The campaign of Republican David Flippo, who faces an unexpectedly tough race to fill a red House seat in Nevada, credited a dead woman from a prominent Nevada family for a donation, according to federal disclosures.

The attribution marked the latest in a string of stumbles for the campaign, including missing deadlines for financial disclosures and retracted claims about military awards.

Flippo’s campaign accepted a $7,000 contribution from Marilynn Mack last month, twice the maximum donation per federal election. Instead of returning some of the money, the campaign reattributed $3,500 of the donation to Joyce Mack, her mother, who died in 2024, according to amended filings submitted to the Federal Election Commission.

Joyce Mack was a community leader and well-known philanthropist in Las Vegas. The family name is on the Thomas & Mack Center arena at the University of Las Vegas.

When asked about the donation by The Wall Street Journal, Flippo campaign spokesman Rory McShane said it was a clerical error and the campaign again amended the donation, putting half of Marilynn Mack’s donation toward debt from the primary, and half to the general election. Marilynn Mack didn’t respond to queries about the donation.

Retiring Republican Rep. Mark Amodei, who has held the seat for 15 years, has called Flippo a fraud and said he won’t support him due to unanswered questions about his finances and lack of history with the district. He relocated to the district from Las Vegas to run in a safer seat.

“I’m proud of the fact that I’m a Republican, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to step in front of basically a fraud freight train and go, ‘Well, it’s a Republican freight train, so it isn’t going to hurt when it splatters me all over the tracks,” Amodei said in an interview.

The Flippo campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request to comment on Amodei’s fraud remark.

The district that stretches from Reno to the state’s desert border with Utah has been solidly Republican for years, but the nonpartisan Cook Political Report shifted it to Likely Republican from Solid Republican in Flippo’s contest against Democrat Teresa Benitez-Thompson. Cook said “Republicans’ polarizing nominee, David Flippo, has given Democrats an outside chance at flipping this seat.”An independent candidate, Lynn Chapman, is running as an alternative candidate to Flippo, potentially dividing conservatives. Republican groups said they were confident that conservative voters in their district will pick Flippo in November.

Flippo was endorsed by President Trump in the primary, boosting him through to the general election in a crowded pack of the Republicans. MAGA Inc., the Trump-aligned PAC recently spent $31,000 on digital ads against Benitez-Thompson in the race.

Flippo, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, has never filed a personal-finance disclosure for his campaign, to which he has contributed $1.8 million. When pressed by local media, he sent the Nevada Independent an unsigned draft, though he hasn’t filed the paperwork with the clerk of the House of Representatives. He also didn’t file financial disclosures in the previous years he ran for Congress.

That draft disclosure provided to the Nevada Independent showed a net worth between $3.2 million and $14.5 million, with holdings in “America First Home Mortgage” and “AZ Land Reserve PPM” in Meadview, Ariz., a rural community near Lake Mead and the Grand Canyon’s West Rim.

He has faced accusations of misrepresenting his military service after saying in campaign emails that he earned the Bronze Star for valor, awarded for act in direct combat. Flippo did earn a Bronze Star in 2004 but it did not carry the “valor” distinction. Late last month he held a press conference in Reno and apologized, blaming campaign video editors and copywriters who mixed up the awards.