Shannon Burns

Throughout 2021, Burns has transformed the local Republican party in this suburban corner of northeast Ohio, making a local partisan group less local and more partisan. The Strongsville GOP at this point is legally the Better Ohio PAC, a political action committee Burns started. Burns, 46, a mostly middling Republican consultant and now a state central committeeman, is plainly an able and energetic schmoozer. He’s also, though, a slipshod businessman at best — and perhaps something worse as well, according to reams of county, state and federal records, which show evictions, bankruptcies, hundreds of thousands of dollars of back taxes and more than two dozen lawsuits filed against Burns and his companies. People in politics who knew Burns knew him because of Victory Solutions. Victory Solutions, which he incorporated in 2006, according to state records, provided phones and computer software to help campaigns make more calls in less time. Burns’ chief business partner died in 2012 of brain cancer, and his widow, a minority shareholder of Victory Solutions, sued Burns for mismanaging the company and stonewalling her in any communication or ownership benefits. He’s been in charge of the Strongsville GOP since early 2015 — just before Trump started running for president. The Trump campaign in the 2016 cycle paid Victory Solutions $1,266,923, according to Federal Election Commission records. In 2018, Burns filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection twice — declaring $231,901 in assets and more than $2 million in liabilities. In the 2020 cycle, though, Victory Solutions did no work for the Trump campaign, and not that much work at all, based on FEC filings — and now is effectively shuttered because it’s so deeply indebted. In January 2021 Burns incorporated in Ohio a new company called WAB Holdings. It does not do business in Ohio, according to Burns. From February to June of this year, according to Texas records, WAB Holdings made a little more than $600,000 from a PAC called Save Austin Now.