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, while the two whose county Republican party bought the advertising on their behalf both won. McShane runs RMC Strategy, the firm 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. Since 2023, Idaho campaigns and committees have paid the firm $848,058.90, and Sen. Jim Risch’s federal campaign has paid it another $403,280.55. It prints the mail for far-right primary challengers and for the Bonner County Republican committee, which paid it to back two challengers who unseated sitting Republicans in 2026.

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.
• $1.25 million from Idaho campaigns. State filings account for $848,058.90 across 450 transactions from 60 separate Idaho committees since 2023. Risch’s federal campaign adds $403,280.55.
• Candidate campaigns are the biggest customers. Scott Herndon’s campaign paid the firm $104,467.76 in 2023 and 2024, the largest Idaho account. Bonner County’s Republican central committee has paid it $48,115.15 since 2024, and Kootenai County’s has paid it $17,699.17.
• Senate District 1 has flipped three primaries in a row. The firm was paid for work in all three campaigns, and in 2026 the money came out of the county party’s account.
• The platform chair works for McShane’s firm. The man who chairs the Idaho Republican Party’s platform committee lists “RMC Strategy Strategist” as his job.
• Three election-denier clients. Issue One, a national watchdog, traced $696,000 from three 2022 secretary-of-state candidates who campaigned on false 2020 claims into McShane’s firm.
• The vice president’s new firm. McShane kept the vice president who wrote the Proud Boys message on staff for nearly three years. When he left and opened his own firm, Kootenai County Republicans paid the new shop $17,020.28 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.

The Nashville Banner described the firm as “an all-in-one consultancy that provided media buying, production, digital and direct mail services.” Idaho campaign-finance filings list it at 6950 O’Bannon Drive, Suite 100, Las Vegas, under two names, because McShane LLC renamed itself RMC Strategy on October 2, 2025.

The Proud Boys text

On election night, November 3, 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. That night 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 Trump’s line to the Proud Boys from the September 2020 debate stage: “Stand back and standby Lol.”

Ashton-Cirillo went on the record with the Nevada Current on May 27, 2021, and with the Post the following week. 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 told the Nevada Current:

He told the Post he was unaware of the texts and that Johnston was not working for any client, and Johnston said the same. 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.

In August 2023, per the Nashville Banner’s reporting by Steve Cavendish, Republican Nashville mayoral candidate Alice Rolli learned about the story on the morning of Monday, August 14, and cut the firm loose the same day, with two thirds of her campaign budget already spent there. Johnston had resigned the Saturday before, per a letter he gave Axios.

Rory K. McShane

Nine 2026 challengers who paid his firm directly lost; the two whose county party paid instead won.

Photo: Instagram

The national clients

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

In February 2021 Paul Gosar, the Arizona congressman, 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 who stayed on Gosar’s staff.

Andy Biggs, the Arizona congressman who chaired the House Freedom Caucus from 2019 to 2022, began texting White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on November 6, 2020, three days after Election Day. The texts carried a proposal that state legislatures appoint their own presidential electors, per the January 6 Select Committee’s evidence release. NBC News counted Biggs as one of 34 members of Congress documented trading election-overturn messages with Meadows. On the morning of January 6 he called Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers to ask whether he would decertify Arizona’s Biden electors. Bowers refused, and he described that call under oath in June 2022.

Bob Good won his Virginia U.S. House 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 voted to overturn the 2020 election, took the Freedom Caucus gavel in January 2024, and lost his own 2024 primary by 0.6 points, per Axios.

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

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

McShane worked Corey Stewart’s 2017 Virginia 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.

Per Issue One’s January 2023 analysis, McShane’s firm billed $696,000 across three 2022 candidates for secretary of state, the office that runs elections, and all three campaigned 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, ahead of his June 2022 state convention win, wrote an online column calling the 2020 election a “scam,” per the Associated Press.

Issue One also reported 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

Club for Growth, the national free-market group, has had its logo on McShane’s client page since 2022. Its 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. The network’s Idaho director is Maria Nate, wife of Idaho Freedom Foundation president Ron Nate and the organizer behind the Gang of 8, and McShane’s firm prints the mail for the slate she moves.

That network and the Idaho Freedom Caucus, the bloc of hardline legislators it helped create, split in public in 2024, and the network cut off its support for the caucus, per InvestigateWest and the Idaho Capital Sun. The caucus’s committee, Idaho Freedom Caucus PAC, paid McShane’s firm $13,642.49 in 2026, per Idaho Sunshine records. A separate committee, Idaho Freedom PAC, paid it $5,317.76 in 2024.

Per Idaho Secretary of State Sunshine campaign-finance records, Idaho committees have paid the firm $848,058.90 since 2023, across 450 separate transactions from 60 different committees. Federal filings at FEC.gov add $403,280.55 from Risch’s Senate campaign, for a combined $1,251,339.45. Idaho payments ran $77,029 in 2023, jumped to $378,031 in 2024, eased to $124,538 in 2025, then climbed to $268,461 in the first half of 2026.

Candidate campaigns account for $722,422.84 of the Idaho total. Most of the rest comes from county Republican committees and political committees, and much of that buys independent expenditure: advertising that supports or attacks a candidate but is paid for by a group the candidate does not legally control. McShane’s firm produces the mail, the digital ads, and the text messages. On May 6, 2026, per Sunshine records, Kootenai County Republicans paid the firm $3,324.40 for bulk text messages carrying sample-ballot information for 24 candidates and one measure, and another $3,324.40 the same day for get-out-the-vote texts.

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.” 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 McShane’s firm than any other Idaho candidate, ran on that same slogan.

Brent Regan chairs both the Idaho Freedom Foundation board and the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee. Per Idaho Sunshine records, he 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, and both women are McShane clients. The county party Regan chairs paid McShane’s firm $12,414.78 in the same 2025-2026 cycle. See the Brent Regan dossier.

The 2026 record

In the May 19, 2026 primary, eleven McShane clients tried to unseat a sitting Idaho Republican. Two won, and in both races the county Republican party paid the firm on their behalf.

Jane Sauter and Mark Sauter are unrelated. Per Ballotpedia and Bonner County Daily Bee coverage, 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 paid the firm out of their own campaign accounts.

That is two wins and nine losses, or two and seven counting only legislative races. In 2024 the same category, clients paying the firm directly to challenge a sitting Republican in a legislative primary, produced three winners out of eight, on $101,750.75 of direct billing.

In 2026 the winners and losers sorted cleanly by who signed the check. Every client who paid the firm from a campaign account and went after a sitting Republican lost, and both clients whose county party paid on their behalf won.

Bonner County’s committee spread its McShane-invoiced independent expenditure across twelve candidates that spring, in seven buys. The $5,652.43 figure is Herndon’s share of those seven buys, per Sunshine records, and the three District 1 names on the slate drew identical shares. Jane Sauter was the second. The third was Cornel Rasor, the sitting House 1B representative, who paid McShane’s firm $26,774.24 out of his own committee and drew the same $5,652.43 of county-party support. Rasor held his seat, 9,314 to 5,430, which put the slate at three for three, two of those wins against a sitting Republican.

Across every contested Republican primary the firm’s candidates ran in, for any office, 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, and the firm’s clients won seven of them.

Clients challenging an incumbent went 0 for 7. 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 the open House 6A seat. Two more clients, Carl Bjerke and Tammy Nichols, paid a combined $2,412.45 in uncontested races.

Brett Skidmore paid $75,685.83 in 2024 and lost House 35B 38 to 62. In 2026 the two largest invoices belonged to Worley and Christensen, and both of those campaigns lost as well.

McShane’s firm was running Worley’s Senate campaign six months after the Idaho Army National Guard removed him from command. Per the 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.” See the David Worley dossier.

The firm’s clients posted their best Idaho record in a nonpartisan cycle. In the November 2025 North Idaho city elections, clients went four for five, and Randy Westlund took the Post Falls mayor’s office on 38.76 percent of a three-way vote.

Three Senate District 1 primaries with one vendor

Herndon’s win is the third turnover in a row in District 1, which covers Boundary County and most of Bonner County, Sandpoint included. McShane’s firm has been paid for work in all three campaigns. The account the money came out of changed from cycle to cycle.

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, posted May 18 and last updated July 6, 2026, says he “recently concluded four and a half years of service as Chairman” of that committee and is now the state party’s Region 1 chair and chairs the state central committee’s resolutions committee.

That county committee is the largest party or political-committee customer on McShane’s Idaho books, at $48,115.15 across 11 transactions from 2024 through 2026, per Sunshine records. The next largest, Kootenai County’s committee, is at $34,719.45, counting its payments to Revere Solutions.

Herndon won the seat back by 1,080 votes. In that primary the same committee filed independent expenditures of $8,056.94 for advertising supporting him, the biggest of the twelve candidate lines it filed, and $1,947.16 for advertising opposing Woodward. Of the pro-Herndon total, $5,652.43 was invoiced to McShane’s firm, $2,385.98 to a vendor called The Peoples Pen, and $18.53 to Facebook ads. The anti-Woodward spending was invoiced to The Peoples Pen.

The outside money

Per Sunshine records, Idaho committees reported $208,369.03 in outside spending supporting McShane clients in the 2023-2024 cycle. By 2025-2026 it was up to $469,677.45, more than double, behind a shorter client list whose win rate had dropped.

And the mix of committees writing those checks changed almost completely from one cycle to the next.

Idaho Freedom Caucus PAC was the biggest outside backer of these candidates in 2024 and dropped to $19,648.23 in 2025-2026, while Citizens Alliance of Idaho climbed to the top. Two committees new to the list, 36-18-1 Inc. and Idaho Summit PAC, arrived in 2026 with a combined $253,881.79. The Following the Money 2026 investigation traces where their money originates.

The same clients under a different letterhead

Woodrow Johnston stayed at McShane LLC for more than two years after the Proud Boys message surfaced in the Nevada Current on May 27, 2021, and in the Washington Post that June. He resigned on Saturday, August 12, 2023, two days before a paying client walked, per the Nashville Banner, and opened Revere Solutions LLC.

On April 8, 2024, eight months after he left, 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 $17,020.28 across five transactions, all of them listing 133 NW 78th Ave, Margate, Florida, per Sunshine records. The last cleared three days before the May 2024 primary.

The two broadcast buys, $9,030.14 combined, were split among sixteen candidates at $564.38 or $564.39 apiece, and all sixteen won their May 2024 primaries. Eleven of the sixteen ran unopposed in the primary, so $6,208.21 of that county-party money went behind candidates whose names were the only ones printed in their race. The five with an opponent drew $2,821.93 between them, and four of those five were incumbents or the plurality winner of a four-way open seat.

In calendar 2024 the county party, which Brent Regan has chaired since 2016, paid Revere $17,020.28, a little more than three times the $5,284.39 it paid McShane’s firm that year, per Sunshine records. In 2025 and 2026 its payments went back to McShane: $5,765.98, then $6,648.80.

The candidate lists overlap too. Six of the sixteen names in the Revere advertising buy also paid McShane’s own firm out of their campaign accounts at some point between 2023 and 2026: 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).

The Charlottesville client

Dave Reilly has more documented extremism behind him than the rest of McShane’s Idaho client list combined.

Per an April 16, 2024 report, 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. On November 23, 2021 the Sines jury returned more than $25 million in damages against the rally’s organizers and the groups named as defendants. The Anti-Defamation League classifies Identity Evropa as a white-supremacist organization.

On December 11, 2025, Reilly posted on his own X account: “Nick Fuentes is right about the Jews.” He hosts The Backlash, a Holocaust-minimization podcast, and publishes the Idaho Tribune under pseudonymous bylines. In March 2025 he appeared on Iran’s state outlet Press TV, eighteen months after the U.S. Treasury sanctioned the outlet on September 15, 2023. The Idaho Freedom Foundation quietly hired him as a messaging contractor in December 2023, per InvestigateWest and Idaho Capital Sun.

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

The extremism standard applied

Belief is not extremism; abusive enforcement of belief is. The firm is over that line on the record above: its vice president called the Proud Boys out to a vote-counting facility, McShane kept him on, and the same client list bills a fake-elector indictee and a Charlottesville participant.

According to FEC records, Sen. Jim Risch hired Rory McShane’s firm and has paid it $403,281.

Connected pages

• Following the Money 2026 investigation. The extended Idaho money breakdown.
• Maria Nate dossier. State Freedom Caucus Network’s Idaho director.
• Ron Nate dossier. Idaho Freedom Foundation president.
• 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. Chaired the Bonner County Republican Central Committee, the firm’s largest party-committee customer in Idaho, and won Senate District 1 back in 2026.
• State Freedom Caucus Network organization page.
• Idaho Freedom Foundation organization page.
• The Propaganda Network organization page.

Have evidence?

If you have direct documents, recordings, or firsthand information related to anything on this page, submit a tip.