New reporting from the Wisconsin Examiner revealed that Rep. Tom Tiffany helped create the “billionaire-loophole” that allows unlimited amounts of dark money to flow into elections and crowd out the voice of Wisconsin voters. Now, as a candidate for governor, he’s trying to distance himself from the loopholes he supported in the Wisconsin legislature.
“Tom Tiffany has spent years in Washington doing the bidding of Donald Trump and billionaires, all while prices got higher and higher for Wisconsinites,” said Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes. “It’s no surprise Tiffany is responsible for the billionaire loophole allowing the ultra wealthy to buy our elections. It’s time to close these loopholes, bring down everyday costs and get things done the Wisconsin Way, and that’s what I’ll do as Governor.”
Read more below:
WISCONSIN EXAMINER: U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany criticizes ‘billionaire loophole’ but voted for law that created it
[Baylor Spears, 12/10/2025]
- U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the current frontrunner in the GOP gubernatorial primary, criticized the “billionaire loophole” that has led to record spending in statewide races in Wisconsin, even though he voted for the legislation that helped expand spending in 2015.
- Tiffany has said his campaign is aiming to raise $40 million for the 2026 gubernatorial race. “We’ll see if we get there,” Tiffany said in an interview with PBS Wisconsin last week. “But, you know, Wisconsin, because of that pass-through loophole, I call it the billionaire loophole, there’s just so much money that comes into Wisconsin. But, you know, you can cry about it or you can compete. We choose to compete… We’re hoping to raise $40 million.”
- Tiffany has represented Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District since 2020, but prior to that he served in the state Senate. As a state senator, Tiffany voted for AB 387, which later became Act 117, along with the other Senate Republicans.
- Tiffany’s campaign has not responded to a request for comment about the vote and whether he wants to see changes to state campaign finance law.
- At the time, advocacy groups and Democratic lawmakers warned the legislation would lead to obscene spending in Wisconsin elections. The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign warned in written testimony that the legislation would mean “billionaires and multimillionaires will have an outsized influence over who gets elected” and that political contests would “be less between candidates and more between tycoons.”
- Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Mandela Barnes, who served in the Assembly in 2015, did not vote on the campaign spending bill, joining the rest of his Democratic Assembly colleagues who said it was a conflict of interest for lawmakers to rewrite the laws that govern their campaigns.
- Barnes also said then that with the legislation Republicans had “fully embraced the darkness of corruption by voting to rig the rules to line their own campaign pockets with shady special interest money and allow for more corruption to go undetected and unprosecuted.”
