Sherrod Brown
October 23, 2026 · Newsletter
Peter Thiel, anti-Ohioan.
Folks – remember back in August when the National Republican Senate Committee sent out an embarrassing public plea begging Big Tech and AI companies to help – admitting Husted can’t run on his record?
It was Peter Thiel who answered the call, with $7 million that kicked off a frenzy of spending here, $317 million as of today.
Below is what I wrote about him in August, and I think it’s worth re-upping. You’ve shown up for me so many times. If you can do it again, I know we’re going to send a loud message to Thiel and his kind on November 3:
I won’t let them bail out Husted, Vivek, JD, and Trump and screw over the working people of Ohio.
Two days ago, my team learned that a dark-money group bankrolled by right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel started spending $3.6 million on TV ads attacking me. They’re on the air right now across Ohio and we’re expecting them to add even more ads against me by the end of the week.
If you don’t follow tech and finance news very closely, you might be asking: who is Peter Thiel, and why is he spending millions of dollars in Ohio’s Senate race? Here’s why this matters:
Peter Thiel is a Silicon Valley billionaire. He’s worked for some of the biggest tech corporations around. He has also gone on to co-found Palantir Technologies, a data analytics and defense company that works closely with Trump’s White House to build the tech-powered surveillance systems that target and track people without their consent. He’s a billionaire building the infrastructure of surveillance, then spending millions to buy senators like Jon Husted, who will let him keep doing it unchecked.
Thiel is a cog in the rigged system. Over the last decade, he’s become one of the biggest dark-money funders for National Republicans. In 2022, Peter Thiel poured $15 million into JD Vance’s Senate campaign right here in Ohio, bankrolling him from his first Senate campaign all the way to the White House. Now? JD folds to whatever Thiel asks him for.
Jon Husted is exactly the kind of ally that Thiel wants to buy. As Lieutenant Governor, Husted spent years as the point-man bringing billion-dollar data centers to Ohio, personally backing $2.5 billion in tax breaks for the companies building them. Now, Ohioans are the ones stuck paying the price on their electric bills while out-of-state tech giants and their billionaire investors reap the benefits.
Special interest Jon Husted is already bought by insurance companies, utility companies, billionaires, and Wall Street – so it’s no surprise that Peter Thiel wants to buy the same kind of access.
Why Now
We’re in the final stretch of this election, and I’m in the fight of my life to flip this seat. National Republicans know that the Senate majority rests on what happens in Ohio, so they’ve already spent a whopping $133 million against me. Now, Peter Thiel is in the mix with his own ad blitz. And to a giant like Thiel, $3.6M is just a drop in the bucket of what’s to come.
Thiel’s timing isn’t an accident. Republicans bank on late-cycle ad buys so they can drown out the momentum we’ve spent months building. They want to misrepresent me to undecided voters in the final stretch, before I even have a chance to respond. If a false or misleading claim airs unanswered for even a few days, it can shape how people vote.
That’s their entire strategy: spend big and late and bet that my campaign won’t have the money to fight back in time.
What’s Next
Thiel and Husted are pummeling us with ads this week in Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo, Dayton, and Youngstown. There’s no sugarcoating it: letting a group like this control the narrative will put my campaign in a weaker position going into our final sprint to Election Day. The best way we can stop that from turning the tides is scaling up in those same areas so voters don’t get inundated with the lies in these ads.
We’re doing whatever we can to move our budget around so we can fend off this blitz as soon as we can. This is where you come in.
We didn’t plan for this surprise Republican spend, so we don’t have the budget to go full force against these latest ads just yet. But if a bunch of folks help out this weekend, we’ll be able to scale up our own program and keep this race competitive.
I hate asking you for money. I know you already do so much for this team by staying informed, talking to your friends about this race, and volunteering your time when you can. But I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.
Every decision we make from here until Election Day has the potential to move the needle, so if you can spare $5 or $10 today, it would mean a lot.
Thank you for standing with me at this important moment.
-Sherrod
Before you click away! Republican spending in Ohio has reached $317 million, and Sherrod Brown is counting on your support to keep up. We can’t outspend them, but we can outwork them.