The parents of a Republican U.S. Senate candidate have donated thousands of dollars to the Democratic woman he is trying to unseat.
The parents of Kevin Nicholson, who is running for the Wisconsin seat held by Sen. Tammy Baldwin, have donated the maximum amount allowed to Ms. Baldwin.
According a Baldwin-campaign filing with the Federal Election Commission, CNN reported Monday evening, Donna and Michael Nicholson each gave the federal limit of $2,700 to Ms. Baldwin’s campaign in December.
The younger Mr. Nicholson announced he was running in July.
Mr. Nicholson has long acknowledged coming from a family of Democrats and said in a statement to CNN that the donations are unsurprising.
“My parents have a different worldview than I do, and it is not surprising that they would support a candidate like Tammy Baldwin who shares their perspective,” he said.
The current Republican-primary candidate was a Democrat himself as a younger man, being the president of the College Democrats of America in 2000.
But “I’m a conservative today not because I was born one, but because of the experience I earned as a Marine in combat, my experience as a husband and father, my choice to be a Christian, the schools I chose to attend and the decision to pursue the career that I have,” he told CNN.
When the issue of his political conversion came up last fall, he told Politico that he definitively left the Democratic Party as a result of its conduct during the occupation of Iraq, which he said left him “livid.”
“I knew what we were doing there,” he said of his 2007 deployment to Iraq. “We were stabilizing that country. We made incredible amounts of progress. And what I was hearing back home was a complete and absolute lie, as politicians were running around calling it a failure.”
