How to Make Friends and Influence Elections

John Jordan, who runs his family’s award-winning Jordan Winery in Sonoma County, Calif., has a lot of stuff. There’s the 58,000-square-foot chateau and the 1,200-acre estate his parents bought in 1972. He has a bass fishing boat, which he keeps docked on one of two man-made lakes on the property, and three private planes, one of which he keeps parked near the estate so he can fly to nearby Santa Rosa for sushi on a whim. He has a startup, which has developed an app for restaurant wine lists, and a marketing team that makes videos of Jordan and his staff dancing to pop songs like Gangnam Style and Blurred Lines to post on the company website.

Before the midterm elections, Jordan, a longtime Republican political donor, decided he wanted something else, too: his own political operation. In October he set up Bold Agenda PAC and spent almost $600,000 promoting an 11-point policy agenda modeled on the 1994 Contract with America. It included rolling back taxes for small businesses that introduce employee profit-­sharing and cutting the salaries of elected officials. Jordan poured some of the cash into running ads for Elan Carr, a Republican who lost his bid for the Los Angeles-area House seat vacated by longtime Democratic Representative Henry Waxman.