WASHINGTON — John Wood was a candidate for U.S. Senate in Missouri for 55 days this year.
The former and current legal counsel to the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol quit his job in June and moved to Missouri to launch a late write-in campaign as an independent candidate who would caucus with the Republican Party.
Wood collected enough signatures to get on the ballot. But after Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt won the primary, Wood soon dropped out of the race in August to return to his job in the Capitol.
Through it all, Wood had support from former U.S. Sen. Jack Danforth, his former boss who began advocating for an independent candidate in February. Danforth, a Republican who represented Missouri from 1976 to 1995, started a PAC called Missouri Stands United in May and started spending money at the beginning of June, about a month before Wood entered the race.
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“It was an opportunity to state the case for holding the country together,” Danforth said. “Was I disappointed? Yes. Because it turned out that we couldn’t translate that general feeling that we’re too polarized into an actual campaign.”
The group collected money from two donors: $2,500 from , a California ultrarunning enthusiast, and $6 million from Danforth, according to the group’s filing with the Federal Elections Commission.
The PAC spent about $5.6 million of it supporting Wood — $102,218 for every day he was in the race.
Instead, the biggest beneficiaries of Danforth’s political effort may have been political consultants.
While the group spent more than $3.5 million on ads supporting Wood’s candidacy and more than $1.4 million on media placement, the PAC paid a number of political consulting groups to boost Danforth’s indictment of polarization in modern politics.
The group’s October filing lists nine businesses across the country that received money for “PAC strategy consulting,” not including groups that got money for compliance consulting, legal fees or media consulting. The biggest checks went to a group called Bendixon and Amandi International, a communications consulting firm based out of Miami, which collected more than $95,000 of Danforth’s cash.
When asked whether he regretted spending the money on a likely doomed campaign instead of finding a different approach to battling political polarization, Danforth talked instead about his disappointment in the Republican Party, saying he doesn’t feel like he has a political home.
“It was a message,” Danforth said. “It was a message of restoring the center and restoring politics as a place where you try to work things out. And it was a reaction to Trump.”
Danforth said he already voted in the November election, using an absentee ballot. He wrote in John Wood.
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