Rose up to $13M in self-funding, Blackburn PAC gets $250k from Anthropic in TN gov primary last days

Cookeville U.S. Rep. John Rose loaned his gubernatorial campaign an additional $4 million in the final days of the Republican primary, bringing his total in self-funding to $13 million. 

For U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn the Tennessee Freedom Fund and Team Tennessee political action committees, PACs, backing her bid have consolidated under one entity after raising a total of $12 million this cycle so far. This includes a recent donation of $250,000 from San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company Anthropic.

Anthropic’s primary product is the AI agent Claude, and with its contribution, it’s one of the top spenders backing Blackburn. 

Candidates filed their final campaign finance reports to the Tennessee Registry of Election Finance on Friday, detailing their contributions and spending one week before the August 6 primary. 

Blackburn, Rose and Kingston state Rep. Monty Fritts are running for the Republican nomination to replace term-limited Gov. Bill Lee. The winner of the Republican primary is widely considered to be the favorite to become the state’s next governor, as Tennessee voters haven’t elected a Democratic candidate to a statewide office since 2006 and has never elected an independent one.

For much of the last year, Blackburn held a significant polling advantage over Rose. But in the last few weeks, Rose’s campaign released polling showing the race tightening, which Blackburn disputed. There has only been one non-campaign-funded independent poll conducted, which shows a close race. 

Blackburn has raised $10.8 million for the election, and Rose has raised $15 million, including his self-funding. Fritts has raised close to $300,000.

Blackburn has raised money from more individuals, and Tennesseans specifically. But the largest checks supporting her have gone to the independent expenditure PACs backing her.

The top donor to the two PACs is the pro-private school voucher group affiliated with Club For Growth called the School Freedom Fund. The group donated $4.81 million to a PAC backing Blackburn a month after her federal Senate campaign donated a nearly identical amount to the organization’s primary PAC.

Blackburn moves $4.8M from US Senate campaign account in apparent legal ‘workaround’

Other top donors to Blackburn’s PACs are Club for Growth funder Jeff Yass ($1 million), payday lender Advance Financial ($800,000), Tamara Stephens ($279,000) and logistics entrepreneur Spencer Patton ($250,000)

Rose doesn’t have a PAC, and has used his used his personal wealth, estimated at $55 million, to counter the disadvantage.

But a dark-money group called the American Exceptionalism Institute has been running advertisements attacking Blackburn. The group has not registered with the state under its legal requirement to disclose its spending, leaving its donors unknown. A Blackburn campaign surrogate filed a complaint with the state agency in charge of overseeing campaign finance.