Rory K. McShane

Eleven candidates hired Rory McShane’s Las Vegas firm to take a seat off a sitting Idaho Republican in the May 2026 primary. The nine who paid the firm out of their own campaign accounts, $121,116.73 worth, all lost. The two who never wrote it a check, because their county Republican party bought the advertising on their behalf, both won. McShane runs RMC Strategy, the shop whose own client page advertises Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs, Bob Good, Jim Marchant, Anthony Kern, and the Republican parties of Nevada, North Carolina, and Maryland. On election night 2020, the firm’s vice president texted a political contact: “we need to get the Proud Boys out.” McShane kept him on the payroll for nearly three years after that. In Idaho, the same firm has billed $2,333,344 since 2023, printing the mail for far-right primary challengers and for the county Republican committees attacking sitting Republicans.

Inside this dossier:

• The text that cost him a client. A Nashville mayoral candidate fired McShane’s firm within hours of learning what his vice president wrote on election night 2020. She had already spent two thirds of her campaign money there.
• $2.33 million in Idaho. State filings account for $1,930,063.28 across 690 payments from 60 separate Idaho committees since 2023. Federal filings add $403,281.
• County parties are the biggest customers. Bonner County’s Republican central committee has paid the firm $520,183. Kootenai County’s has paid $376,344. All of it aimed at Republican primaries.
• Senate District 1 has flipped three primaries in a row. The firm was paid in all three. In 2026 the money came out of the county party, not the campaign account.
• The platform chair works for the vendor. The man who chairs the Idaho Republican Party’s platform committee lists “RMC Strategy Strategist” as his job.
• The election-denier franchise. A national watchdog traced $696,000 from three 2022 secretary-of-state candidates who campaigned on false 2020 claims into McShane’s firm.
• The same county party, two vendor names. McShane kept the vice president who wrote the Proud Boys message on staff for nearly three years. When that VP finally left and opened his own firm, Kootenai County Republicans paid the new shop $161,502.52 in six weeks, then went back to paying McShane the following cycle.

Who he is

Rory K. McShane is a Republican campaign consultant based in Las Vegas. Per his firm’s own founder biography, he grew up in Maryland, worked at an Austin advertising firm, and started what he then called McShane LLC in 2017 on a thrift-store desk in his newborn son’s nursery. He moved the operation to a garage, then to an office. The American Association of Political Consultants named him to its “40 Under 40” list in 2020.

What the firm sells is everything a campaign needs from one roof. Per the Nashville Banner, it is “an all-in-one consultancy that provided media buying, production, digital and direct mail services.” The business address on Idaho campaign-finance filings is 6950 O’Bannon Drive, Suite 100, Las Vegas. McShane LLC renamed itself RMC Strategy on October 2, 2025, and both names show up in Idaho records.

The Proud Boys text

Election night, November 4, 2020. Woodrow Johnston, then vice president of McShane LLC, was working out of a rented room at the Venetian casino. The Nevada Republican Party had hired the firm to help with the ballot count. Johnston opened a Facebook Messenger chat with Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, a Las Vegas political operative. The Nevada Current published the full chat.

The Gosar in that message is Paul Gosar, the Arizona congressman who is also McShane’s headline client. The Brooks Brothers Riot was the 2000 Republican protest that shut down the Bush-Gore recount in Florida. Minutes later, per the Washington Post, Johnston added: “Stand back and standby Lol.” That is Trump’s line to the Proud Boys from the September 2020 debate stage.

Ashton-Cirillo went on the record with both the Post and the Nevada Current on May 27, 2021. She said she started contacting far-right activists, one of whom publicly identified as a Proud Boy. Protesters in Proud Boys attire turned up at the North Las Vegas election center chanting “Don’t steal my vote.”

McShane’s answer to the Nevada Current:

He told the Post he was unaware of the texts and that Johnston was not working for any client. Johnston said the same. Neither man disputed that the messages were real. McShane did not fire him. Per the Post: “Our management team has met with Mr. Johnston. I’m confident he sees the error of what he did.” Johnston stayed on as vice president for more than two years after that story ran.

A customer finally did what the boss wouldn’t. In August 2023, per the Nashville Banner’s reporting by Steve Cavendish, Republican Nashville mayoral candidate Alice Rolli heard about the story from a supporter and cut the firm loose the same day. She had already spent two thirds of her campaign budget with them. Johnston resigned that weekend.

Rory K. McShane

Nine 2026 challengers paid his firm directly and lost. Two more had their county party pay, and won.

Photo: Instagram

The national clients

Every name in this section appears on RMC Strategy’s own client page. The firm advertises them.

Paul Gosar, U.S. House, Arizona. In February 2021 Gosar became the first sitting member of Congress to keynote Nick Fuentes’s America First Political Action Conference, a white-nationalist event staged just outside CPAC, per Newsweek and The Hill. Fuentes has compared Jews killed in gas chambers to “cookies baking in an oven.” Gosar posed for photos with him the next day and later scheduled a fundraiser with him in Orlando, per StopAntisemitism. In November 2021 the House voted 223 to 207 to censure Gosar for posting an animated video of himself killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and stripped his committee assignments. Per Talking Points Memo and a 2023 letter from five Jewish House members, his digital director Wade Searle was a prominent Fuentes follower. Gosar kept him.

Andy Biggs, U.S. House, Arizona, and chair of the House Freedom Caucus from 2019 to 2022. Per the January 6 Select Committee’s evidence release, Biggs began texting White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on November 6, 2020, three days after Election Day, proposing that state legislatures appoint their own presidential electors. Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers testified under oath in June 2022 that Biggs called him the morning of January 6 to ask whether he would decertify Arizona’s Biden electors. Bowers refused. Per NBC News, Biggs was one of 34 members of Congress documented trading election-overturn messages with Meadows.

Bob Good, U.S. House, Virginia. Good won his seat in 2020 by attacking the incumbent Republican, Denver Riggleman, for officiating a same-sex wedding for two of his own campaign volunteers, per NPR and NBC News. He took the Freedom Caucus gavel in January 2024. He voted to overturn the 2020 election. Per Axios, he lost his own 2024 primary by 0.6 points.

Anthony Kern, Arizona state senator. An Arizona grand jury indicted Kern on April 24, 2024 on nine felony counts each of forgery, fraud, and conspiracy in the state’s fake-elector case, per Copper Courier and 12 News Phoenix. He pleaded not guilty. He had been photographed on the Capitol grounds on January 6, 2021. Per Arizona Mirror, he sat as a delegate at the 2024 Republican National Convention while under indictment.

Liz Harris, former Arizona state representative. In April 2023 the Republican-controlled Arizona House voted 46 to 13 to expel her, per NPR and Arizona Mirror. She had arranged a hearing where an outside witness accused sitting officials of taking bribes from a Mexican drug cartel, and the Ethics Committee found she lied about her role.

Corey Stewart, Virginia. McShane worked Stewart’s 2017 governor’s primary, a campaign built on defending Confederate monuments, per his then-employer’s own write-up. Per CNN, Stewart endorsed congressional candidate Paul Nehlen in January 2017 and called him “one of my personal heroes.” Nehlen later described himself as “pro-white.” Stewart also accepted an endorsement from Jason Kessler, who organized the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, per PolitiFact.

The three secretary-of-state candidates. Per Issue One’s January 2023 analysis, McShane’s firm billed $696,000 across three 2022 candidates for the offices that run elections, all of them campaigning on false claims about 2020. Nevada’s Jim Marchant paid nearly $500,000, which was 56 percent of everything his campaign spent. Marchant founded the America First Secretary of State Coalition, told a QAnon conference that a QAnon influencer recruited him to run, and backed Nevada’s slate of fake electors, per Media Matters and NBC News. Wyoming’s Chuck Gray paid nearly $200,000, campaigned on the claim that 2020 was “clearly rigged,” and flew to Arizona to praise the Cyber Ninjas audit, per Bolts Magazine. Indiana’s Diego Morales paid roughly $7,000 and told his state party convention that “the 2020 election was flawed and the outcome is questionable,” per WFYI.

The same Issue One report found that McShane’s firm set up its own political committee, Take Back the West PAC, in 2020. It raised roughly $80,000 and paid essentially all of it back to McShane’s firm. A federal committee by the same name paid him roughly $570,000 more that cycle, per FEC filings.

What he does in Idaho

The road from Las Vegas to Idaho runs through Club for Growth, the national free-market group whose logo has sat on McShane’s client page since 2022. Club for Growth’s former vice president of government affairs, Andy Roth, left in December 2021 to start the State Freedom Caucus Network, which builds hardline legislative blocs state by state. Its Idaho director is Maria Nate, wife of Idaho Freedom Foundation president Ron Nate and the organizer behind the Gang of 8. McShane’s shop prints the mail for the slate she moves.

The vendor relationship also crosses a public feud. The Idaho Freedom Foundation and the chamber-aligned Idaho Freedom Caucus attack each other in public. Both pay McShane. His firm bills the Bonner County Republican central committee on one side and Blaine County’s Common Sense PAC on the other.

The money, per Idaho Secretary of State Sunshine campaign-finance records and federal filings at FEC.gov: Idaho committees have paid the firm $1,930,063.28 since 2023, across 690 separate payments from 60 different committees. Federal filings add $403,281. Combined, $2,333,344. The billing has not been steady. Idaho payments ran $77,029 in 2023, jumped to $606,996 in 2024, eased to $450,528 in 2025, then hit $795,510 in 2026.

The three biggest customers are not candidates. They are county Republican organizations and a party-adjacent PAC, and what they buy is independent expenditure: advertising that supports or attacks a candidate but is paid for by a group the candidate does not legally control. In each of those counties, the local Republican party is running that advertising against sitting Republican legislators. McShane’s shop produces the mail, the digital ads, and the text messages. The sample ballot Kootenai County Republicans sent out on May 6, 2026 listed roughly 24 candidates and one measure, was produced by McShane’s firm, and cost the county party $3,324, matched by an identical charge the same day.

The man who writes the party platform works for the vendor. Per his own website, Bjorn Handeen is an “RMC Strategy Strategist” and the sitting Chair of the Idaho Republican Party Platform Committee. His verified X bio reads: “GOP strategist with @RMCStrategy | Platform Committee Chair @IdahoGOP | Proud Paleoconservative.” He was the press contact on David Worley’s February 2026 Senate campaign launch, writing from an rmcstrategy.com email address.

Handeen’s platform committee wrote the “eliminate the property tax” plank into the 2026 Idaho Republican platform at the state convention. Scott Herndon, who has put more money through Handeen’s firm than any other Idaho candidate, ran on that same slogan. Nothing on the public record shows Handeen telling the delegates who voted on that plank that his firm was being paid by campaigns running on it.

The money runs back into the network through Brent Regan, who chairs both the Idaho Freedom Foundation board and the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee. Per Idaho Sunshine records, Regan wrote a $1,000 personal check to Debbie Loffman’s Coeur d’Alene mayoral campaign and a $1,030 personal check to Julie Hensley’s Kootenai commissioner campaign. Both women are McShane clients. The county party Regan chairs paid McShane’s firm $190,990 in the same 2025-2026 cycle. See the Brent Regan dossier.

The 2026 record

Unseating sitting Republicans is the work the Idaho network hires this firm to do. In the May 19, 2026 primary, eleven McShane clients tried it. Two won. Neither of the two paid the firm anything. Their county Republican party did.

Jane Sauter and Mark Sauter are not related. Per Ballotpedia and Bonner County Daily Bee coverage, the two had met before: Mark Sauter beat Jane Sauter in the 2024 primary, and she took the seat from him in 2026. The Spokesman-Review covered both District 1 results the morning after as North Idaho incumbents losing their seats.

The other nine all wrote the checks themselves.

Two and nine, or two and seven counting only legislative races. Two cycles earlier the same category produced three winners out of eight, on $101,750.75 of direct billing.

The split runs along one line, and it is who signed the check. Every 2026 client who paid the firm from a campaign account and went after a sitting Republican lost. Both clients whose county party paid the firm on their behalf won. The filings show who paid whom and who finished ahead. They do not show that the vendor decided any of it.

Bonner County’s committee spread its independent expenditure across twelve candidates that spring, not two. The $5,652.43 is a District 1 slate allocation split evenly three ways, not a buy aimed at a single race. Third on that slate was Cornel Rasor, who is worth pulling apart because he sits in both columns and belongs in neither fight. Rasor was the sitting House 1B representative. He paid McShane’s firm $26,774.24 out of his own committee, and he drew the same $5,652.43 of county-party support Herndon and Jane Sauter drew. He won, 9,314 to 5,430. He was defending a seat he already held rather than taking one off anybody. All three candidates on that slate allocation won; two of the three did it by beating a sitting Republican.

Widen the frame to every contested Republican primary the firm’s candidates ran in, for any office, and the direction holds. Clients won 14 of 24 races in 2024, on $388,044.77 of billing. In 2026 they won 9 of 22, on $243,488.26.

Seventeen of those 2026 races were contested legislative primaries. The firm’s clients won seven. Which seven is the point.

The totals at the bottom of that table are the whole argument. Six of the seven wins were legislators defending seats they already held: Elaine Price, Cornel Rasor, Steve Tanner, Vito Barbieri, Christy Zito and Brandon Shippy. The seventh, Colton Bennett, took an open House 6A seat with nobody defending it. Two more clients, Carl Bjerke and Tammy Nichols, paid a combined $2,412.45 in races nobody else entered at all.

The big invoices lose. Brett Skidmore paid $75,685.83 in 2024 and lost House 35B 38 to 62, and the two largest 2026 invoices are the top two rows of the loss table above.

Worley is the client worth sitting on. Per Idaho Army National Guard relief documentation from the Assistant Adjutant General (Exhibit 7A, Tab 6.1, p.7), Maj. Worley said of his First Sergeant, verbatim: “well, its not like I raped [First Sergeant redacted] well, not yet.” The same finding called the remark “an extreme lapse of judgment” and relieved Worley of command for “demonstrated counterproductive leadership that reduced morale, eroded trust and showed little respect for others.” Six months later McShane’s firm was running his Senate campaign. See the David Worley dossier.

The firm’s best Idaho cycle was the one with no partisan primary in it. In the November 2025 North Idaho city elections, clients went four for five, with Randy Westlund taking the Post Falls mayor’s office on 38.76 percent of a three-way vote.

Senate District 1, three primaries, one vendor

Herndon’s win is the third turnover in a row in this seat. District 1 is Boundary County and most of Bonner County, Sandpoint included, and McShane’s firm has been paid in all three primaries. What changed each cycle is the account the money came out of.

Per the Spokesman-Review, which profiled both men two weeks before the vote, Herndon was chair of the Bonner County Republican Central Committee going into the May 19 primary. The Idaho Republican Party’s own candidate page says he “recently concluded four and a half years of service as Chairman” of that committee and now serves as the state party’s Region 1 chair and chairs the state central committee’s resolutions committee.

That county committee is the largest single Idaho customer on McShane’s books. It has paid $520,182.61 across 87 records since 2024, and no other Idaho filer, candidate or party or PAC, comes near it.

The same committee also filed independent expenditures in that primary. $8,056.94 went to advertising supporting Herndon, the biggest of the twelve candidate lines it filed, and $1,947.16 went to advertising opposing Woodward. Herndon won the seat back by 1,080 votes.

The outside money

Independent expenditure behind these same clients moved the opposite direction from the win rate. Idaho committees reported $208,369.03 in outside spending supporting McShane clients in the 2023-2024 cycle. In 2025-2026 it was $469,677.45, more than double, on a shorter client list, for a worse record.

Who wrote those checks changed almost completely.

Idaho Freedom Caucus PAC was the biggest outside backer of these candidates in 2024, then fell away. Citizens Alliance of Idaho went the other direction and finished the cycle on top. Two committees with no recorded 2024 support for anyone on the list, 36-18-1 Inc. and Idaho Summit PAC, arrived in 2026 with a combined $253,881.79. Where their money originates is traced in the Following the Money 2026 investigation.

The same clients, a different letterhead

Woodrow Johnston did not leave McShane LLC over the Proud Boys message. He stayed nearly three years after it surfaced, through the Nevada Current story in May 2021 and the Washington Post story that June. He left in August 2023, the weekend a paying client walked. Then he opened Revere Solutions LLC.

For eight months Idaho’s campaign-finance record shows nothing under that name. Then on April 8, 2024, the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee cut Revere a $2,500 check for voter surveys. Over the next six weeks the county party paid Revere Solutions $161,502.52 across 37 payments, all of them naming 133 NW 78th Ave, Margate, Florida. The last cleared three days before the May 2024 primary.

Sixteen candidates each drew exactly $9,030.14 of that advertising, and all sixteen won. Then check the ballots. Eleven of the sixteen had no primary opponent at all, meaning $99,331.54 of county-party money ran behind candidates whose names were the only ones printed in their race. The five who actually drew an opponent split $45,150.70, and four of those five were incumbents or the plurality winner of a four-way open seat.

The year-by-year ledger is where this stops looking like one man striking out on his own.

In the 2024 primary the county party sent Revere seven times what it sent McShane. Revere then vanishes from Idaho filings and McShane’s billing climbs back.

The candidate lists overlap too. Six of the sixteen names in the Revere advertising buy were paying McShane’s own firm out of their campaign accounts in the same period: Elaine Price ($32,846.80), Carl Bjerke ($13,024.27), Robert Norris ($8,700.00), Vito Barbieri ($3,000.00), Leslie Duncan ($2,550.00), and Marc Eberlein ($1,550.00).

Brent Regan has chaired the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee since 2016.

The client that lands the case

One name on the Idaho client list carries more documented extremism than the rest of the roster combined. Dave Reilly.

Per Political Potatoes, April 16, 2024, Reilly is a McShane campaign client. Federal-court discovery in Sines v. Kessler (3:17-cv-00072, W.D. Va.) identified him as the Identity Evropa member using the Discord handle “Davey Crockett” at the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Rally organizer Jason Kessler named him under oath at the November 15, 2021 trial. The Anti-Defamation League classifies Identity Evropa as a white-supremacist organization. The Sines jury returned a $25 million verdict.

Reilly’s own X account, December 11, 2025, verbatim: “Nick Fuentes is right about the Jews.” He hosts The Backlash, a Holocaust-minimization podcast. He appeared twice on Iran’s state outlet Press TV in March 2025, eighteen months after the U.S. Treasury sanctioned it. He publishes the Idaho Tribune under pseudonymous bylines. The Idaho Freedom Foundation quietly hired him as a messaging contractor in December 2023, per InvestigateWest and Idaho Capital Sun.

Kootenai County Republicans endorsed Reilly’s 2021 Post Falls School Board run after Charlottesville was already public. That is the same county party on the McShane invoice. See the Dave Reilly dossier.

The extremism standard applied

Belief is not extremism; abusive enforcement of belief is. Calling the Proud Boys out to a vote-counting facility, keeping on the vice president who did it, then billing a fake-elector indictee and a Charlottesville participant off the same client list, crosses that line. Every step of it moved on an invoice.

According to FEC records, Sen. Jim Risch hired Rory McShane and has paid him $403,281.

Connected pages

• Following the Money 2026 investigation. The extended Idaho money breakdown.
• Maria Nate dossier. State Freedom Caucus Network’s Idaho director; the organizing end of the Club for Growth pipeline.
• Ron Nate dossier. Idaho Freedom Foundation president; the policy end of the same pipeline.
• David Worley dossier. The largest 2026 Idaho candidate invoice on the book.
• Chad Christensen dossier. Documented Oath Keepers member; the second-largest 2026 invoice.
• Brent Regan dossier. Chairs both the IFF board and the county party on the invoice.
• Doyle Beck dossier. East Idaho funding context for the network paying these bills.
• Dave Reilly dossier. Charlottesville participant, McShane client, KCRCC endorsee.
• Greg Pruett dossier. The propaganda lane of the same network.
• Dustin Hurst dossier. IFF strategist whose network overlaps the McShane slate.
• Christy Zito dossier. Sitting state senator and McShane client.
• Scott Herndon dossier. Won Senate District 1 back in 2026 while chairing the county party that is the firm’s biggest Idaho customer.
• State Freedom Caucus Network organization page.
• Idaho Freedom Foundation organization page.
• The Propaganda Network organization page.

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