(Headline USA) A billionaire businessman with a controversial record on guns may be considering a run for Senate.
Rumors among political strategists and other key stakeholders point to former CEO of Dick’s Sporting Goods, Ed Stack, as the potential replacement for outgoing Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa.
Breitbart spoke with Dan Garcia, who serves on of Pennsylvania’s state Republican committee.
He said he received a phone call polling him on a range of issues, including things that led him to think Stack was fishing for information.
“The first half of the questioning, it was not obvious that the call was in support of any one candidate,” Garcia said. “It just seemed like a generic poll, but then it turned into Ed Stack-specific type of questions, and that’s where I was like, ‘Okay, I think he’s floating a balloon is what it sounds like here.'”
Those questions included things like, “would you be less likely or more likely to vote for him if you knew” Stack been a job creator, or if he supported Donald Trump.
In 2019, Stack sparked controversy for announcing his company would destroyed and stop selling $5 million worth of “assault rifles,” an often misused term, because of his anti-gun beliefs.
“I said, ‘You know what? If we really think these things should be off the street, then we need to destroy them,'” Stack told CBS News at the time of the announcement.
Stack also released a book and began testing the waters for a presidential run that year.
Politico reported on his initial inquiries into the process, including a focus group on Stack’s electability that featured some disappointing results.
Stack was a big donor to Republican causes but turned against the party in 2016, donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to House Democrats.
“Edward Stack is funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars into Nancy Pelosi’s Super PAC to fund his kid sister’s campaign for Congress,” the NRCC said in response to Stack’s switch. “It’s nice to see that Stack is using the money he’s made off of his family shipping jobs out of Upstate New York overseas to China to try buying Kim Myers a seat in Congress.”
