Charlie Neibergal / AP
Republican presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis waves at the Republican Party of Iowa’s 2023 Lincoln Dinner in Des Moines, Iowa, Friday, July 28, 2023.
Wednesday, Aug. 2, 2023 | 2 a.m.
Robert Bigelow, owner of Budget Suites of America and Bigelow Aerospace, listens to Nevada Governor-elect Joe Lombardo during an event with supporters at Rancho High School Monday, Nov. 14, 2022. Lombardo beat incumbent Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak.
Republicans in Nevada
Las Vegas businessman Robert Bigelow is the most prolific individual donor of a political action committee backing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination — further cementing the billionaire’s status as one of the highest-spending political megadonors in recent elections.
Bigelow made a single contribution worth more than $20 million March 30 to the super PAC known as Never Back Down — whose executive board is chaired by former Nevada Attorney General and longtime DeSantis ally Adam Laxalt — according to the group’s recent midyear filing report to the Federal Election Commission.
A Sun analysis of the PAC’s filing indicates Bigelow’s contribution is the highest by a single individual and is second only behind an $82.5 million donation made by the Tampa-based Empower Parents PAC May 31.
The next-highest donation, $5 million, came from Faithful & Strong Policies Inc., a company tied to Scott Wagner, a Miami Beach, Fla., attorney who co-chaired DeSantis’ transition team for his second term as governor.
The news was first reported by The Washington Post, which indicated it received internal data from Never Back Down ahead of Monday’s FEC filing deadline. And the $82.5 million cash infusion came from DeSantis’ former political operation, essentially making Bigelow the top donor of new funding, according to the Post’s report.
Bigelow, 79, did not return a request for comment, but in the past he has publicly admired DeSantis and likened him to a modern-day Ronald Reagan.
Aside from Bigelow, a few others with Nevada ties donated to DeSantis’ super PAC: Nicholas Tomaino, founder of the cryptocurrency investment firm 1Confirmation, who donated $100,000 June 16, and PLS Logistics executive Gregory Burns, who gave the group $10,000 on June 26.
In October, the Sun reported Bigelow — who owns the extended-stay hotel chain Budget Suites of America, as well as Bigelow Aerospace — had donated at least $47 million to primarily conservative organizations throughout the 2022 election cycle. That included roughly $25 million to then-GOP gubernatorial nominee Joe Lombardo and another $10 million to a PAC called Friends of Ron DeSantis.
OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks spending on political campaigns, ranked Bigelow as No. 22 among top individual federal contributors in the 2022 election cycle, joining the likes of Democratic megadonor George Soros, as well as Las Vegas Sands heiress Miriam Adelson and former gaming mogul Steve Wynn. The Open Secrets list did not account for spending in state races.
Former President Donald Trump — who is already facing three criminal indictments and could face at least one more — remains the favorite to be the Republican nominee atop the 2024 ballot. A poll released Monday by The New York Times/Siena College found 54% of respondents would most likely vote for Trump for the GOP nomination, compared with 17% who said they would support DeSantis, the leading candidate behind Trump.
Despite that, the Post reported that Never Back Down spent $4 out of every $5 on voter contact, building custom voter files and technology investments to aid in the PAC’s field outreach program. Never Back Down CEO Chris Jankowski said in a statement the group was laying ground operations that inevitably would help DeSantis leapfrog Trump en route to the GOP nomination.
“Every conversation at the door, every text message reply is making us smarter and more efficient,” Jankowski said. “We are running a full-scale operation that has never been done before at this level by either party. Donald Trump is using most of his donors’ money to cover his legal fees. This isn’t close.”
Never Back Down also spent $15.5 million in political ads through the first six months of 2023, more than any other presidential operation except for the PAC affiliated with Trump, the Post reported. Never Back Down also raised $740,000 on behalf of the DeSantis campaign, which came from roughly 8,000 new donors.
The Post also reported that a PAC with Trump ties spent more than $40 million in the first half of 2023 to defend Trump himself, advisers and others.
DeSantis’ campaign — separate from Never Back Down PAC — raised about $20.4 million from its first six weeks through the end of June and had $12.2 million in cash on hand. But high costs have led DeSantis’ camp to announce a recent round of layoffs.
Trump’s official campaign raised the most money among 2024 presidential hopefuls, according to FEC records, raking in $35.9 million with $22.5 million in cash on hand, while President Joe Biden, a Democrat, came in second, having raised $31.9 million with $20.1 million in cash on hand.
DeSantis ranked third, ahead of tax consultant John Anthony Castro (who raised $20 million and ended the filing period with $20 million in cash on hand) and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy ($19.1 million/$9 million in cash on hand) as the top-five fundraisers.
But Trump’s joint fundraising committee, Trump Save America, had just $5.7 million in cash at the end of the June 30 reporting period, after raising $53.9 million but spending $52 million during the same period. And his official leadership committee had $3.6 million in cash on hand — though advisers told the Post that the PAC has been handling legal fees for anyone involved in Trump-adjacent investigations, if they ask the PAC for help.
Never Back Down raised $130.5 million cumulatively and had $96.8 million in cash on hand.
About Bigelow
According to the Bigelow Aerospace website, Robert Bigelow personally spent more than $450 million on the space company, which has contracted with NASA and SpaceX on a number of projects. Most recently in 2016, Bigelow’s company sent an expandable module that can carry more than 1,000 pounds of cargo to the International Space Station. Its contract was renewed the following year.
Bigelow was also friends with the late Harry Reid, the Nevadan who served as Senate majority leader during the Obama administration. Despite political differences between the two, Reid — a Democrat — helped earmark $22 million for a Department of Defense program to study unidentified flying objects that contracted with Bigelow Aerospace.
More recently, however, Bigelow has been more vocal about his politics.
Bigelow in September 2022 told the Associated Press that “liberalism, that’s a cancer. And we have U.S. senators and representatives that need to go. And the second would be a philosophy of freedom — a philosophy of free enterprise and freedom for everybody.”
A 2017 story by The New York Times revealed that Reid was instrumental in linking Bigelow with the Defense Department, and from 2007 to 2012, the program produced “documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of life.”
Bigelow’s fascination with the paranormal reaches beyond space and potential alien life. Last year, he announced he had provided grant funding up to $1 million to research “contact and communication with post-mortem or discarnate consciousness.” The grant winners are to be announced this month.
In 2016, Bigelow sold a 480-acre plot of land in northeast Utah dubbed “Skinwalker Ranch” he had owned since 1996. Skinwalker Ranch, a site where numerous alleged paranormal events have occurred, has been the subject of various media projects, notably a 2005 book by Las Vegas journalist George Knapp, as well as a television series that began airing on the History Channel in 2020.
