The controversial Doylestown venture capitalist made his money backing startups. He fanned the flames of the COVID culture wars last fall by throwing big money into small-town school-board races. Now he’s set his sights on nothing less than reshaping the GOP.
Paul Martino / Photograph by Justin James Muir
I start with a problem — a problem we all share in one way or another. I told a friend I was working on a profile of Paul Martino, the Bucks County venture capitalist who put more than $500,000 into school-board races across Pennsylvania last fall in a largely successful effort to swing those elections in favor of candidates determined to open public schools that were closed because of COVID — and keep them open. Those candidates were Republicans, mostly, and Republicans will naturally give some school boards a more conservative bent, through other issues that they tend to be passionate about: school choice, critical race theory, gender ID, book banning and so forth.
So to my problem — one, as I say, we all share. My friend had already read the above facts in the Inquirer, and that’s all he knew and needed to know. He responded, “Oh, that asshole. You’ve got to hammer that asshole.” He paused. “Though I guess you’ve got to be … evenhanded. As a journalist. What an…
