Secretive Wyoming billionaire Timothy Mellon, one of the Republican Party’s most prolific financial backers, has all but cut off Senate Republicans this election cycle, furious that GOP leadership couldn’t muscle through President Trump’s sweeping voting restrictions bill.
Mellon, grandson of Gilded Age industrialist Andrew Mellon, ranked as the second-largest Republican donor in the country during the 2024 cycle behind only Elon Musk, having steered close to $200 million toward Trump and the broader party.
But this year tells a starkly different story, reported The New York Times: Mellon has publicly disclosed just roughly $3 million in donations so far, along with a separate $20 million gift to House Republicans that hasn’t yet shown up in official filings. Notably absent entirely is any public money for Senate Republican candidates, a category he’d previously supported with tens of millions of dollars across the last several election cycles.
People familiar with the matter say Mellon’s team has explicitly linked the freeze to the Senate’s failure to pass the SAVE America Act, Trump’s push to restrict mail voting, impose nationwide voter ID requirements, and demand proof of citizenship for registration. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) backed the bill but acknowledged the votes simply weren’t there to beat a Democratic filibuster, calling it a matter of “math.”
The final straw, according to someone briefed on the matter, may have been something almost trivial: Mellon was sent a standard fundraising appeal in the mail asking him to help Senate Republicans, the kind of form solicitation typically reserved for smaller donors rather than someone of his financial weight.
He reportedly wrote back personally to decline, blaming the party’s failure to pass the legislation.
Mellon, who has backed anti-vaccine organizations and once proclaimed Black people are “belligerent” and unable to improve their own lives, is widely viewed within Republican fundraising circles as notoriously difficult to reach. Allies of Thune reportedly tried arranging a face-to-face meeting between the two men beginning last year, without success.
The financial snub hasn’t left Senate Republicans hurting, exactly. Their main super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, still holds roughly an $80 million cash advantage over its Democratic counterpart, thanks in part to other billionaire donors like Miriam Adelson and Stephen Schwarzman stepping in to fill the gap Mellon left behind.
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