Following the Money

The PAC mailing Idaho voters in May 2026 under the name “Citizens Alliance of Idaho” was funded 98% by a Virginia federal PAC. The Virginia federal PAC was funded 62% by one Pennsylvania gambling-machine company. The branding says civic patriotism; the donor record says skill-game industry. That single pipeline — Pace-O-Matic’s $2.29M into Citizens Alliance PAC Inc., $506K out to Citizens Alliance of Idaho, $506K of independent expenditures supporting 38 far-right primary candidates — is the largest dark-money channel into Idaho’s 2026 Republican primary, and it is the cleanest single example of why the network behind these mailers does not deserve voter trust.

Inside this report:

• Pennsylvania gambling money is the network’s biggest single check. POM of Pennsylvania LLC wrote $2,291,600 to Citizens Alliance PAC Inc. in 2026. That money funded 98% of Citizens Alliance of Idaho’s $515K cycle raise, which paid for $506K in IE supporting Keyser, Price, Tanner, Ehardt, Worley, Kelly Golden, McKellar, Young, and 30 other far-right primary candidates.
• Make Liberty Win burned $311K in Idaho for a 22% preferred-outcome rate. Three of twelve supported candidates won. Zero of three opposed incumbents were defeated. The 2024 leadership-clearing strategy produced the Chuck Winder defeat; the 2026 slate-boost strategy produced almost nothing.
• A Las Vegas vendor took the biggest invoices from the worst-finishing campaigns. McShane LLC charged Chad Christensen $30,917 (he lost 44%), James Lamborn $23,807 (he lost), Heidi Smith-Takatori $7,644 (she lost), and Karey Hanks $5,553 (she lost). The sitting incumbents who barely used the firm — Barbieri, Zito, Price — held their seats.
• Two sitting legislators with safe seats ran $465K of money for other candidates’ primaries. Josh Tanner’s Idaho Summit PAC deployed $215K. Jordan Redman’s 36-18-1 PAC deployed $250K, 100% Redman-self-funded.
• The Idaho Freedom Caucus PAC is precious-metals-industry-funded. Stefan Gleason’s Money Metals cluster contributed $31,602 — 23% of the PAC’s receipts — and is its largest single institutional source.
• The Idaho Freedom Foundation’s own named PAC raised $13,149. Doyle Beck wrote 38% of it. IFF’s institutional brand is decoupled from where its money actually moves.
• Every marquee race the unified network tried to flip ended in defeat. Mark Fitzpatrick lost the governor’s race. David Worley lost Senate D28. Kelly Golden lost House D32A. Twelve-plus operators aligned, the propaganda apparatus aligned, the money aligned, and the votes were not there.

Section 1 — The money: where it came from

The far-right side of Idaho’s 2026 Republican primary moved roughly $1.7 million through four channels: a Pennsylvania-gambling-funded Virginia federal pipeline, a national Koch-network super-PAC, two incumbent-run state vehicles, and a small set of caucus-aligned slush PACs.

The Pace-O-Matic / Citizens Alliance pipeline

Citizens Alliance of Idaho PAC took in $515,000 in the 2026 cycle. $506,000 of that — 98% — came from three wire transfers out of Citizens Alliance PAC Inc., a federal Super PAC registered at 1602 Village Market Blvd SE in Leesburg, Virginia (FEC C00789933). The Virginia federal entity is a pure pass-through donor on the Idaho side: it filed no FEC independent expenditures of its own, and all of its 2026 Idaho activity moves through the CAI state arm.

The Virginia entity’s own donor base is concentrated almost entirely on one corporation. POM of Pennsylvania LLC — the operating entity for Pace-O-Matic, a Georgia-headquartered skill-game and gambling-machine manufacturer — wrote $2,291,600 across twelve contributions in the 2026 cycle, representing 62% of all itemized receipts at Citizens Alliance PAC Inc. Pace-O-Matic’s founder, Michael Pace of Helena, Montana, also contributed $50,000 personally. Pace-O-Matic has spent heavily in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and other state legislatures to defend skill-game legality against state-by-state gambling regulation.

CAI’s 2026 independent expenditures totaled $506,225 across 24 unique transactions, with $367,226 allocated to specific candidate beneficiaries on the Amount Applied basis. The full IE-support roster covered 38 far-right primary candidates. The top recipients by CAI IE: Josh Keyser ($38,899), Elaine Price ($38,553), Steve Tanner ($38,415), Barbara Ehardt ($37,229), Kelly Golden ($20,618), Brian McKellar ($19,239), Julianne Young ($15,853), Karey Hanks ($12,589), Glenneda Zuiderveld ($11,973), Kent Marmon ($11,839), Lucas Cayler ($11,839), David Worley ($10,932), David Leavitt ($9,925), Joshua Kohl ($9,925), Chad Christensen ($9,869), Andrew Messer ($9,925), Greg Ferch ($8,101), and Clint Hostetler ($7,006), with twenty additional candidates receiving smaller IE amounts. Every name on that list is a documented far-right primary candidate; not one is a mainstream Republican.

Pace-O-Matic has documented state-legislative interests in skill-game and gambling-regulation fights in multiple states. The documented Idaho-side fact is the money: $2.29M from a gambling-industry LLC to a federal PAC that exists to fund Idaho candidate IE.

The Money Metals donor cluster

A separate corporate ecosystem in Eagle, Idaho funded the Idaho Freedom Caucus PAC and a wide slice of the far-right candidate slate at the retail level. Stefan Gleason (CEO of Money Metals Exchange, registered residence Charlotte NC), Clint Siegner (VP, Eagle ID), Mike Gleason (Eagle ID), SMC Properties LLC (the company’s real-estate vehicle, registered in four legal-name variants in Idaho Sunshine), and Money Metals Exchange LLC moved roughly $130,000 across 2025-2026 cycles. The broader cluster is documented at politicalpotatoes.substack.com/p/stephan-gleason-money-metals-idaho.

The single largest institutional line from the cluster is $31,602 to the Idaho Freedom Caucus PAC — the largest documented institutional donor to that vehicle. The cluster also touched roughly thirty far-right candidates with $1,000-per-candidate “personal payroll” checks: Gleason, Siegner, SMC Properties, and Mike Gleason each writing $1K checks to the same candidates on the same dates. Top candidate-level cluster recipients: Lucas Cayler ($4,000), Karey Hanks ($4,000), Dale Hawkins ($4,000), Scott Herndon ($4,000), Clint Hostetler ($3,999), Chad Christensen ($3,000), Josh Keyser ($3,000), Elaine Price ($3,000), Steve Tanner ($3,000), Rob Beiswenger ($3,000).

The business case is sound-money policy and a state precious-metals depository — Money Metals operates the Eagle, Idaho depository vault that is the obvious beneficiary of any state legislation routing pension funds or treasury reserves into precious-metals holdings.

One anomaly is worth noting: Stefan Gleason personally gave House Speaker Mike Moyle $1,000 on April 17, 2025. Moyle is the same establishment Republican that Make Liberty Win spent $112,852 attacking in the 2024 cycle. The pattern is “establishment-access insurance” — fund the Speaker’s reelection while also funding the operations that primary the Speaker’s allies.

Federal Koch-network money: Make Liberty Win

Make Liberty Win, the federal PAC operated as the IE arm of Young Americans for Liberty (FEC C00731133), deployed $311,040 of independent expenditures in Idaho’s 2026 cycle. MLW does not file these IE with the FEC — federal PACs spending on state legislative races report to the state portal, not Schedule E — so the spending shows up only in Idaho Sunshine.

MLW’s own 2026 receipts were $4.94 million, 73% of which ($3.58M) came from a single transfer out of its parent 501(c)(4), Young Americans for Liberty Inc. in Austin, Texas. The top individual contributors are concentrated: George Macricostas (Incline Village NV, Flat Willow Farm LLC) wrote $753,250; Jamiel Akhtar (Dallas TX, HBK Capital Management) wrote $100,000; Chris Rufer (Woodland CA, founder of The Morning Star Company) wrote $75,000. The fourth-largest donor wrote $10,000. MLW’s funding base is one parent organization and a handful of high-net-worth individuals.

$487,402 of MLW’s 2026 federal disbursements ran through a single vendor: PAC Management Services LLC of Fairfax VA. The structural relationship between PAC Management Services LLC and McShane LLC — the Las Vegas firm documented in Section 2 — is unresolved in the public record. Nevada Secretary of State business records would resolve the question; the parallel vendor pattern warrants the inquiry.

The incumbent-run vehicle PACs

Two Idaho House Republicans with no primary opposition this cycle ran state PACs that deployed half a million dollars into other legislators’ races.

Idaho Summit PAC, controlled by Rep. Josh Tanner (House D13B, unopposed in 2026), reported $263,000 in receipts and deployed $215,257 in independent expenditures across 21 candidates. Idaho Summit’s largest single contribution this cycle was Tanner’s own self-fund plus large individual donors; the PAC sits in the IFC-amplifier wing of the network per the documented factional map.

36-18-1 PAC, controlled by Rep. Jordan Redman (House D3B, also unopposed in 2026), reported $325,000 in receipts and deployed $250,308 across 26 candidates. The funding is exactly one donor: Redman himself wrote a $250,000 personal contribution to his own PAC. Zero outside donors appear on 36-18-1’s receipts. Redman is laundering his personal money into other legislators’ races through a vehicle that, because he has no primary opponent, has no spending limits tied to his own race.

Both PACs raise the same statutory question. Sitting Idaho legislators cannot coordinate with their own campaigns, but the law contemplates the candidate-and-committee being the same person. When a sitting legislator with a safe seat runs a separately-reporting PAC that spends in other legislators’ primaries, the “coordination” line in Idaho Code § 67-6602(9) becomes meaningfully harder to enforce, and the pattern repeats across both Tanner and Redman in 2026.

The Idaho Freedom Caucus PAC: chamber-caucus slush vehicle

Idaho Freedom Caucus PAC raised $137,200 across 158 donors. The Money Metals cluster contributed $31,602 (23% of receipts), the largest single institutional source. Other top donors: Pinkerton Wealth Management LLC ($10,800), Happy Hippo LLC ($10,000), James Auld ($10,000), Fifth Dimension Holdings LLC ($6,000 from a Sheridan WY registered-agent address).

The PAC’s spending pattern is unusual. Most of the $137K sits as a war chest. Only $29,878 was deployed as IE in the 2026 primary. The functioning model is a money-holding vehicle, not an active IE shop — receipts ramp through the cycle, IE deployment stays modest, and the balance carries forward.

Idaho Freedom PAC — the vestigial one

Idaho Freedom PAC, the institutionally-branded vehicle that shares its name with the Idaho Freedom Foundation, raised $13,149 in the 2026 cycle. Doyle Beck personally wrote $5,000 — 38% of the entire raise. The PAC made minimal independent expenditures.

The Idaho Freedom Foundation’s own name is decoupled from its operational money architecture in 2026. The money flows through Citizens Alliance of Idaho (the gambling-funded federal pipeline), Idaho Summit and 36-18-1 (the incumbent-run vehicles), the Idaho Freedom Caucus PAC (the precious-metals-industry slush), and the Money Metals direct-donor retail. IFF’s own institutional PAC sits dormant. Beck signs the largest check on it anyway.

Section 2 — The machinery: where the money went

The operational backbone for the far-right side of Idaho’s 2026 primary was a single Las Vegas campaign-management firm.

The Las Vegas vendor at the center

McShane LLC, registered at 6950 O’Bannon Drive Suite 100 in Las Vegas, was founded by Rory McShane. The firm’s documented Idaho-side staff connection is Bjorn Handeen, a Coeur d’Alene operator with ties to the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee and Brent Regan’s KCRCC operation.

Across 2025-2026, fourteen Idaho far-right candidate committees paid McShane LLC a total of $81,640. The Kootenai County Republican Central Committee paid the firm $3,324 on May 6, 2026 to produce an independent expenditure supporting 24 candidates plus one ballot measure. Idaho Freedom Caucus PAC paid the firm $11,355 across April 2026 for literature, brochures, printing, and yard signs. Total documented McShane LLC Idaho billing across candidate committees and PAC clients: roughly $96,000.

The biggest invoices went to the candidates who lost worst

The vendor’s billing pattern lines up directly with the candidates’ finish positions.

Candidate	McShane payments	Outcome
Chad Christensen (House D35A)	$30,917	LOST (44.0%)
James Lamborn (House D28A)	$23,807	LOST
Heidi Smith-Takatori (House, Canyon County)	$7,644	LOST
Karey Hanks (House D31)	$5,553	LOST
Steve Tanner (House D13B)	$4,203	WON
Vito Barbieri (sitting incumbent)	$3,000	WON
Christy Zito (Senate D8)	$2,560	WON
Glenneda Zuiderveld (Senate D24)	$1,109	LOST
Kelly Golden (House D32A)	$996	LOST
Elaine Price (House D4B)	$69	WON

Eighty-three percent of McShane’s Idaho candidate-committee revenue came from candidates who lost. The sitting incumbents who barely used the firm — Barbieri, Zito, Price — held their seats. The Christensen and Lamborn invoices include continuous monthly Management Services lines from January through May 2026, indicating McShane was effectively running their day-to-day operations. Both campaigns lost decisively.

The consultant who charged the most managed the campaigns that lost the worst. The firm’s “scorched earth” tactical signature, including the photoshopped face-mask mailer produced to defeat Sen. Jim Woodward in 2024, is documented at politicalpotatoes.substack.com/p/mcshane-idaho-campaigns.

The coordination question

Idaho Code § 67-6602(9) defines an independent expenditure as one made “not with the cooperation or with the prior consent of, or in consultation with, or at the request of a suggestion of, a candidate or any agent or authorized committee of the candidate.” The statutory standard is independence.

The Kootenai County Republican Central Committee filed a $3,324 independent expenditure on May 6, 2026 produced by McShane LLC, supporting a 24-candidate slate that included sitting Rep. Vito Barbieri. Barbieri’s own campaign committee was a $3,000 McShane LLC client in the same cycle.

The open question is whether a PAC IE produced by the same vendor that runs the supported candidate’s day-to-day campaign meets the “independence” standard the statute requires. The federal regulatory framework under 11 CFR § 109.21 treats common-vendor arrangements as a presumptive coordinated-communications trigger. Idaho’s statutory language (“cooperation,” “consultation,” “request or suggestion”) covers comparable conduct without identical regulatory plumbing.

The Idaho Secretary of State is the administering officer for these determinations, and the records raise the question for the SOS to resolve.

The federal-side parallel: PAC Management Services LLC

$487,402 of Make Liberty Win’s 2026 federal cycle disbursements ran through PAC Management Services LLC of Fairfax, Virginia. If PAC Management Services LLC is a sister or successor entity to McShane LLC, the McShane operation pulled north of half a million dollars of total cycle revenue across state and federal billing. If the two firms are unrelated, the parallel is coincidence.

Nevada Secretary of State business records and FEC Schedule B disbursement addresses are the resolving sources. The Idaho-side observable fact is that the largest federal MLW vendor and the largest state McShane vendor are both Las-Vegas-or-Vegas-adjacent campaign-services LLCs operating in the same network and the same cycle, with $568,000 of combined Idaho-impacting billing between them.

Section 3 — What worked

The honest accounting of network effectiveness in 2026 has to start with the wins. The network spent $1.7M; some of it produced outcomes.

Where the money worked was incumbent defense. Sitting far-right incumbents protecting their seats held across the board: Christy Zito (43.4%), Kent Marmon (68.5%), Clint Hostetler (53.8%), Elaine Price (won), Barbara Ehardt (won), Scott Herndon (53.5% over Jim Woodward at 46.5%), Cornel Rasor (63.2%), Colton Bennett (61.6%), Steve Tanner (won), and Vito Barbieri (won). These wins share a pattern: a sitting incumbent with local credibility, with network money showing up as supplementary reinforcement. Each race played out as a referendum on a known legislator who had built local relationships, with the network money as background noise.

North Idaho was the network’s most productive geography. The Senate D1 race between Scott Herndon and former Sen. Jim Woodward was the cleanest 2026 flip in the network’s preferred direction — Woodward out, Herndon in — and it tracked the same regional pattern that produced the 2024 defeat of Sen. Chuck Winder. North Idaho’s electorate is durably hostile to the moderate Republican brand the network attacks. The money landed there, and the votes followed.

The Idaho Freedom Caucus held roughly the seats it already had. The money bought stasis.

Section 4 — What failed

The network’s bench-building strategy in 2026 was a documented failure.

Make Liberty Win’s catastrophic 22% return

Make Liberty Win deployed $311,040 in Idaho 2026-cycle independent expenditures. Twelve candidates were supported. Three won (Zito, Marmon, Hostetler — all incumbents). Eight lost. One was too close to call on the canvass cross-match. Three incumbents were opposed (Jim Guthrie, Michael Veile, Marco Erickson). All three opposed incumbents won.

Preferred-outcome rate: 23% of races, 22% of dollars. Roughly $243,000 was spent on losing efforts.

The 2024-to-2026 strategy flip explains the result. MLW’s 2024 cycle ran 8.7:1 oppose-heavy — $632,413 attacking sitting mainstream incumbents including Speaker Mike Moyle ($112,852), then-Senate Pro Tem Chuck Winder ($107,473), Sen. Rod Furniss, Rep. Jack Yamamoto, Rep. James Petzke, Rep. Britt Raybould, and Rep. Mark Harris. The strategy cleared one major name (Winder) and forced expensive defensive spending on the rest.

The 2026 cycle inverted to a 4:1 support-heavy posture — $250,308 funding 12 challenger campaigns, $60,732 attacking only 3 incumbents. Leadership-clearing became slate-boost. The result was a quarter of the kill rate of 2024, none of the marquee scalps, and most of the money lit on fire.

The three marquee races where unified network priority produced zero wins

The records show three races where every layer of the network — both factions, the propaganda apparatus, the donor cluster, the consultant infrastructure — aligned on a single priority candidate.

Governor: Mark Fitzpatrick. Twelve-plus named operators amplified Fitzpatrick’s candidacy across the factional map. He lost to Brad Little in the May primary.

Senate D28: David Worley vs. Sen. Jim Guthrie. Citizens Alliance of Idaho executive director Matt Edwards called the race “the single most important election this year.” The layered network support stacked to roughly $149,000 in Worley’s favor — Citizens Alliance of Idaho IE, Make Liberty Win IE, McShane consulting, Greg Pruett’s Honor Idaho and Idaho Dispatch editorial coverage, sustained X-amplifier amplification from Lauren Walker, Brian Almon, and Matt Edwards personally. Worley lost 46.7% to 53.3%.

House D32A: Kelly Golden vs. Rep. Stephanie Mickelsen. Six-plus named operators backed Kelly Golden’s East Idaho challenge through Citizens Alliance of Idaho, Idaho Summit, the Money Metals cluster, Greg Pruett’s Honor Idaho slate, and the IFC-wing X amplifiers. Golden lost 42.8% to 57.2%.

When both factions of the network and the entire propaganda apparatus aligned on a marquee priority race in 2026, the network produced zero wins. The amplification stack reached its full operational height in the Worley race and produced one of the cycle’s most decisive losses anyway.

The propaganda effectiveness gap

Greg Pruett’s Honor Idaho ran a May 2026 ten-candidate slate-promotion batch profiling Jilene Burger, Judy Boyle, Faye Thompson, Cindy Agidius, Larry Golden, William Mostoller, Cornel Rasor, Colton Bennett, Camille Blaylock, and Kelly Golden. The far-right subset of that slate (seven candidates) won 29%. The moderate subset (three candidates Pruett also profiled, despite the network’s general posture against them) won 67%. The Pruett editorial layer correlated with wins for the moderates Pruett covered and losses for the far-right challengers Pruett pushed hardest.

Lauren Walker’s May 17, 2026 surrogate video enumerated 21 named candidates as her endorsement slate. The sitting incumbents on the list won. Most of the challengers lost. Walker’s amplification followed candidates the network had already selected rather than producing new ones.

The network’s editorial layer tracked who its operators cared about and left voter behavior untouched. The X-amplifier wing and the Pruett editorial network amplified candidates who would have won (sitting incumbents) or lost (out-positioned challengers) at the same rate without the amplification. Infrastructure existed; conversion did not follow.

Section 5 — Why they can’t be trusted

The argument for distrust comes from the donor record itself.

Hidden industry money behind civic-sounding branding

The PAC reaching Idaho mailboxes as “Citizens Alliance of Idaho” is funded 98% by a Virginia federal entity that is itself 62% funded by a Pennsylvania gambling-machine company. The PAC reaching Idaho legislators as the “Idaho Freedom Caucus PAC” is funded 23% by a precious-metals industry donor cluster with a documented Idaho legislative interest. The mailer surface does not name the industry actually writing the check.

A voter receiving a Citizens Alliance of Idaho IE supporting Josh Keyser sees no mention of Pace-O-Matic on it. An Idaho Freedom Caucus PAC mailer carries no mention of Money Metals Exchange. A McShane LLC-produced attack on a sitting Republican incumbent identifies neither the Las Vegas campaign-services LLC behind it nor the slate it serves. The branding obscures the donor identity by design.

Every individual filing complies with Idaho’s disclosure rules. The pipeline only resolves when the federal filings, the state filings, and the corporate registrations get pulled together — and that cross-jurisdiction pull is what no individual voter does. The trust problem lives in that gap.

Out-of-state operator concentration

The operational center of the Idaho far-right’s 2026 effort was not in Idaho.

• Las Vegas wrote the campaign material (McShane LLC).
• Virginia ran the federal-to-state pipeline (Citizens Alliance PAC Inc.).
• Pennsylvania wrote the biggest single check (POM of Pennsylvania LLC / Pace-O-Matic).
• Charlotte, North Carolina housed the precious-metals donor cluster’s CEO (Stefan Gleason).
• Austin, Texas hosted the parent 501(c)(4) that funded 73% of Make Liberty Win.
• Incline Village, Nevada wrote MLW’s biggest individual check ($753,250 from George Macricostas).
• Dallas, Texas wrote MLW’s second-largest individual contribution ($100,000 from Jamiel Akhtar of HBK Capital Management).
• Fairfax, Virginia housed the federal vendor (PAC Management Services LLC) that took half a million of MLW’s 2026 cycle disbursements.

The Idaho voter receiving a 2026 primary mailer was reading content produced in Las Vegas, funded by a Virginia PAC, with money from Pennsylvania, on behalf of a slate of Idaho candidates selected by operators who in many cases do not live in Idaho.

The coordination questions

Several questions surface from the records that the Idaho Secretary of State, not editorial copy, is the appropriate authority to answer.

McShane LLC served simultaneously as the day-to-day campaign-management vendor for candidate committees including Vito Barbieri’s and as the production vendor for the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee’s $3,324 May 6 independent expenditure that supported Barbieri. The Idaho § 67-6602(9) independence requirement is the open question.

Idaho Freedom Caucus PAC paid McShane LLC $11,355 for literature and yard signs in April 2026 while McShane was the candidate-committee vendor for IFC-aligned candidates. Whether IFC PAC’s spending supported any McShane LLC candidate client through these production lines is a document-by-document allocation question.

Honor Idaho is registered with the Idaho Secretary of State as a lobbyist with a 2026 reported scope of four firearms bills only — S1430, S1349, S1298, and H0621. Its documented 2026 cycle output includes a personally-bylined April 3 article attacking Sen. Jim Guthrie 46 days before the primary, a multi-month @HonorIdaho institutional-X-account attack chain against Guthrie inside the pre-primary window, and a May 2026 ten-candidate slate-promotion batch profiling candidates running in primaries with no apparent legislative hook to the four registered bills. Lobbyist registration under Idaho Code §§ 67-6617 through 67-6620 governs issue-advocacy lobbying of legislators, a separate regulatory track from candidate-supporting communications to voters. Where the Honor Idaho output sits on that boundary is the open question.

None of these questions is an accusation. Each is a pattern on the public record that the disclosure regime exists to resolve and has not resolved.

The branding-versus-reality contradiction, summarized

The civic-sounding labels translate into industry-and-vendor reality only when a reader does the cross-jurisdictional pull. “Citizens Alliance of Idaho” translates to a Pennsylvania gambling-machine company channeling money through Virginia. “Idaho Freedom Caucus PAC” translates to a precious-metals industry donor concentration. A McShane LLC-produced mailer attacking an incumbent traces back to a Las Vegas campaign-management vendor. Honor Idaho coverage of a 2026 primary candidate originates from a firm whose registered Idaho lobbying scope this year was four firearms bills.

The network’s public-facing branding obscures who actually funds it and who actually operates it. Every dollar in this report is anchored to a primary-source filing. Only the branding fails to match the receipts.

Section 6 — The honest assessment

The 2026 cycle was the network’s most expensive failure on the record.

The network spent roughly $1.7 million across state and federal channels. It produced incumbent retentions only. Every marquee challenger installation it attempted ended in defeat — Worley in Senate D28, Kelly Golden in House D32A, and Mark Fitzpatrick in the gubernatorial race. The MLW-funded Twin Falls and Magic Valley slate — Joshua Kohl, David Leavitt, Faye Thompson, Glenneda Zuiderveld, William Mostoller, Lucas Cayler, Andrew Messer — produced one win out of seven races. The Pruett-amplified slate produced two far-right wins out of seven. The Walker-amplified slate produced more losses than wins.

The mainstream Republican incumbents the network spent millions to remove are still in the legislature: Sen. Jim Guthrie, Rep. Stephanie Mickelsen, Rep. Marco Erickson, Rep. Britt Raybould, and Speaker Mike Moyle. The seats the network already held remain held. The seats it tried to take stayed where they were.

The federal money pipeline will keep running. Pace-O-Matic’s $2.29M to Citizens Alliance PAC Inc. and Young Americans for Liberty’s $3.58M to Make Liberty Win show no sign of slowing, and the corporate-industry donor base is growing cycle over cycle (Citizens Alliance PAC Inc.’s receipts doubled from 2024 to 2026). The marginal return on the next dollar is what’s shrinking. The bench-building strategy failed in 2026 on every measurable axis: the slate lost, the propaganda layer left the votes where they were, and the highest-billed vendor produced the worst-performing campaigns.

The 2028 implications run the other way from the 2026 spending volume. If the corporate-industry pipeline keeps growing at the cycle-over-cycle pace documented through 2026, the next primary will see more money chasing the same operational model that produced 22% effectiveness this cycle. The donors funding Citizens Alliance PAC Inc., Young Americans for Liberty, and the Money Metals cluster face a choice between another round of slate-boost with the same Las Vegas vendor, the same propaganda layer, and the same factional infighting documented in the 2026 record — and rethinking the model after a catastrophic return. The question for Idaho voters is simpler: what the pipeline is buying when it lands in their mailbox next cycle, and whose interests the candidates running on it actually represent.

Idaho voters paid attention to who the candidates actually were in 2026. Local credibility beat out-of-state-funded propaganda in race after race. Stephanie Mickelsen held East Idaho on her own name recognition. Jim Guthrie did the same in Senate D28. Brad Little carried the governor’s race the same way he ran it: as a known quantity to Idaho voters across every region. The challengers the network installed against these incumbents lost on the strength of those local relationships, regardless of how many Las Vegas mailers, Honor Idaho articles, or Lauren Walker videos showed up in the final 30 days.

The records add up to a simple read: the branding fails to match the donors, the operators live outside Idaho, the highest-billed consultants ran the worst-finishing campaigns, the IE filings raise unresolved independence questions, and the editorial layer amplified who the operators chose rather than producing voters. In 2026 the network defended the seats it already held and the rest of the project came apart. The failure was expensive enough, and the donor pipeline opaque enough, that next cycle’s voters deserve to know what they are actually being asked to vote for, and on whose dollar.

[Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. All citations link to primary sources or Tier-2 credible media.]