Beaudion Not Quite Halfway to Paying Off Campaign Debt, Uses Donor Cash to Fly to D.C. After Quitting Senate Race

Remember how failed Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Julian Beaudion said he needed to keep raising money after his August 4 withdrawal to pay off his campaign debt?

Beaudion has made some progress. On June 30, Beaudion reported to the Federal Election Commission that his campaign owed $14,458.22 in debt. During the third quarter, Beaudion managed to pay down 46% of that debt. Beaudion is still in the red to the tune of $7,801.10. Beaudion owes $4,301.10 to Berk and Keeley Ehrmantraut’s “full-service political solutions firm” Prairie Sunrise in Sioux Falls for “compliance services”. The defunct campaign owes $3,500 to donor Lenox Ramsey‘s Kampeyn LLC in Richmond, VA, for “campaign management services”.

Beaudion would have 10% less debt right now if he hadn’t used his campaign funds to pay $771.09 in travel expenses in September:

• Delta, 9/4: $158.00
• Citizen M Hotel, Washington, DC, 9/10: $474.97
• Lyft, 9/18–21: $138.18

Beaudion said on social media September 17 that he was in Washington, DC, for Congressional Black Caucus Week, “focused on building coalitions and relationships that matter to the people!” Beaudion livestreamed an episode of his new podcast, launched after his campaign, on September 18 and uploaded a video of himself walking outside the White House fence on September 19.

Back in August, Beaudion told donors his post-campaign fundraising was just for meeting obligations already incurred by his campaign—”We need to responsibly wind down this operation and pay the remaining bills from the campaign we built together.” He didn’t mention anything about incurring new expenses on new trips.

But hey—at least Beaudion didn’t book a private charter flight like Senator Rounds.

Beaudion’s campaign raised only $19,178.69 in Q3, including 884.25 from Beaudion’s pocket on August 3, the day before he quit the race. $3,506.04 of Beaudion’s itemized donations are dated after his acrimonious and petty withdrawal. That’s compared to the $7,541.06 in itemized donations raised before he announced the end of his campaign. Beaudion also reports $7,369.36 in unitemized and thus undated contributions. We can’t tell how much of that came in before he quit, but if we assume the same ratio pre-/post-withdrawal donations in the unitemized pile as in the itemized pile, we can guess Beaudion raised somewhere around $12K in July. That anemic monthly rate didn’t promise much more than the paltry sums Beaudion had reported since 2025 Q4, when he lost whatever paltry campaign finance momentum he might have been building since launching his campaign in spring 2025.

If Beaudion can sustain his August–September fundraising rate and avoid the temptation to travel on other people’s dime, he could retire the rest of his campaign debt by the end of this year.

And hey, Julian! You can move $64 closer to closing that book by canceling your $21.24 monthly subscription to OpenAI, whose ChatGPT never did much good for your campaign anyway.