WASHINGTON ― The campaign for Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) sent an email Thursday night urging supporters to give him money in the face of a massive and coordinated left-wing attack.
But really, Heller is just fundraising off of a 3-year-old mean tweet by a random guy with 199 Twitter followers as of Friday evening.
“We’ve seen a remarkable stream of emails of support from friends like you upset about the over-the-top attacks against Dean, and we hear you,” begins
The email highlights this tweet by @jefsauce, aka “Tim, hi.” It’s from April 2014.
“Their opposition to common sense ideas like school choice and smaller government have brought on this excessive aggression,” the email says. “When you’ve been enabled by big government for so long, clearly you will [sic] they say and do anything to protect it.”
“That’s why I’m reaching out earlier than we have ever needed to before,” it continues. “Will you contribute $25, $50, or even $100 to fight the attacks?”
It’s unclear why @jefsauce tweeted his message three years ago. When The Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim asked him on Twitter, he said he didn’t remember. But @jefsauce noticed that Heller was using his old tweet to raise money, which prompted this response on Friday:
”Well it’s certainly silly that a public figure would still be upset about a three-year-old tweet from a nobody like me,” the person behind @jefsauce later told HuffPost. “I just hope that if he made any money off my content, I see my fair cut of it. Thanks!”
Heller’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Heller is up for re-election in 2018 and is one of the most vulnerable Senate Republicans.
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