Conservative billionaire PAC backs Nate Morris for Senate in TV ad campaign
A political action committee supporting Nate Morris for U.S. Senate in Kentucky placed a $1.1 million ad buy Wednesday.
The ad, a positive television commercial about Morris’ background, marks the first outside spending to support Morris on television.
Morris and Rep. Andy Barr’s campaigns for Senate in 2026 have both run ads in the race, and a PAC supporting Barr as well as a PAC opposing Barr have spent millions on TV ads. Former state Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who is leading in all the publicly available polling but lagging his opponents in fundraising, has yet to air any television ads.
From Restoration of America PAC, led by GOP megadonor and billionaire shipping magnate Dick Uihlein, the latest political ad strikes a sunnier tone than the ones previously aired by Morris.
“There’s a fresh new voice in the Kentucky Senate race: conservative Nate Morris. A ninth-generation Kentuckian, he was raised by a single mother in a union household. Nate worked hard, pulled himself up, built a successful job-creating business from scratch,” the ad’s narrator says.
The ad will air in most of the state, covering Lexington, Louisville, Cincinnati and Bowling Green television markets, according to records with the Federal Communications Commission.
Uihlein is one of the most influential conservative donors in the country. Restoration of America PAC was a top-five outside spender supporting Trump in the 2024 presidential election — almost all of its money coming from Uihlein — and Uihlein is one of the top contributors to Club For Growth, the conservative advocacy group behind a series of ads hitting Barr.
In the 2022 midterms, the heir to the Schlitz brewing fortune was the top donor to Republicans.
Uihlein, who lives in Illinois, also has history supporting both Cameron and Barr as well as other Kentucky conservative ventures. Uihlein even gave Barr’s Senate campaign a direct donation of $7,000 in June, according to records with the Federal Elections Commission.
Along with Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass, Uihlein was one of the biggest outside spenders supporting Cameron’s 2023 run for governor, where he fell short of Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear by five percentage points. Uihlein fueled three separate PACs that supported Cameron.
Restoration of America PAC was also the money behind an expensive 2022 race for Franklin Circuit Judge, an important role overseeing most challenges to state law. It pumped thousands into supporting Joe Bilby, a Republican attorney, against incumbent Judge Phillip Shepherd. Still, Shepherd won in a landslide.
The PAC’s ad backing Morris strikes something of a contrast from Morris’ own previous ads, where the focus was on bashing his opponents and Sen. Mitch McConnell, whose seat he and several others are seeking to fill.
In the early days of the campaign and in the lead-up to his public launch, Morris’ messaging was focused on his opposition to McConnell, who has routinely won in landslide fashion despite low approval ratings in Kentucky. That message came with some prodding from national conservative figures like Vice President JD Vance and the late conservative influencer Charlie Kirk.
Morris launched his campaign in June with Kirk, who was mourned across the country after he was assassinated earlier this month, who said Morris would “end the McConnell mafia.” The Senate candidate also claims he was encouraged to get into the race by Vance, a personal friend who told him McConnell’s “gotta go.”
Still, some of that perspective was present in the ending of the Restoration of America PAC ad.
“Nate’s not part of the Mitch McConnell machine. He’s a true Washington outsider, and, like President Trump, Nate believes in creating prosperity for all Americans. It’s a new day in Kentucky,” the narrator says.
Beyond Uihlein, Morris also got a boost this week from the current Trump-endorsed frontrunner to become Ohio’s next governor. Vivek Ramaswamy, a businessman who rose to political prominence with a run for president in 2024, endorsed Morris Wednesday.
“Nate Morris is the exact kind of candidate the MAGA movement needs in the Senate,” Ramaswamy told The Daily Wire. “The era of career politicians is over.”
