Who ‘did it’ for Tillis win?

Dallas Woodhouse, a longtime Republican political operative and now the newly hired executive director of the N.C. Republican Party, has a knack for showmanship. But on Election Night 2014, the showman might have shown too much.

At a Charlotte hotel where Republicans were celebrating big wins in the mid-term election, Woodhouse appeared for a TV interview wearing sunglasses and a paper campaign hat emblazoned with the name of winning GOP Senate candidate Thom Tillis. Woodhouse said his get-up was the kind of disguise that embarrassed Democrats would be wearing in the aftermath of the Republicans’ big gains, most notably Tillis’ unseating of Democratic incumbent Sen. Kay Hagan.

But the problem was that Woodhouse dropped the disguise he’d been wearing throughout the campaign. He was the head of Carolina Rising, a 501(c)(4) educational nonprofit that under IRS rules must not affiliate or coordinate with a political candidate’s campaign or spend more than half of its resources on politics.

But when the TV reporter asked Woodhouse, “You just mentioned you (Carolina Rising) spent a whole lot of money to get this man (Tillis) elected right?” Woodhouse responded, “$4.7 million dollars. We did it.”

That admission raises serious questions about the legality of Carolina Rising and the source of its funding. The Center for Responsive Politics reports on its website OpenSecrets.org that Carolina Rising’s tax filing “shows that the organization raised nearly $4.9 million in its first year – $4.8 million of it from a single donor; nearly all of that went out the door to a prominent political media firm in Virginia for ads mentioning Tillis.”

Under the law, the single, anonymous donor who helped Tillis win can remain secret, but under a sense of openness and accountability Tillis or the N.C. Republican Party should ask the donor for a voluntary disclosure.

Otherwise, North Carolinians are left to wonder who used Carolina Rising to spend millions for nearly 4,000 TV ads supporting Tillis? And what does the donor expect in return?

Such a voluntary disclosure is unlikely, though a complaint about Carolina Rising filed on Oct. 20 with the IRS by the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington may yield new information.

At the least, the murky funding behind Tillis’ election has drawn new attention to the need to tighten control over phony social welfare groups that flout the rules against political involvement.

This story was originally published October 26, 2015 at 7:35 PM with the headline "Who ‘did it’ for Tillis win?."