Rival Factions Amongst Top Donors Behind Cruz and Rubio

The wealthy donors that have built a strong shadow of outside groups of the Republican Party are quickly moving into two equally deep-pocketed and mutually hostile factions, complicating the effort to deny the nomination of the party to Donald Trump, show reports filed on Sunday with the Federal Election Commission.

Many of the financiers on Wall Street that have been Republican Party super PACs over the six years since the decision by the Supreme Court over Citizens United have rallied by Florida Senator Marco Rubio betting he is the best chance the party has to win in the general election if Hillary Clinton were his foe.

In the final six months of 2015, records at the FEC show that a super PAC that supports Rubio took in over $14.3 million including over $2.5 million each from Ken Griffin and Paul Singer to hedge fund founders.

The super PAC drew a significant amount of support from donors that previously had give to groups that supported Jeb Bush amongst them Chris Cline, a executive in the coal industry and Brian Ballard a prominent lawyer in Florida.

However, the steady increase of support for Ted Cruz the Senator from Texas who is a favorite of the Tea Party reviled by leaders of the party, has unleashed the new counter establishment of donors that are conservative, some from outside the realm of traditional Republican donating.

They include the wealthy libertarian businessmen, Israel hawks, evangelicals and other that are disenchanted by the past nominees of the party and drawn to Cruz’s social conservatism that is utterly uncompromising along with his promise to disrupt the traditional power brokers of the party in Washington.

Cruz’s backers include the Wilks a family from Texas who made their fortune in the shale oil business and have become prominent donors to anti-abortion organizations; Edward Czuker a real estate developer in Los Angeles; and Richard Uihlein who donated $1 million to a super PAC that supports Cruz back in January.