Cardboard Billionaire Uihlein Vaults Up the Ranks of Trump Backers
Onetime skeptic Richard Uihlein is spending tens of millions of dollars in support of the Trump's third White House bid.
By Donald Shaw and David Moore, Sludge
Billionaire Richard Uihlein has long been a major funder of Republican politics, but a new Federal Election Commission filing reveals that he has ramped up his spending in recent weeks to record levels as he finances groups attacking Vice President Kamala Harris and promoting former President Donald Trump.
Uihlein gave more than $48 million to the conservative Restoration PAC last quarter, according to a new Federal Election Commission filing, bringing his total contributions to Restoration PAC since January 2023 to $58 million. The most Uihlein had previously given to a political action committee in a single quarter was $10 million, to the Club for Growth super PAC in 2020 and 2022.
The donations catapulted Uihlein into the upper echelons of Trump megadonors this election cycle, behind only reclusive investor Timothy Mellon, Elon Musk, and Miriam Adelson.
Together with his wife Elizabeth, Uihlein has made his fortune from the Uline packaging supply company, which sells packing peanuts, cardboard boxes, utility carts, bubble mailers, and more. Forbes estimates their net worth as $6 billion, and Uhlein has used his wealth to spend heavily in favor of Republicans, including Scott Walker as the former Wisconsin governor pursued a law banning collective bargaining for most public sector workers.
Earlier this election cycle, Uihlein was one of the many former pro-Trump megadonors who were backing other Republican primary candidates, in his case Ron DeSantis. Richard and Elizabeth each donated $1 million in the spring of 2023 to the pro-DeSantis Never Back Down super PAC. Uihlein is a close associate of the Club for Growth, a conservative political advocacy group that has feuded with Trump over candidate endorsements and his championing of economic policies like tariffs. Club for Growth spent millions on ads last year to try and undermine Trump in hopes that Republican primary voters would select another candidate, only to make peace with Trump earlier this year; Uihlein gave the group’s PAC $5 million in August, according to FEC records.
The Uihleins stand to benefit enormously if Trump is elected and provisions in his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act are made permanent, as the candidate has promised to do. In 2018 alone, the Uihleins deducted $118 million from their taxes by using the bill’s deduction for “pass-through” income, according to a ProPublica investigation based on leaked tax documents. ProPublica projected the “pass-through” tax cut would save the Uihleins and fellow billionaire Trump megadonor Diane Hendricks more than half a billion dollars in taxes over eight years.
The “pass-through” tax deduction is scheduled to expire at the end of next year unless legislation is passed to extend it or make it permanent.
Pushing right
Restoration PAC was founded in January 2015 by former Illinois Republican U.S. Senate candidate Doug Truax, and Uihlein has been its primary funder since its founding. In total, Uihlein has given the group about $138 million, according to FEC records.
The PAC is one of several affiliates in a constellation of groups run by Truax and funded by Uihlein. These include the academic scholarship-making Foundation for the Restoration of America, the election policy-focused Voter Reference Foundation, and the judicial activism group Fair Courts America.
Restoration PAC’s anti-Harris television ads recycle familiar Republican attacks on her record. In one TV ad, Restoration PAC used out-of-context footage from an MSNBC town hall on gun violence to deceptively make it appear that a woman who has since told media that she is a Harris supporter was criticizing the Biden-Harris administration’s economic policies. In addition to TV ads, it’s also spending money to oppose Harris’ candidacy on social media and through text messages. The large majority of the PAC’s ad barrage against Harris began on Oct. 1, according to FEC records.
In addition to the presidential election ads, Restoration PAC has spent more than $4.5 million on ads opposing the re-election of Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin and more than $2.4 million opposing the re-election of Democratic House Rep. Jared Golden in Maine.
Some of Restoration PAC’s money also flows out to other conservative super PACs that promote Trump and other Republican candidates. So far this election cycle, it’s given $5.5 million to the Trump-backing American Principles Project super PAC, $5.4 million to anti-choice super PAC Women Speak Out, and $1.5 million to the Elon Musk-affiliated pro-Trump group America PAC, among others.
Uihlein’s agenda includes not just lowering tax rates for the wealthiest and slashing government regulations but also quashing labor unions, both in his home state of Illinois and elsewhere. In the months before the 2022 midterms, Uihlein donated $1 million to an Illinois group battling a pro-labor constitutional amendment. Four years prior to that, the billionaire donated half a million dollars to a PAC supporting an unsuccessful referendum to make Missouri a “right-to-work” state.
The family foundation Uihlein runs was a major financial supporter of the Illinois Policy Institute, the organization that represented the plaintiffs in the landmark Supreme Court case Janus v. AFSCME. The Uihleins were also multimillion-dollar donors to groups backing the 2016 presidential bids of Walker and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who — along with the Club for Growth, Trump, and Sen. JD Vance — opposes the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, a bill that would mark the largest expansion of workers’ rights in decades.
As of last month, the Uihleins were among the top five individual donors to outside spending groups at the federal level in the 2024 cycle, according to a tally by OpenSecrets. Other recipients of that money include PACs supporting Republican U.S. Senate candidates including Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania, Tim Sheehy in Montana, and Eric Hovde in Wisconsin; the group aligned with Hovde is called “Fix Washington PAC.”