Jeffrey Yass has spent more than $5 million dollars trying to influence the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s race. Yass is worth over $49 billion and is spending his money on TV ads and mailers supporting Dave Sunday.
Pennsylvania’s richest billionaire, Jeffrey Yass, is hoping to influence the Attorney General’s race by throwing $5.5 million dollars behind York County’s Republican District Attorney Dave Sunday, who is running against former Auditor General Eugene DePasquale in the upcoming election.
“I don’t know Jeff Yass, but I can’t imagine he’s just writing that check to give to the [Commonwealth Leaders Fund] and there’s no reason for it,” DePasquale said during a recent interview with The Keystone.
“All you have to do is read that Philadelphia magazine article that just came out, where it talks about what Yass wants. The strings that Yass wants for that money.”
Yass, who is a proponent of school vouchers and charter schools, has emerged as one of the largest Republican mega-donors in recent years and has a track record of supporting right-wing candidates in Pennsylvania and throughout the country.
Last month, he explained to Philadelphia Magazine why he supports defunding public schools.
“As students flee [to schools of their choice], those government schools would have to shut down,” Yass said. “And that’s a good thing. If a school cannot fix itself, if it does not adequately educate its children, if it shortchanges the families it is supposed to serve, it doesn’t deserve to be open.”
According to Forbes, Yass’ net wealth grew from $27.6 billion in April 2024 to a whopping $49.6 billion by September 2024 thanks in large part to his investments in the popular social media platform TikTok.
The spending in support of Sunday comes in the form of TV ads and mailers funded from the Commonwealth Leaders Fund, a political action committee primarily funded by Yass, and were authorized by the Sunday campaign.
DePasquale’s campaign noted that Sunday failed to disclose the advertisements as an in-kind contribution, which are non-monetary contributions that offer goods or services for little to no charge, on his most recent campaign finance reports.
“There is no universe where Dave Sunday’s campaign didn’t know the value of these contributions,” Carver Murphy, DePasquale’s campaign manager, told Spotlight PA.
“They were part of the transaction and certainly have records of it. Ad disclosures make that information public. They weren’t waiting on notification of the contribution from [Commonwealth Leaders Fund], they were trying to hide it.”
“Thankfully, voters have another, better choice,” Murphy said. “Eugene DePasquale doesn’t work for Jeffrey Yass, and he’s not beholden to any one billionaire donor.”
Sunday is campaigning on lowering gun crime and combating the opioid epidemic, according to Spotlight PA, while DePasquale is running on protecting reproductive rights and using the office to advocate for the commonwealth.
