Follow the money in Tennessee's race for governor and you keep landing in the same place: a handful of very rich people who want your tax dollars spent on private schools.
In June, two ads hit Tennessee airwaves boosting Marsha Blackburn's campaign for governor. They were paid for by a political action committee called the Tennessee Freedom Fund. That PAC raised $4.6 million in three months — and $3 million of it came from a single source tied to one of the country's biggest political spenders: the pro-private-school-voucher group Club for Growth. That's according to reporting by the Tennessee Lookout.
Here's why that matters for the rest of us.
One billionaire, one agenda
The $3 million check came from a Club for Growth affiliate called the School Freedom Fund. And nearly all of that fund's roughly $15 million this election cycle traces back to one man: billionaire Jeff Yass.
Yass isn't a Tennessean looking out for Tennessee kids. He's a Wall Street investor — best known as a major backer of the Chinese-owned app TikTok — and one of the largest donors behind Donald Trump's 2024 campaign. He also gave $1 million to Team Tennessee, another PAC set up to help Blackburn.
Add it all up and Yass is Blackburn's single largest backer, counting both PAC money and her own campaign account. This isn't a new relationship, either. Yass first cut Blackburn a check back in her 2002 House campaign, and Club for Growth helped power her 2018 run for the U.S. Senate.
So when a billionaire spends millions to make someone governor, it's fair to ask: what does he want in return?
What the money is buying: your school dollars
The answer is right there in the name — the School Freedom Fund. Yass and Club for Growth spend to elect candidates who will push private-school vouchers, which take public money and hand it to private schools.
Blackburn is exactly that candidate. Among the top Republicans running for governor, she's the only one who is 100% behind expanding Tennessee's private-school voucher program. In her own words:
"We must continue to expand school choice programs, like the Education Freedom Scholarships, to make certain that every parent can choose the education for their child that best suits their child's unique needs."
That program is currently capped at 35,000 students. Blackburn wants to grow it — and the billionaire bankrolling her wants the same thing.
We've seen this playbook before
This voucher money machine doesn't just fund friendly candidates. It punishes Republicans who get in the way.
In 2024, Club for Growth spent more than $3 million in Tennessee state legislative races, running a smear campaign against Republicans who had opposed Gov. Bill Lee's voucher expansion. Lee's plan failed that year — then narrowly passed in 2025, with newly elected, Club for Growth-backed lawmakers providing the winning votes.
The group then dropped roughly $380,000 in a 2025 primary to sink a state representative, Jody Barrett, who had simply voted against vouchers. The message to any Tennessee Republican is blunt: cross the voucher billionaire, and he'll spend you out of office.
Now that same operation is trying to install a governor.
This is who Blackburn works for
None of this is out of character. Blackburn's whole career runs on big outside money. Look at her top donors and you find AIPAC, the private-prison company CoreCivic, hospital giant HCA, and Wall Street's Apollo Global Management — not the working families of Tennessee. She has spent 23 years in Washington and hasn't held an in-person town hall in her home state in years, leaving constituents to ask their questions to a cardboard cutout.
Public schools serve nearly every child in the state. Vouchers pull money out of those schools and send it to private ones that can pick and choose who they take. When a billionaire spends millions to expand that, he isn't doing it for your family. He's doing it to destroy public education, and Marsha Blackburn is helping him.
Source
Adam Friedman, "Pro-private school voucher Club for Growth donates $3M to PAC backing Blackburn for governor," Tennessee Lookout, July 13, 2026. Photo: John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout.
