Billionaires Turned a Voucher Cap Into a Defeat

Charles Hartzog was 23 and a gas-station cashier. Then three billionaire-backed PACs spent more than $145,000 to help him defeat West Virginia House Finance Committee Chairman Vernon Criss in the 2026 Republican primary.

Again.

Criss was no voucher opponent. Five years earlier, he had voted to create the Hope Scholarship. His offense was proposing a cap of a little more than $5,000 a year. He said he wanted to prolong the program, not kill it. He had called it a “giveaway program.”

The cap came with arithmetic behind it. Hope cost $9 million in its first year, when a little more than 2,300 students enrolled. Now 26,000 students use it—more than the enrollment in the state’s largest public school district—and this year’s cost is projected at $150 million.

The movement calls it school freedom. The ledger calls it $150 million.

The cap was not an attempt to destroy private schools. It was an attempt to make the money end at a number. The donors wanted no number at all.

Meanwhile, the voucher sends public tax dollars to private schools and other qualified education providers while enrollment losses deepen public-school shortfalls. Since 2019, 70 public schools have closed, more than 30,000 students have left the system, and up to 20 more could close by the end of the school year. The bill to fix public schools died entirely.

Five days after Criss proposed the cap, children and families clogged the hallways outside the House Finance Committee with signs and homework. Lobbyists and organizers said the proposal would destroy the program. Within days, lawmakers stopped the effort to curtail spending.

The bill had died. Now they came for the man who offered it.

Call the class what it is: donor-class politics. Concentrated money can shape a bill, recruit a friendly lawmaker, fund a legal defense, and fund the election that protects the policy. That is the checkbook veto. The checkbook lobby does not need a hotel room and a secret memo. It has campaign-finance law. Its leverage was indirect but immense: lobby for a voucher, support lawmakers who create and expand it, fund candidates who promise more, and bankroll attacks on incumbents who try to cap it.

The voucher money reaches private schools and other qualified providers; the leverage goes to the donors. The cost lands on public-school students, their communities and taxpayers.

The money has a long memory because the donor network can work the whole chain. Yass-controlled charities gave $8.5 million over nearly a decade to the Institute for Justice, which litigated for Hope. Donor-backed outsiders helped create Hope in 2021. Club for Growth Action, the super PAC heavily funded by Yass and affiliated with School Freedom Fund, put $10.8 million behind Patrick Morrisey’s 2024 primary. Morrisey promised to expand Hope, and after taking office his administration promised expansion in 2025 and sought lawmakers aligned with him on budgets and school choice.

The sequence was the point: outsiders helped create Hope in 2021, Yass-backed spending helped elect Morrisey in 2024, his administration promised expansion in 2025, and Criss’s 2026 cap brought the PACs back.

State campaign-finance filings reviewed by ProPublica and Mountain State Spotlight identify the three committees behind the push: Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-affiliated group; School Freedom Fund, which Jeffrey Yass has funded; and Sugar Maple PAC, which received $450,000 from Yass. The same three PACs targeted ten incumbent Republicans and unseated four. All four had disagreed with Gov. Patrick Morrisey; most had expressed reservations about Hope. Criss was the biggest catch.

Sugar Maple spent $86,000 attacking Criss. One mailer put Criss in a garbage truck and called him “Vernon Criss’ liberal trash.” Criss had been unopposed in 2024.

In 13 competitive 2026 midterms, Democrats raised five times as much as Republicans. The party label is beside the point. The buyer is the point. The West Virginia case is plainer: the money had a named policy, a named incumbent, and a measured result.

After the election, David McIntosh, president of School Freedom Fund and the affiliated Club for Growth, called the result a warning: “These elections are a warning to Republican leaders like Vernon Criss — if you oppose school freedom, expect to be held accountable.”

He had the receipts.

This is not a single-campaign story. It is an operating system for power: lobbying, litigation, candidate support and attack advertising all feed the same policy. The leverage did not disappear when Criss lost. It moved into the next election.

Sugar Maple spent $15,000 backing Hartzog. The gas-station cashier won 61 percent of the vote.

The cap died. The checkbook veto.

That was enough.