The WWE pro wrestling founder has already contributed about $1 million this year. McMahon reemerges as mega-donor

After dropping $100 million trying unsuccessfully to get herself elected to the Senate, wrestling executive Linda McMahon is trying a new experiment: spending big bucks on other people’s campaigns.

McMahon, whose status as the founder of the WWE pro wrestling franchise made her an irresistible subject for the national media and a rich political target for her Democratic opponents, has reemerged in the world of Republican high-dollar fundraising. Having made hundreds of millions of dollars heading an overwhelmingly male entertainment operation, McMahon is now a rare new female player in the male-dominated world of billionaire political kingpins.


In 2014, McMahon and her husband, WWE CEO Vince McMahon, have already contributed about $1 million to federal candidates, party committees and super PACs, including Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, the research and tracking group America Rising and TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts’ group Ending Spending, according to a review of public finance records.

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McMahon associates don’t expect her to throw as much money into politics as the free-spending Koch brothers or environmentalist Tom Steyer, who have single-handedly funded big, national advocacy groups on the right and left. But the million-dollar donation figure – coming largely in Linda McMahon’s name – is a dramatic uptick in the Connecticut Republican’s giving. Before Linda McMahon entered the political fray herself as a Senate candidate in 2010, the most she and her husband had given to political campaigns was about $30,000 in both 2008 and 2006.

McMahon declined to be interviewed, but she has told fellow Republican elites that she is keen on helping elect other GOP women to office, as well as helping the party compete more seriously in regions of the country where Democrats currently hold a clear upper hand, like McMahon’s home base in New England. She is said to be an ardent admirer of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and has contributed a quarter-million dollars to the Christie-led Republican Governors Association ahead of a competitive gubernatorial race in Connecticut this fall.

Unlike other self-funding candidates who have largely vanished from politics after electoral defeats – California Republican Meg Whitman, for example, who spent upwards of $140 million running for governor in 2010 – McMahon has no intention of getting out of the ring just yet.

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“The uptick in her political contributions is representative of the fact that she realizes the challenges that Republican candidates face,” said Chris LaCivita, a Republican consultant who worked on McMahon’s 2012 campaign and has stayed in touch with her.

“Some people are once bitten, twice shy. But Linda McMahon is a tough customer,” he added. “This is somebody who is very concerned about the direction of the country.”

If McMahon has long-range aims in mind for her contributions – nudging the GOP as a whole in a more electorally competitive direction — she has already achieved a shorter-term goal of staying in the mix with a certain class of deep-pocketed conservative power brokers.

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Despite her fabulous wealth, McMahon, who is 65, has been shadowed during her political career by lurid stories of excess and exploitation in the world of professional wrestling. Her Democratic opponents attacked her as a Senate candidate for the number of WWE wrestlers who died young from drug overdoses, suicide and other causes. That reputation does not seem to have followed her into the world of political big money.

She has been welcomed into the fold of billionaire donors clustered around New York hedge fund mogul Paul Singer: McMahon attended a December event organized for the Singer-backed joint fundraising committee Friends for an American Majority, which has routed big sums of money to GOP Senate candidates in four states. McMahon again joined Singer and his finance-oriented cohort for a February donor retreat in Aspen, mingling with powerful Washington figures including House Speaker John Boehner.

In that largely male environment, McMahon’s donations have already made her one of the most prolific female givers on the right. In 2012, the top female donor to Republican candidates and groups was Miriam Adelson, the wife of Vegas casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson; after her, the next contributor down was New Jersey-based donor Virginia James, who gave $1.5 million the entire cycle.

McMahon has taken cues from some in the Singer crowd about which candidates and groups are most worth investing in. But her contributions also show that McMahon picks and chooses her own favorites. She has tended to give to moderate, establishment-oriented candidates, but also gave $1,500 to Georgia Senate candidate Karen Handel, the social conservative who failed to make the runoff ballot in this week’s primary.

And McMahon has continued to sprinkle cash on Connecticut Republicans, giving to candidates running for state treasurer, lieutenant governor and the legislature, as well as writing checks to half a dozen town committees in places like Norwalk and Greenwich.

“If you know Linda, you know that she takes advice, but in the end she makes her own decisions,” said Connecticut state Rep. John Frey, who runs a federal political action committee called Leadership Connecticut PAC that has received money from McMahon.

He added that she remains a palpable presence in Connecticut politics: “You see her at fundraisers, at state party events, at headquarter openings. When her schedule allows it, she’s out there.”

Despite her interest in giving to Senate candidates, McMahon has given no money so far to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Instead, she has supported the House-focused Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC and one of her largest gifts was the $250,000 she handed to the RGA.

Several sources said that Linda McMahon remains a loyal supporter of Christie, even amid the governor’s “Bridgegate” woes. Her big RGA check came in February, well after the eruption of the George Washington Bridge scandal, and McMahon associates say they would expect her to support Christie in any future endeavor. Last fall, the McMahons hosted a fundraiser for Christie’s all-but-guaranteed reelection campaign at their private home.

Christie recorded an opening voice-over for the big event touting New Jersey’s recovery efforts after Hurricane Sandy. “When Mother Nature gave us her worst, we showed the world our best,” Christie said, continuing: “I’m Governor Chris Christie. Welcome to the land I love. Welcome to Wrestlemania.”

Perhaps coincidentally, WWE moved Wrestlemania – the biggest pro wrestling event of the year – to New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, generating what was estimated to be over $100 million in economic impact for the state.

To some in the party, McMahon’s shift from lightning-rod Senate candidate to a member of the well-tailored world of genteel financier conservatives is a head-snapping transformation. It was only two years ago, after all, that Rove himself opposed McMahon in the 2012 Senate primary on the grounds that she had already blown one big race. “She ran last time and had a 40 mile-per-hour wind behind her back and came up short,” Rove said at the time. (McMahon lost her 2010 and 2012 races by nearly identical 12-point margins.)

Former Connecticut Rep. Chris Shays, who lost to McMahon in the 2012 GOP Senate primary, said McMahon has effectively used her political activities to gain acceptance from her peers in the Greenwich, Conn., one-percenter community. She has acquired a “tremendous amount of influence,” Shays said, despite lingering reservations about how she made her money in the first place and “an unbelievable lack of knowledge about political issues.”

The social benefits to McMahon’s political giving are obvious to Shays. WWE, he said dryly, “is not something that a lot of people, for instance, in Fairfield County say, ‘Oh gosh, what a great business you have.’”

But now, Shays said, “I basically view the Republican Party in Connecticut as her party. It’s a party that doesn’t have any structure, but it’s a party that has a very strong personality in Linda McMahon.”