Cubs-Owning Ricketts Family Backs Scott Walker With $5 Million Donation

By Margaret Paulson in News on Jul 31, 2015 6:15PM



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The Ricketts family seems to have chosen Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker as their pick for the 2016 Republican nomination. While the Cubs-owning family as a whole has donated to several of the GOP contenders, including Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, Joe and Marlene Ricketts—the family matriarch and patriarch—gave its biggest donation yet to Walker, in the form of $5 million to his Unintimidated SuperPAC.

The Washington Post reports that Walker and Joe Ricketts have had several private meetings in the past year. It’s also not too surprising considering son Todd is the co-chairman of Walker’s finance team. And Joe Ricketts has long been known for his staunch opposition to President Barack Obama, which he made plans to chronicle in attack ads, a book and a film.

We do have to wonder, though, how daughter Laura, a noted liberal and democratic donor, feels about being grouped in with her conservative and rather litigious family.

Walker just completed a fundraising tour of Chicago, Bloomington and the village of Godley, hoping to scoop up a crop of fresh donors in the conservative reaches of our fine state. In Chicago on Monday, Walker stopped at Billy Goat Tavern, where he dismissed criticisms he's received from the notoriously thin-skinned Donald Trump. Trump had bashed Walker’s handling of hospitals and the education system in Wisconsin just a few days earlier, after he found out Walker took a page from his own childish playbook, calling Trump a “DumbDumb” in a recent fundraiser invitation, according to Milwaukee’s Journal Sentinel.