Misleading anti-Dembo ad misuses WinCity Voices reporting

I don’t like admit­ting it, but I was wrong, and Mitch McConnell was right.

As a young news­pa­per edi­tor, I had arro­gant­ly asked the sen­a­tor in pri­vate if the only thing he want­ed to be remem­bered for was oppos­ing cam­paign finance reform.

The issue was the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, spon­sored by Sens. John McCain and Russ Feingold. One of its pro­vi­sions was a ban on unlim­it­ed soft mon­ey con­tri­bu­tions to nation­al par­ty committees.

Did I real­ly think that weak­en­ing polit­i­cal par­ties was good for elec­tions, he asked.

Maybe he had fore­seen one of the unin­tend­ed con­se­quences of the law, which was a mas­sive shift of cam­paign mon­ey away from par­ties and can­di­dates and toward inde­pen­dent advo­ca­cy groups that were far less trans­par­ent and accountable.

Since that time, spend­ing by inde­pen­dent groups has explod­ed. Many of the ads we now see on tele­vi­sion and online are not the kind where the can­di­date says “I approve this mes­sage,” but rather where out­siders say what they want with­out the candidate’s consent.

Instead of water­ing down spe­cial inter­ests, McCain-Feingold inflamed them.

I sus­pect it may be one of those inde­pen­dent groups that is behind an ad malign­ing Democratic con­gres­sion­al can­di­date Zach Dembo and inac­cu­rate­ly cit­ing one of my arti­cles for WinCity Voices as one of its sources.

The arti­cle is one we pub­lished in July about a Democratic can­di­dates’ event at the Cardinal Community Center where Dembo was the main speaker.

The ad appears on the Democratic Party of Clark County’s Facebook page with a ban­ner across it and the words “Alvarado’s false claims.”

The ad accus­es Dembo of being against tax cuts for work­ing fam­i­lies, a plan to fund rur­al hos­pi­tals, and efforts to hold health insur­ance com­pa­nies accountable.

The Facebook page also shared a link to my sto­ry with the sug­ges­tion: “Some peo­ple might need to read this arti­cle again.”

I inter­viewed Alvarado about the ad pri­or to a Republican cam­paign event on Oct. 8. He didn’t know what ad I was refer­ring to, and he sug­gest­ed that it may be one by an inde­pen­dent polit­i­cal action committee.

So the next day I texted the image to him, and he replied: “No. Not my ad.”

He did, how­ev­er, dou­ble down on his posi­tion that Dembo had opposed work­ing class tax cuts because the Democrat had been against President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which, Alvarado said, cuts tax­es for most Americans.

If the OBBB hadn’t been enact­ed, Alvarado said, it “would have caused everyone’s tax­es to go up. Especially dur­ing the cur­rent cli­mate, that would have been dev­as­tat­ing for people.”

“He’s been very open about that,” he added.

Alvarado couldn’t say whether Dembo was against a plan to spend $50 bil­lion to help rur­al hos­pi­tals because he didn’t know.

And we didn’t talk about the accu­sa­tion that he was against hold­ing health insur­ers account­able because the source cit­ed for that accu­sa­tion was not WinCity Voices, but some­thing called the Paragon Health Institute from last November. I couldn’t find the spe­cif­ic ref­er­ence online.

When I asked in the com­ments sec­tion of the Democrats’ Facebook post with the ad if any­one knew who was behind it, the admin post­ed a pho­to of anoth­er ad with a super­im­posed mes­sage say­ing it was “paid for by No Going Back PAC Inc and not autho­rized by any can­di­date or candidate’s com­mit­tee.” The mes­sage also gave the web­site www.nogoingbackpac.org.

On its web page, the PAC says it “makes inde­pen­dent expen­di­tures in U.S. fed­er­al elec­tions in sup­port of can­di­dates who share the val­ues of the founders and fun­ders of No Going Back PAC Inc.”

According to mul­ti­ple news sources, No Going Back PAC is a spin­off of President Trump’s MAGA Inc. polit­i­cal oper­a­tion and is spend­ing tens of mil­lions of dol­lars on 2026 midterm races. There are sev­er­al arti­cles accus­ing the PAC of air­ing false or mis­lead­ing ads about can­di­dates across the coun­try. One said the new PAC was cre­at­ed in order to post­pone the dis­clo­sure of donors until later.

During the Democratic Party’s Wendell Ford Dinner Oct. 1 in Mount Sterling, I asked Dembo about the claims in the ad.

He told me he was not against the hos­pi­tal relief fund or mid­dle class tax cuts.

“Randy, you were in the room with me, and you wrote that arti­cle that they’re cit­ing, so you know bet­ter than I do that they’re lying.”

Whoever they are.

“The thing that I was against and that I con­tin­ue to be against is the effect these Medicaid cuts will have on our rur­al hos­pi­tals. And so to turn that around and pre­tend that some­how I’m against relief for rur­al hos­pi­tals is just typ­i­cal D.C. pol­i­tics. It’s exact­ly why folks don’t like career politi­cians,” he said.

As for mid­dle class tax cuts, he said: “Of course I’m not for rais­ing mid­dle class tax­es. I think the only thing I talked about in our meet­ing was the car­ried inter­est loop­hole and the fact that rich hedge fund man­agers on Wall Street pay the same tax rate as small busi­ness own­ers on Main Street.”

He added that who­ev­er made the ad was “grasp­ing at straws.”

“What you wrote was fair and accu­rate,” he concluded.

What I wrote actu­al­ly doesn’t even men­tion Medicaid cuts, or the hos­pi­tal relief fund, or the car­ried inter­est loop­hole. It men­tions tax­es and social spend­ing cuts only indi­rect­ly, in the con­text of one para­graph about exces­sive fed­er­al spending:

Dembo said the gov­ern­ment must get deficit spend­ing under con­trol. He said the president’s Big Beautiful Bill (its actu­al name) not only cut ser­vices for peo­ple in need but was a huge tax cut for the rich that added $1 tril­lion to the debt.

According to a fact check arti­cle by the Lexington Herald-Leader’s inves­tiga­tive reporter John Cheves, one of the things the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 does is cut Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program fund­ing by about $1 tril­lion over the next decade.

Dembo has called those cuts “cat­a­stroph­ic,” and said they could deny Medicaid cov­er­age for 200,000 Kentuckians and risk clos­ing 35 rur­al hos­pi­tals across Kentucky. One of the hos­pi­tals list­ed in ini­tial reports was Clark Regional Medical Center, now named Centerpoint Health, in Winchester.

The $50 bil­lion rur­al hos­pi­tal relief fund men­tioned in the ad is a sop intend­ed to off­set some of the dam­age done by the Medicaid cuts to hospitals.

Dembo isn’t against offer­ing hos­pi­tals relief but wants to reverse the cuts that made the relief need­ed in the first place.

Polls show the race between Alvarado and Dembo is close. If Dembo is elect­ed, the for­mer fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor has said he wants to use his expe­ri­ence to fight pub­lic cor­rup­tion, includ­ing in the Trump admin­is­tra­tion and in both par­ties in Congress.

Dembo wants to ban insid­er stock trad­ing by mem­bers of Congress, bar them for­ev­er from becom­ing lob­by­ists, and impose term lim­its on serv­ing in the House and Senate.

One oth­er issue that should be addressed is reform­ing polit­i­cal adver­tis­ing rules and cam­paign finance law, which has got­ten far worse in the last 24 years, espe­cial­ly since Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, which fur­ther tilt­ed polit­i­cal influ­ence toward wealthy donors, big cor­po­ra­tions, and spe­cial inter­est groups.

Even if it means amend­ing the Constitution to get around the idea that polit­i­cal adver­tis­ing is pro­tect­ed speech under the First Amendment — I would argue that it actu­al­ly over­whelms the voice of ordi­nary cit­i­zens — we must address this most per­ni­cious form of pub­lic cor­rup­tion. This time, let’s get it right.