David Michael Miller
True, the U.S. Senate election is more than a year away, but the only votes that may matter are already in: The super-rich have hand-picked their choices for the post.
So let me introduce you to Kevin Nicholson, a Milwaukee-area businessman nobody had ever heard of, politically speaking, before uber-wealthy Richard Uihlein tapped Nicholson to run in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate against incumbent Democrat Tammy Baldwin. Uihlein has already donated $3.5 million to a super PAC supporting Nicholson, which should hand him the primary election, right?
That was clearly the message to other Republicans from Uihlein. “I strongly encourage others to support this effort and avoid a repeat of 2012’s divisive Republican primary,” Uihlein declared in March.
The effrontery on display here was remarkable on several levels. For starters, Uihlein doesn’t even live in Wisconsin, but is an Illinois resident trying to dictate who this state’s GOP candidate should be. Secondly, this was a race which looked like it would attract a raft of Republican candidates, to whom Uihlein’s message was simple: drop dead. Then there was the fact that Uihlein’s choice is a former Democrat who switched parties.
But given Uihlein’s financial clout — he’s the biggest political donor in Illinois and ranked fourth nationally in 2016 in donations to outside spending groups — all the other potential Republican candidates, no matter how much more impressive their GOP credentials, were served notice they didn’t have a chance. That is, unless they, too, had access to huge wealth.
That warning may end up scaring off wealthy Madison businessman Eric Hovde, who ran unsuccessfully in the 2012 Republican primary for U.S. Senate, but may not feel he can outspend Uihlein. The latter’s great-grandfather August Uihlein was a co-founder of Milwaukee’s Joseph Schlitz Brewing Co., and his father co-founded the Illinois-based General Binding Corp., where Uihlein worked in international sales until he and his wife, Elizabeth Uihlein, founded the Uline company in 1980. The explosive growth of that privately held company has probably made Richard a billionaire, as Forbes has estimated. Vanity Fair ranked the Uihleins among the nation’s top 10 billionaires when it came to funding elections.
But one Republican wasn’t scared off, and that’s state Sen. Leah Vukmir from Brookfield, a Milwaukee suburb. That’s because Vukmir has her own billionaire backer, Beloit businesswoman Diane Hendricks, whom Forbes lists as the second richest self-made woman in America, with a net worth of $4.9 billion. Hendricks donated $5 million to a group that supported Sen. Ron Johnson’s 2016 reelection and gave $5 million to the Unintimidated PAC that supported Scott Walker’s disastrous campaign for president. It looks like she isn’t intimidated by Uihlein.
What does Uihlein want? Milwaukee conservative talk radio host Dan O’Donnell suggested Nicholson could be “just a puppet of Richard Uihlein.”
Nicholson is an ex-liberal who was president of the College Democrats of America and spoke at the 2000 Democratic National Convention. But Nicholson says he began moving away from the Democratic Party after that, though he voted as a Democrat in North Carolina’s 2008 presidential primary, as one media report disclosed. His ideological change since then must have been drastic indeed if he’s now simpatico with Uihlein.
A window into the couple’s views is provided by regular letters penned by Elizabeth to their company’s 4,000 employees, which offer frequent blasts at government spending and relentless political indoctrination. As one letter noted, “High unemployment, bankrupt states, expensive government programs like healthcare, higher taxes and a relentless global economy make the elections in November very important…. Dick and I love reading newspapers and when we watch TV news, the channel is mostly set on Fox News.”
But the Uihleins do favor government spending for them: Richard Uihlein lobbied for a state handout to relocate his company, then located in Illinois, and got some $18.6 million in state incentives from the administration of Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle to move the company to Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin.
As for Hendricks, she is famous for asking Walker to do something about those dastardly unions and make Wisconsin a “right-to-work” state, and the governor soon did her bidding.
Hendricks’ choice makes perfect sense. Vukmir is about as conservative a Republican as you can find — and that’s saying something these days — who can be counted on to favor tax cuts for the wealthy and ending unions for workers. And Hendricks doesn’t like to pay taxes. She didn’t pay a nickel in state income taxes from 2012 to 2014, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. And, as I reported in Urban Milwaukee, her 10,000-square-foot home was grossly under-assessed and she therefore grossly underpaid what should have been due in property taxes.
Odds are, one of these two candidates will win the GOP primary and will be gunning for Baldwin, with a generous billionaire gladly underwriting the campaign.
Bruce Murphy is the editor of UrbanMilwaukee.com
