The Trump PAC That’s Attacking a Democratic House Candidate

One of Donald Trump’s personal super PACs has swooped in at the eleventh hour to Michigan’s Seventh Congressional District in an effort to save one-term Republican incumbent Tom Barrett from a strong challenge by progressive Democrat Will Lawrence. The $4 million infusion from the new Safety & Affordability PAC, which was formed last month with a $25 million cash transfer from Trump’s MAGA Inc. committee to target close congressional contests, will fund a barrage of attack ads on Lawrence. According to data from the platform AdImpact, there’s likely more S&A PAC money still to come, as it has placed ads that will require even more funding before Election Day rolls around. Polls from the last couple of months have shown Lawrence with a growing lead in the race, which has exceeded $60 million in ad buys for both candidates, making it the most expensive for the House this cycle.

Lawrence, a climate activist and tenant organizer backed by the left-leaning Working Families Party, became an unlikely sensation in Michigan politics during the primaries, surging past two darlings of the Democratic establishment, one a former ambassador, the other a Navy SEAL, to win by 15 points. That was thanks in large part to Lawrence’s relentless focus on blocking data center construction, an issue that’s been radioactive to voters left, right, and center, and has even drawn sometime Trump voters into Lawrence’s camp.

Last month, Lawrence put out a four-page white paper outlining his “Stop Tech Overreach Plan,” which ties together a litany of economic, environmental, and quality-of-life problems the data center rollout has inflicted on an unsuspecting public. “AI development is out of control,” the plan reads. “Tech billionaires are bulldozing towns and farms to build data centers to make themselves even richer. They’re threatening Michigan jobs, driving up our energy costs, and contaminating our air and water.” The plan calls for a pause on data center projects and secretive super-advanced AI development, as well as a national jobs program funded by taxes on profits reaped by AI companies, a pathway into Social Security for workers whose roles have been made redundant by AI, and restrictions on the use of AI in schools. Lawrence’s tech platform also proposes carving out a category of “humans only decisions,” for ethically freighted spheres like war, the courts, and medicine.

It hasn’t hurt that Barrett, Lawrence’s GOP opponent, helped pass billions of dollars’ worth of tax breaks for data centers with a yes vote on Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. He’s been trying to take the wind out of Lawrence’s sails on the issue nonetheless. In late August, in the weeks after Lawrence won his primary, Barrett introduced a bill nominally devoted to restoring “local authority” over data center construction. He also ran ads over the summer touting the time he “stood up to [his] own party and voted against giving your tax dollars to data centers.” Never mind the actual details of Barrett’s stand against that tax break, which was on the table back in 2015 in the Michigan state House, where the congressman then served. The cuts, which narrowly passed on a bipartisan basis, applied broadly across the state but included a “local opt-out” provision, allowing local and county-level tax authorities to vote down automatic property tax exemptions for existing data centers or tax exemptions for new ones. Barrett argued at the time that the local opt-out provision would put existing data centers in his district at risk of being left behind. “If members of my caucus want to do this, and they say the benefits outweigh the risks, I can respect that, so long as we hold all of these data centers equal,” Barrett told MLive.com in 2015. “I don’t want to see the one in my district held to a different standard than one somewhere else.”

Barrett’s current effort to distance himself from the GOP has extended to another of its myriad electoral liabilities: the Iran war. Since the summer, after voting down an earlier measure to end the military campaign, he has joined House Democrats to pass war powers resolutions that would assert Congress’s constitutionally defined authority to declare war, though those resolutions have not managed to clear the Senate’s 60-vote cloture hurdle.

Despite his current declarations of independence from Trump, Barrett’s credibility on this claim isn’t helped by the fact that he’s now benefiting from millions of dollars in ad spending from the president’s personal super PAC. “Clearly Donald Trump and his allies want to buy Tom Barrett’s loyalty in office,” said Ravi Mangla, the press secretary for the national Working Families Party (WFP). Barrett’s campaign and a representative of Trump’s super PAC did not respond to requests for comment.

As the vast majority of outside spending for the GOP goes to the party’s close Senate races, the ad blitz by Trump’s super PACs puts Lawrence near the top of the list of Democratic House candidates targeted by the president. Though Republicans by now have essentially written off retaining control of the House, Trump’s PACs have doubled down in a number of close races in the president’s home state of Florida, where Democratic candidates have been polling surprisingly well despite a GOP gerrymander earlier this year. There, the president’s PACs have spent more than $10 million to defeat Democrats Pia Dandiya and Kathy Castor, an incumbent of almost two decades, who are both running in districts that the state legislature redrew to favor Republicans. Dandiya and Castor each held modest leads in the latest round of polling.

In recent weeks, Trump’s PACs have also zeroed in on Arizona’s First District, where Amish Shah, a former state representative who narrowly fell short of unseating the district’s Republican congressman last cycle, is gunning for the now open seat and led a recent poll by three points. Matthew Dunlap, who’s running in Maine’s open Second District against the state’s former Republican governor Paul LePage, has also drawn millions of dollars’ worth of negative ads from Trump’s PACs in the race’s final weeks. Last month, Trump’s PACs spent less than $28,000 attacking Dunlap. This month, they’ve poured in nearly $4 million. Trump carried the district in 2024 by ten points.

Within the cohort of Democratic House candidates targeted by Trump’s PACs, Lawrence stands out. Unlike his fellow targets, he isn’t running for an open seat in a Trump +10 district or to fend off a gerrymander in Trump’s backyard. With Lawrence, the bull’s-eye placed on him might just be about the issues. The narrative that Trump and the tech barons want to spin about AI, and the financial and physical infrastructure needed to sustain it, would certainly be prey to the holes poked in it by a progressive firebrand who’s won over independent and Republican supporters with his critiques.

“Will Lawrence is unique in that he is one of a handful of folks around the country who are rejecting corporate PAC money as well as speaking out against AI and data centers,” said the WFP’s Mangla. “I think it wouldn’t be a reach to say that Lawrence’s vocal opposition to an out-of-control AI industry has put himself on the radar and in the crosshairs of Donald Trump and MAGA, who see those as opportunities to enrich themselves and their donors.”