268 in independent expenditures against Christensen. Idaho First added $3,657. WinAg PAC added another $231. Roughly $16,000 pointing Idaho voters toward the record already sitting on chadchristensen.org. Voters read it.

Section 2. The other races the network went all-in on

Three races got the full network treatment in 2026 — coordinated mail, PAC drops, amplifier coverage, and candidate rollouts. All three ended with the far-right candidate losing.

David Worley, Senate District 28: $129,000 in his favor, lost by 6.6 points

Matt Edwards of Citizens Alliance publicly called the Worley-Guthrie race “the single most important election this year.” The network moved accordingly.

Idaho Summit PAC put $38,689 in IE behind Worley. 36-18-1 PAC added $23,874. Citizens Alliance of Idaho added $10,932. Worley raised $55,359 through his own committee. Make Liberty Win kicked in $9,220 through the Fairfax pipeline. Total in Worley’s favor: about $129,450.

Sen. Jim Guthrie beat him 53.3% to 46.7%.

The multi-year attack arc on Guthrie runs through the Manufacturing a Martyr investigation. The “80%-votes-with-Democrats” number that ran through mail, X posts, and Honor Idaho copy in the last 45 days is picked apart in The 80 Percent Lie. Guthrie’s actual party-line voting rate is 93.6% in a Senate that’s 81% Republican. That number was public the whole time. Voters chose Guthrie anyway.

Kelly Golden, House District 32A: $185,000 in her favor, lost by 14 points

Idaho Summit PAC put $38,051 in IE behind K. Golden. Citizens Alliance of Idaho added $20,618. 36-18-1 PAC added $6,019. Idaho Prosperity Fund added $9,000. Idaho Realtors PAC added $8,000. WinAg added $5,000. K. Golden’s committee raised $25,142. Direct plus IE landed at about $185,000.

Rep. Stephanie Mickelsen beat her 57.2% to 42.8%.

For two years, the network told Idaho voters Mickelsen wasn’t a real Republican. Greg Pruett wrote it up on Honor Idaho. Brian Almon’s Gem State Chronicle repeated it. Ryan Spoon turned a Mickelsen quote into a lie about undocumented workers in real time. Lauren Walker followed it on X with tags like “ICE Queen” and “Plantation Mistress.” The full arc runs through the Mickelsen Coordinated Attack investigation. Voters in District 32A — the people who live near the Mickelsen family and know the farm — picked Mickelsen by 14 points.

Mark Fitzpatrick, Governor: self-funded, lost statewide to Brad Little

Institutional far-right IE for Fitzpatrick was almost nothing. Kootenai County Republican Central Committee spent $1,647. Nez Perce County GOP spent $8. A propaganda layer stood behind him without the money following.

Fitzpatrick’s committee raised $207,379. Roughly $60,000 came from Fitzpatrick himself in a stack of four contributions ($40,000, $10,000, $5,000, $5,000), plus another $5,000 from Paul Fitzpatrick. The amplifier network published for him for weeks. Walker’s May 16 video listing the twenty-one candidates she was working to elect closed on Fitzpatrick. Every IFF and IFC operator publicly backed him. The Mark Fitzpatrick dossier walks the underlying record.

Rank-and-file Idaho Republicans returned Brad Little to the November ballot anyway.

Section 3. Where the money came from (and never really left)

The Citizens Alliance mail that landed in Idaho voters’ boxes in May 2026 looks like an Idaho organization telling Idahoans about Idaho candidates. It isn’t.

The state-side entity is Citizens Alliance of Idaho. In the 2026 cycle, roughly 98 percent of its money came from Citizens Alliance PAC Inc, a federal super PAC whose treasurer Elizabeth Curtis lists the address as 10332 Main Street, Fairfax, Virginia. Sixty-two percent of that federal PAC’s 2026 receipts came from POM of Pennsylvania LLC — Pace-O-Matic, a Pennsylvania gambling-machine manufacturer with a long-running interest in state gambling law.

The federal Citizens Alliance PAC Inc then moved $9.4 million between its own related entities during the cycle:

Amount	Recipient	What it is
$4.70M	Defeating Communism PAC (Dublin, OH)	Related federal super PAC
$3.29M	Citizens Alliance of America 501c4	The network's own dark-money parent
$3.05M	Citizens Alliance PAC of Idaho	Idaho state PAC arm
$1.98M	Citizens Alliance of Idaho PAC	Second related Idaho state arm
$1.08M	Citizens Alliance of North Dakota	Sister-state arm
$1.00M	Mobilize the Message LLC (FL)	Cliff Maloney's vendor

Source: FEC Schedule B disbursements, Citizens Alliance PAC Inc, 2026 cycle.

The Idaho state arm — the entity on the “Paid for by Citizens Alliance of Idaho” line — deployed $499,000 in independent expenditures across 38 Idaho far-right primary candidates. Christensen, Kelly Golden, David Worley, Glenneda Zuiderveld, Clint Hostetler, Kent Marmon, Lucas Cayler, Chris Trakel, and a couple dozen others all pulled from the pipeline.

Make Liberty Win runs the same shape from a different address a few blocks away. MLW’s mailing address is 10521 Judicial Dr, Fairfax, Virginia. Same Elizabeth Curtis on the paperwork. MLW paid PAC Management Services LLC $75.8 million over its lifetime — $2.96 million in the last two cycles — and PAC Management Services is registered at 10521 Judicial Dr. Same building. MLW also paid Liberty Staffing Services LLC $14.2 million lifetime; Liberty Staffing’s entire client list in eight years is two federal committees, both Fairfax-housed super PACs on Curtis’s paperwork.

Curtis is treasurer on four federal super PACs housed in this operation: Make Liberty Win, Ready for Ron / Ready to Win, Committee to Defeat the President, and Citizens Alliance PAC Inc. Four brands, one treasurer, one Fairfax office block.

MLW deployed $311,000 into Idaho 2026 IE. CAI Idaho deployed $499,000. Most of the candidates each backed lost.

Section 4. The Las Vegas firm, the rebrand, and the man who chairs the Idaho GOP platform

McShane was already a familiar name in Idaho from 2024. His shop produced the photoshopped face-mask mailer used to defeat Sen. Jim Woodward in the North Idaho primary. The 2026 roster came back to him. So did the losses.

On October 2, 2025, McShane LLC announced on rmcstrategy.com/news that it was now doing business as RMC Strategy — Revolutionizing Microtargeted Campaigns. The corporate registration continues under McShane LLC. Same Las Vegas office, same Rory McShane, six different names on the invoices: McShane LLC, RMC, RMC LLC, RMC Strategy, RMC Strategies, and Revolutionizing Microtargeted Campaigns.

Across all six aliases, the firm’s 2025-2026 Idaho footprint is $1,246,038 across 36 unique filers. Add Sen. Jim Risch’s principal committee — a monthly retainer that started mid-2025, plus two ad-buy purchases of $92,684 on March 30 and $118,373 on April 28, 2026, for a total of $403,281 across 25 payments to RMC LLC — and the combined federal-plus-state Idaho-relevant billing is $1,649,319.

That money moves through three layers of the same operation.

The candidate layer

David Worley’s Senate D28 campaign paid RMC $50,118 across 32 records. Cornel Rasor’s committee paid RMC $26,774. Colton Bennett paid RMC Strategies $21,753. Elaine Price paid $28,310 across both names. James Lamborn paid $23,807. Chad Christensen paid McShane LLC $30,917 — the biggest single legislative loser. Roughly two dozen Idaho candidate committees paid Rory McShane’s firm to run their 2026 campaigns. Most of the biggest bills came from campaigns that lost.

The North Idaho local slate

RMC also runs a full Kootenai County local operation. Randy Westlund paid RMC Strategy $31,024 to run for Post Falls Mayor. He won November 2025 with a 39 percent plurality in a four-way race and was sworn in January 2026. Debbie Loffman paid $8,860 across three aliases for the Coeur d’Alene Mayor race and finished second of four to Dan Gookin. Teresa Mallery paid Revolutionizing Microtargeted Campaigns $18,148 for Kootenai County Treasurer and lost the May 2026 primary to Carlos Zamora 57 to 43. Julie Hensley paid McShane LLC $1,921 for the Kootenai commissioner seat Marc Eberlein was leaving and won the May primary 55.6 to 44.4. Victoria Bauman paid RMC $4,608 for her Community Library Network trustee race, won, and is now Vice-Chair. Eberlein and Sen. Carl Bjerke kept smaller retainers with the firm.

Randy Westlund is the signature win of the operation. KCRCC rated and vetted him for the 2025 ballot. He filed as a 2026 Precinct 507 candidate on Brent Regan’s precinct-committee slate. Per Idaho Secretary of State records dated April 29, 2024, he is a listed corporate officer of the Coeur d’Alene chapter of SACR, the men’s-only Christian-nationalist fraternal group the Idaho Statesman editorial board called “a threat to freedom in Idaho.” Within weeks of taking office, his council voted 4-2 to remove Juneteenth from the city’s holiday calendar and restore Columbus Day, which Westlund said better honors “American heritage” — as reported by KREM 2 in February 2026. He announced within the same month that he wanted to open mayoral proclamations to political and religious causes, according to the Coeur d’Alene Press. Before he was even sworn in, he had already picked his preferred candidate for an open council seat, which the CdA Press reported drew transparency complaints. This is the mayor McShane’s Vegas firm was paid $31,024 to install.

Post Falls is also where Dave Reilly lives — the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” attendee federal court records identified as an Identity Evropa member. KCRCC under Brent Regan endorsed Reilly’s 2021 Post Falls School Board run. See the Dave Reilly dossier. The candidates, the mayor, the party committee, and the Charlottesville alum all operate inside the same handful of Kootenai County cities.

The county-committee IE machine

The largest McShane/RMC billing in Idaho doesn’t come from candidate committees. It comes from Republican county central committees running independent-expenditure operations.

The Bonner County Republican Central Committee paid RMC $476,867 across 74 records — nearly a half-million dollars from a single county Republican committee to one Las Vegas firm for IE work. Kootenai County RCC paid McShane $190,990 across 69 records. Blaine County Common Sense PAC paid $241,354 across 39 records. Blaine County Accountability PAC added $15,663. Kootenai Freedom Caucus added $5,271. More than $930,000 in county-committee and county-adjacent PAC billing to McShane/RMC in one cycle, running mail and digital for the same candidates the individual campaigns were already paying McShane to manage.

The same firm is getting paid twice on the same candidate — once by the candidate’s committee to run the campaign, and again by the county central committee for the “independent expenditures” pushing that candidate’s mail. That’s how the whole slate is wired.

The name on the platform

The on-the-ground Idaho employee running these RMC campaigns is Bjorn Handeen. His own website, bjornhandeen.com, lists his title as “RMC Strategy Strategist.” He’s a former North Idaho Region Chairman of KCRCC, chaired the Idaho Virtual Academy board of trustees 2018-2022, was named Outstanding Republican Worker by the Idaho GOP in 2020, and has been in politics since the 1998 Ventura campaign. His verified X account, @BjornJHandeen, opens with a bio that reads word-for-word:

Line two is worth reading twice. The Idaho Republican Party’s official platform — the document that defines what the state party stands for — is chaired by a paid employee of the Las Vegas firm running challenger campaigns against sitting Idaho Republican legislators. The platform and the invoices for the challenger campaigns come out of the same Vegas office.

Handeen was the press contact on David Worley’s February 10, 2026 Senate D28 launch. His email address on that release was [email protected]. The candidate the state party’s platform chair was launching lost by 6.6 points to a sitting Republican senator two months later.

The money bridge back to the network’s institutional center runs through Brent Regan — Idaho Freedom Foundation Board Chair and Chair of KCRCC. Regan wrote a $1,000 personal check to Debbie Loffman’s Coeur d’Alene mayoral campaign and a $1,030 personal check to Julie Hensley’s Kootenai commissioner primary campaign. KCRCC under his chairmanship then paid McShane’s firm $190,990 out of the county party’s account for IE work on the same slate. The IFF chairman’s county party wrote the institutional checks. He wrote the personal ones.

Section 5. The amplifier network produced noise, not votes

Greg Pruett’s Honor Idaho, Brian Almon’s Gem State Chronicle, John Heida’s Stop Idaho RINOs, and the X-amplifier wing including Lauren Walker, Brandy Pardee, and Dave Reilly spent the better part of a decade building this operation. All of them fed the same slate in the 2026 primary.

Pruett’s Honor Idaho slate profiled a set of far-right candidates as the “real conservative” choice against Traditional Idaho Republican incumbents. Seven were on the ballot as challengers. Five lost. Almon’s Gem State Chronicle ran cover for the same slate all year. Heida’s Stop Idaho RINOs kept the volume high. The X wing published nonstop through the last 45 days.

The Amplifier Network investigation walks the operator-by-operator record: Walker’s mass-doxxing thread against the Bonneville County RCC, her May 3 fabrication about Christa Hazel’s father, Fitzpatrick’s posts about Mormons, Reilly’s posts about Jews, Regan stonewalling the Idaho Statesman, Pardee calling twelve House Republicans “child traffickers,” and the official @IdahoGangOf8 caucus account amplifying an attack on a sitting Republican governor 13 days before the primary. It’s a paper trail in the network’s own words.

The candidates the amplifier network worked hardest to elect — Fitzpatrick statewide, Worley in D28, K. Golden in D32A, Christensen in D35A, Zuiderveld in D24, Josh Kohl in D25 — all lost. Whatever audience the amplifier accounts were reaching, the Idaho Republicans who showed up May 19 weren’t part of it.

Section 6. The Traditional Idaho Republican playbook that beat all of this

Stephanie Mickelsen, Jim Guthrie, and Brad Little won their primaries without a Vegas consultant on the invoice line, a Fairfax super PAC pushing their mail, or a Pennsylvania gambling-machine company on the finance report.

Their contributions came from constituents, from in-state industry PACs like Idaho Realtors, Idaho Loggers, Idaho Dairymen, and agricultural cooperatives, and from county central committees whose members live in the districts. Pace-O-Matic isn’t on the top line. 10521 Judicial Dr isn’t on the mail. The money got raised at home and spent at home.

Their campaign help was Idaho-based — staff, spouses, county central committee volunteers, and consultants whose kids go to school in the districts. No out-of-state boiler-room retainer running from January through May.

The record carried the message. Mickelsen talked farm-country agriculture policy and constituent service. Guthrie pointed to his 93.6% Republican party-line voting rate in a Senate that’s 81% Republican. Little ran on the last six years of the Idaho economy.

And they knocked doors. An “ICE Queen” mailer doesn’t survive a five-minute conversation with the actual candidate on a front porch when the voter has already met her.

This is what Idaho campaigns looked like for a long time before the mail started showing up from Virginia. It still works.

Section 7. What worked, what didn’t, and the year the opposition decided to fight back

What the cycle established, for the network:

• Uncontested-seat defense worked. Fifteen of the network’s 33 raw wins came from candidates who had no primary opposition. That is not a test of voter persuasion. It’s paperwork.
• Sitting far-right incumbents in North Idaho and the Magic Valley (Zito, Marmon, Hostetler, Price, Nichols) held their seats. Regional alignment is real. It doesn’t scale.
• The all-in attacks failed. Worley, K. Golden, Fitzpatrick, and Christensen were the four candidates the network coordinated its full stack behind. They are the four candidates who lost worst.
• The Vegas consultant collected the biggest checks from the campaigns that finished worst.
• The Fairfax pipeline ran mail through the state-arm brand for four months and didn’t move the Idaho electorate.
• The amplifier network kept the volume up all cycle and can’t point to a vote it produced.

For Traditional Idaho Republicans, this was the cycle they decided to stop absorbing the punches. For years the mail came in, X posts piled up, primary challengers filed, and Freedom Index numbers got plastered on billboards. A handful of incumbents lost seats. A handful retired. The ones who stayed got tired of being called RINOs, sellouts, plantation mistresses, and ICE queens over votes their own constituents sent them to Boise to take.

By spring 2026 they were organizing. County central committees, neighbors, doors, the record, and the network’s own mail sitting on the kitchen table for anyone to read.

They spent the money. They ran the playbook. They lost.

Related investigations

• Manufacturing a Martyr — the multi-year attack arc on Sen. Jim Guthrie
• Mickelsen Coordinated Attack — the manufactured ICE-on-a-farm operation against Rep. Stephanie Mickelsen
• The 80 Percent Lie — the manufactured “votes-with-Democrats” number the network ran against Guthrie
• The Amplifier Network — Walker, Fitzpatrick, Reilly, Regan, Pardee, Spoon, Hurst, Heida, Pruett — the operators in their own words
• Anatomy of an Attack — the Christa Hazel case, parallel to the Mickelsen playbook
• Chad Christensen dossier — the full record archived at chadchristensen.org
• Mark Fitzpatrick dossier — the gubernatorial candidate the operator class backed and the money didn’t follow

Have evidence?

If you have documents, records, or firsthand information about the 2026 cycle spending, the vendors, the operator network, or the candidates named in this report, submit a tip.

[Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. All citations link to primary sources or credible Idaho media.]