$8 Million in Gambling Money Walked In Right Behind Them, and Pennsylvania’s Senate Is What Was for Sale
On May 20, 2026, three Republican Pennsylvania state senators stood for reelection in the most expensive primary fight in the modern history of the chamber. None of them faced a serious challenger of their own creation. None of them faced a wave of grassroots anger. None of them faced an issue voters in their districts were demanding be solved.
What they faced was an auction.
Two gambling industries, fighting over how Pennsylvania will tax the next decade of slot machines, sports books, and so-called “skill games,” dumped more than $8.1 million into three Republican primaries through a daisy chain of shell PACs, dark-money nonprofits, and out-of-state mailboxes. The challengers they recruited included a professional cowboy, a masonry contractor, and a 32-year-old Army veteran working as a counselor. None of them had run for office before. None of them appeared to know they were being used as the human delivery vehicle for an industry tax fight.
Welcome to representative democracy, Pennsylvania edition, where the people writing your laws are the prize and the people on the ballot are the wrapping paper.
What the Centercratic Party Stands For
The Centercratic Party rests on nine governing principles. Three of them are on trial in Harrisburg this month.
The first reads: “Safeguard Our Democratic System. Govern through compromise, not domination. Reject extreme tactics by special interests and defend the Constitution for everyone.” Two gambling industries spending $8.1 million through a daisy chain of shell PACs to install or intimidate three state senators is not lobbying. It is the textbook extreme tactic by a special interest, repeated twice, in opposite directions, on the same ballot. The Pennsylvania Senate was not asked to compromise. It was put on notice.
The fourth reads: “One Law for All. The law applies equally to all. Independent courts ensure fair process and protect basic rights.” Underneath that principle sits a simpler idea every Pennsylvanian should be able to take for granted. The tax code is not for sale. The corner store owner who sells lottery tickets does not get to bid for her own tax rate. The retiree on a fixed income does not get to bid for hers. Neither do you. When a $2 billion industry can spend $3 million to recruit a cowboy in a Senate primary because the legislature would not give it a 16 percent tax rate, the cowboy is not the absurd part of the story. The 16 percent is.
The fifth reads: “Debate with Facts and Dignity. Conduct fact-based debates with respect. Acknowledge disagreements. Prohibit personal attacks and bad-faith tactics.” A skill games executive who chairs a political committee called “Protecting Our Democracy” and uses it to mail flyers attacking a Jewish state party chair with the Israeli flag draped across his face is not engaged in debate. He is engaged in laundering an industry tax fight through the most poisonous imagery he can find. There is no fact in it. There is no dignity in it. There is only the bad-faith tactic the principle explicitly prohibits.
Three principles, three violations, eight million dollars, two industries, one state Senate. The rest of this story is the receipts.
The Auction Floor
Pennsylvania has two gambling industries that hate each other and one legislature they both want to own.
On one side sit the licensed and taxed casinos and the sports betting giants, FanDuel, DraftKings, and Fanatics Sports Book, who pay a 36 percent tax rate and follow state gaming rules. On the other side sit the so-called “skill games” terminals, the Pace-O-Matic machines tucked into gas stations, bars, and convenience stores across the commonwealth, which have operated for years in a legal gray zone, pay no state gaming tax at all, and pull in an estimated $2 billion a year. Governor Josh Shapiro wants to tax them at 52 percent. Senate Republicans floated 35. Pace-O-Matic, the company that builds them, supports 16. The skill games bill died in last year’s budget and is the fight that everybody in Harrisburg is now refighting.
So both industries did what industries do when a legislature will not give them what they want. They went shopping for new senators.
The targets were chosen with care. Sen. Lisa Baker of the 20th District in northeast Pennsylvania, Sen. Camera Bartolotta of the 46th in Washington County, and Sen. Chris Gebhard of the 48th in south-central Pennsylvania were all Republican incumbents in safe Republican seats. The primary, not the general, was where any vote on gambling taxes would be settled. Knock out the incumbent in May and you do not even have to pretend to court the general electorate in November.
So on the sports betting side, FanDuel, DraftKings, and Fanatics funneled money into a federal super PAC called Win for America, which by March 31 reported $46 million on hand. Win for America moved money to American Conservative Fund. American Conservative Fund moved money to Win for Pennsylvania. All three committees, the Campaign Legal Center and Spotlight PA found, were registered within weeks of each other at the same northern Virginia address by the same individual. Win for Pennsylvania spent $5 million defending the three incumbents.
On the skill games side, Pace-O-Matic executives and the company’s own PAC fed money into Operators for Skill PAC, which fed money into a state political committee called Citizens Alliance and a federal super PAC of the same name. The state committee alone reported $1.5 million in the first months of 2026, 98 percent of it traceable to Pace-O-Matic. The federal version reported $1.3 million, two-thirds from the same source. That money paid for the mailers, the ads, and the field operation attacking the three incumbents. Total skill-games spending on the three primaries came in around $3 million.
Three state Senate primaries. Eight million dollars. Two industries openly bidding on the same three Republicans.
Sen. Bartolotta, who survived her primary, told reporters that somebody is “trying to take the Senate of Pennsylvania hostage.” Sen. Gebhard, who also survived, was more reflective. “Seeing the sheer power of third-party money,” he said, “we probably should be having a conversation on: ‘Is this a positive for the system and the people of Pennsylvania?’”
A Capitol lobbyist, granted anonymity by Spotlight PA to speak honestly, put it less politely. “It’s about special interests being told no, and the only path to retribution is to control the next generation of Senate leadership.”
That is not a legislature. That is a livestock auction with a press office.
The Cowboy, the Mason, and the Counselor
The three people who agreed to ride this money into battle are the saddest part of the story, because they did not appear to know they were the saddle.
In the 48th District, the skill games money found Clovis Crane, a professional cowboy and horse breeder from rural south-central Pennsylvania. More than $1 million flowed into his race against Sen. Gebhard. Crane lost.
In the 46th District, the money found Albert Buchtan, who owns a masonry firm in Washington County. He lost to Sen. Bartolotta.
In the 20th District, the money found Tyler Meyers, a 32-year-old counselor and U.S. Army veteran. Meyers told Spotlight PA, “It’s ridiculous that for someone like me to run, I have to get lucky with someone like [Citizens Alliance] being willing to fund my campaign in the first place. I’m a working-class man.” Meyers lost to Sen. Baker.
A cowboy, a mason, and a counselor walked into a Republican primary, and somebody else paid for everything. None of the three challengers ran on skill games tax policy. None of them ran on sports betting tax policy. The voters in those three districts were never asked, on the ballot or anywhere else, what Pennsylvania’s gambling tax rate should be. The voters were asked to choose between an incumbent and a stranger whose campaign was being run by a Virginia mailbox.
The industries did not need the challengers to win. The industries needed the incumbents to look over their shoulders. Sen. Gebhard now knows that if he votes the wrong way on the next skill games bill, Pace-O-Matic can drop another million dollars on him in 2030. Sen. Bartolotta knows the same. Sen. Baker knows the same. That is the entire point. The auction does not have to clear for the bid to do its work.
The Coleman Receipt
If anybody in Harrisburg doubted the trade was that direct, Sen. Jarrett Coleman of the 16th District has been kind enough to put it in writing.
In July 2025, Coleman published an op-ed defending the skill-games industry’s preferred tax treatment. Spotlight PA reported that he subsequently received $426,000 from Operators for Skill PAC. A sitting state senator wrote an op-ed in favor of a tax rate one industry desperately wanted and then collected $426,000 from that industry’s political arm.
Coleman is not on the ballot until 2028. That is not a defense. That is the schedule.
The Antisemitic Mailer Nobody Was Supposed to Trace
The ugliest moment of this primary belongs to a man named Joseph Calla, an executive at Capital Vending and, according to filings reviewed by Spotlight PA, a $156,000 donor to Operators for Skill PAC since 2017. Calla chairs a new political committee with the kind of name that should embarrass everybody who sees it: “Protecting Our Democracy.”
In the closing days of the primary, Protecting Our Democracy mailed Lehigh Valley voters a flyer attacking the Democratic frontrunner, Bradley Merkl-Gump, as “the hand-picked candidate of the corporate, Israel-first Democratic party boss and insiders.” The mailer overlaid an image of Pennsylvania Democratic Party chair Steve Santarsiero, who is Jewish, with the Israeli flag.
The point of the mailer was not to elect a Republican. The point was to push Democratic voters away from Merkl-Gump and toward a weaker candidate, Mark Pinsley, who would be easier for Coleman to beat in November. Pinsley won the primary. The strategy worked.
The strategy was funded by a man whose business is skill games terminals.
This is what happens when a state legislature becomes a corporate asset. Antisemitic mailers stop being a moral problem and start being a line item.
Once Again
Pennsylvania Republicans took the gambling industry money. Pennsylvania Democrats sat across the aisle and watched a Democratic primary get bent into a shape that benefited a skill games executive. Neither party has introduced legislation to close the shell-PAC chains that made any of this possible. Neither party has called for hearings on whether a state senator who writes an op-ed for an industry and then collects nearly half a million dollars from that industry’s PAC has a problem the ethics code should address.
Aaron McKean, senior counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, described the mechanism plainly. Money laundered through chains of PACs leads to “a less informed vote at the end of the day. And that’s a real problem for our democracy.”
It is a real problem. Both parties know it is a real problem. Both parties prefer the problem.
When two industries can openly bid on three state senators, and the only question left is which industry’s preferred tax rate wins, there is no longer one law for all of us. There is one law for whoever wrote the bigger check, and a working cowboy, a working mason, and a working counselor sent home to wonder what just happened to them.
Once again, our parties have failed us. We have a primary system that runs on industry money, a campaign finance system designed to hide where the money came from, and two parties who treat both as features. We have to save our democracy before it is too late, because nobody inside this auction house is going to do it for us.
That is the wave.
The CenterWave is published by CenterVoter, the home of the Centercratic Party. Visit centercratic.party | centervoter.com