“What Donors Want”: They Helped Elect A New Class Of Congress Members; Now What?
When the 114th Congress convenes on Tuesday, lawmakers won’t merely be thinking of the voters who put them in office. They’ll also be mindful of the donors who helped them reach those voters in the first place.
The 2014 midterm elections cost some $3.7 billion, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. That’s a lot of moneyed interests to consider, and sometimes they aren’t pulling lawmakers in the same direction. What’s a senator to do, for example, if the small-government Koch groups see a federal spending plan as too lavish while the U.S. Chamber of Commerce thinks of it as a win for business?
Scott Reed, a top political adviser for the Chamber, had this take on donor expectations: “We don’t expect the candidates we endorsed to line up 100 percent with us, but we’d like to get them in the 80 percent range.”
Here’s a look at what’s on some donor wish lists—and how they intersect and conflict with each other.
The Koch brothers want an authentic spending fight
Billionaire energy executives Charles and David Koch have a network of advocacy groups that sunk at least $150 million into last year’s elections. They want their senators to be soldiers for less government spending.
“What I want these candidates to do is to support a balanced budget,” David Koch told Barbara Walters in an ABC interview in December. “I’m very worried that if the budget is not balanced that inflation could occur and the economy of our country could suffer terribly.”
Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, the most active nonprofit in the Koch alliance, said his group won’t be shy about calling out lawmakers who take their eye off this spending ball. Phillips predicted chafing between deficit hawks like his group and others that might be willing to sacrifice purity if it means getting their preferred projects funded.
The Chamber of Commerce wants the government to invest in infrastructure
That makes the Chamber, which put up $35 million to usher into office more business-minded Republicans, a potential foe to the Kochs’ top objective. The group spent most of its money on primary contests and notched a win rate of 14 out of 15 candidates, Reed said. The goal was to elect Republicans who are “committed to governing,” he said.
“What we did not want,” he said, “are the candidates who say, ‘Let’s get to D.C. so we can shut the damn place down.'”
The Chamber thinks Republicans should be prepared to fund infrastructure, even featuring that message in some of its candidate advertisements last year. “The key ingredients to thriving free enterprise are roads, bridges and tunnels,” Reed said.
Crossroads wants to avoid messy clashes that could ding the GOP image ahead of 2016
The Chamber can probably count on Karl Rove’s powerful Crossroads political groups as an ally. They’re driven far less by ideology than by party politics. That makes sense: Rove was former President George W. Bush’s top strategist, earning the nickname “Bush’s brain.” The Crossroads enterprise spent $100 million on the 2014 races, according to American Crossroads President Steven Law, and wants more than anything to put the party in a good position for the 2016 presidential election.
“Voters expect constructive action, not obstructionism. They want Washington to work and lawmakers to get things done,” Rove wrote in his post-election column in the Wall Street Journal. “Their expectations are low because their distrust of politicians is high. So surprise them. The rewards will be great if the GOP shows it has a governing agenda.”
Translation: Crossroads wants to keep senators from doing politically damaging things that might cost seats or, worse, the presidency in 2016. To that end, Crossroads will spend much of 2015 providing Republican leaders with research to advise them how to broaden the party’s appeal and what kinds of legislation voters would like to see. “There’s an appetite for constructive change, not reflexive opposition,” Law said.
As for any looming fiscal battles, “we strongly support spending restraint,” Law said. “But where we differ with some of the other groups is in tactics.” He said shutting down the government in protest of Obama’s health care law is a prime example of the kind of “colossal failure” he hopes Republican lawmakers will avoid. “You have to think through what you’re going to get for it. We’d be concerned about shutdown gambits that would tarnish the brand.”
Law, like many representatives of the political money groups, will make the rounds on Tuesday, congratulating the new members and attending various parties in their honor. “Everyone we were helpful to has been very kind about letting us know they appreciated our role,” he said.
Sheldon Adelson seeks the death of online gambling
A billionaire casino executive, Adelson wants to stop what he sees as the scourge of online gambling. He argues it’s not about the bottom line for his international gambling empire, but rather it’s an issue of morality because kids can get hooked on betting. Three states have already legalized online gambling, but Congress could step in with a federal ban. That’s what Adelson has pushed for through a Washington advocacy group he started in 2014.
Although some have argued that it’s too late for action, Adelson isn’t just anyone—he’s a megadonor. In addition to pumping more than $90 million into the 2012 presidential election, he spent $5 million last year to elect Republican House members. Politico reports he may have funneled tens of millions more through nonprofit groups that don’t disclose their donors.
Coal Country wants a return to power
The coal industry demonstrated last year that it can still fuel election turnout. Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used a pro-coal message to pad his win in Kentucky. More than one-third of McConnell’s TV ads in his race against Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes invoked his pro-coal stance, and voter turnout showed the message hit home: He improved his vote totals throughout the state’s coal counties.
The pro-coal theme also played well in West Virginia, where Republican Shelley Moore Capito defeated a Democratic opponent. The American Chemistry Council, American Energy Alliance and United Mine Workers of America Power PAC all weighed in with campaign money and election-time advertising. They’ll be after lawmakers to push back on President Barack Obama’s new regulations limiting smog, which were seen as a direct hit on the coal industry.
Black pastors bought themselves an unlikely friend
Weighing in at just $183,340 in contributions, All Citizens for Mississippi certainly wasn’t the election cycle’s biggest super-PAC. But it packed an important punch. The group worked to motivate African Americans to head to the polls in support of Republican Senator Thad Cochran, who was facing a surprisingly tough primary challenge from the right. The super-PAC, led by a black minister, put out radio ads warning that Cochran opponent Chris McDaniel would be bad for race relations.
Bishop Ronnie Crudup of the New Horizon Church International, who started the super-PAC, said its work on behalf of Cochran erased any doubt about the importance of Mississippi’s African American voters. Crudup said he’s had post-election conversations with Cochran. “The senator knows that African Americans stepped up for him, and I can’t put words in his mouth, but he has made good, affirmative statements that he appreciates the support.”
On Crudup’s wish list: better funding for historically black colleges and universities, policies that bring jobs to Mississippi and federal funding for workforce development. And there’s the issue of Obamacare. Crudup said he’d be very disappointed if Cochran tries to obliterate what he sees as a law that has been particularly helpful in getting African Americans health insurance coverage. “I think that our senator understands his constituents, black and white, depend on that service,” Crudup said.
By: Julie Bykowicz, Thank You Notes, Bloomberg Politics, January 5, 2015
“Who Ya Gonna Call?”: Guess Who’s About To Buy Congress
The midterm elections are less than a week away, and money is pouring into contested states and districts at a furious pace. A new analysis from Public Citizen shows the biggest “dark money” spender is none other than the US Chamber of Commerce, a mega-trade group representing all sorts of corporations—and one that is spending exclusively to defeat Democrats in the general election.
The Chamber is a 501(c)(6) tax-exempt organization, meaning it doesn’t have to disclose its donors. We know from looking at its board, available membership lists and tax forms from big corporations that much of the Chamber’s money has generally come from titans in the oil, banking and agriculture industries, among others.
The Chamber is leaving a huge footprint in almost every race it enters. The report shows that, through October 25, the Chamber has spent $31.8 million. The second-largest dark-money spender, Crossroads GPS, spent $23.5 million:
Among the report’s other findings:
- The Chamber is averaging $908,000 per race it enters.
- The Chamber is the biggest dark-money spender in twenty-eight of thirty-five races it entered.
- Of the twelve contested Senate races, the Chamber is the top non-disclosing outside spender in seven of those races, spending an average of $1.7 million per state.
- In the twenty-three House races in which the Chamber has spent over $11.5 million, it is the top spender in all but two of them.
- The Chamber has spent mainly to either support Republicans or attack Democrats. The only money it spent against Republicans came early in the year during GOP primaries to support business-friendly Republican candidates.
Thanks to weak campaign finance laws, however, we will likely never know who exactly is bankrolling this massive presence in the midterm elections. “When large corporations decide they want to get their own candidates into office but they don’t want to be seen doing it, they call the US Chamber,” said Lisa Gilbert, director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division. “These politicians then push for anti-environmental, anti-consumer and anti-health policies and priorities that hurt everyday Americans.”
By: George Zornick, The Nation, October 29, 2014
“Far From The First Time”: Karl Rove Still Can’t Find An Actual Obamacare Victim
Politics is a constantly changing business, but there are still a few things you can count on in every election cycle: like Karl Rove’s dark money group, Crossroads GPS, blowing its donors’ money on misleading, ineffective attack ads.
Since President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in 2010, its opponents have spent over $400 million on television ads attacking it, with Crossroads leading the way. But despite Republicans’ repeated assertions that Obamacare would be the issue that causes Americans to rise up against Democrats and throw them out of office, the torrent of attack ads has actually done little to sway public opinion against the law. In fact, according to a Brookings Institution study, anti-Obamacare ads may have actually increased ACA enrollments by raising awareness about the law and its benefits.
But still, conservative outside spenders are determined to take their anti-health care message directly to the voters. The latest example is a new ad from Crossroads GPS, in which a Colorado woman named Richelle McKim laments that Senator “Mark Udall’s vote for Obamacare has hurt families in Colorado.”
McKim recounts her husband’s decision to start a new business, saying “We knew we needed to find health care. Because we were a single-income family, we couldn’t afford our plan.” Text then flashes across the screen, letting viewers know that “Richelle had to go back to work.”
It seems like a perfect case to make to the suburban women who are likely to decide Senator Udall’s tight re-election battle against Republican congressman Cory Gardner.
It also happens to be totally false.
As Denver television station KDVR reports, McKim has worked constantly over the past six years; from July 2008 through May 2010, she worked from home as the office manager for her husband’s company (which, evidently, wasn’t founded as a response to Obamacare). Since then, she has worked for Anadarko Petroleum and Noble Energy — which have donated $57,550 and $36,000 to Gardner’s campaign, respectively.
By McKim’s own admission, Obamacare didn’t actually drive her back into the workforce, as the ad claims.
“It wasn’t the Affordable Care Act,” she told KDVR. “It was just a financial burden, having a single income for so long.”
And, for good measure, McKim’s husband used to forgo health insurance because he suffers from high blood pressure — a pre-existing condition that made his insurance more expensive until the ACA became law.
This is far from the first time that Obamacare opponents have been forced to stretch the truth, flatly lie, or just give up and use paid actors to tell a scare story. Indeed, it begs the question: If the Affordable Care Act is really such a disastrous boondoggle, why couldn’t Crossroads — or the Koch brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity, or even House Republican Conference chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers — find an actual victim?
In this case, the fact that Obamacare has helped cut Colorado’s uninsured rate by 6 percent might have something to do with it.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, August 8, 2014
“The Increasingly Confusing World Of Campaign Finance”: Koch-Backed Small Business Front Group Added To ALEC Board
The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), a big business-funded group that claims to be the “nation’s leading small business association,” has joined the corporate board of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or “ALEC.” It marks perhaps the final step towards the NFIB abandoning any pretense of being a nonpartisan representative of small business owners.
ALEC has been described as a “corporate bill mill” that allows big business interests to peddle influence with ALEC’s legislative members — who are almost entirely Republican — and push “model” legislation that tends to benefit the corporate bottom line or advance an ideological agenda. The NFIB has long been an ALEC member, and this week joined the ALEC corporate governing board, which meets jointly with the ALEC legislative board and helps set the agenda and fundraise for the organization.
The announcement of the NFIB’s board membership came the same day the New York Times revealed that the the health insurance lobby, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), laundered $1.6 million through the NFIB’s dark money advocacy arm in 2012 to attack Democratic Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas. This is on top of the $850,000 that the insurance group gave to NFIB the year before.
The New York Times wrote:
“The largely hidden role of the for-profit health insurers highlights the increasingly confusing world of campaign finance, as nonprofit groups such as the National Federation of Independent Business and its Voice of Free Enterprise program can keep their donor lists secret and then present their carefully fashioned message, financed in large part by big business, as if it is coming from, perhaps, a more sympathetic voice.”
Even the small business owner featured in the NFIB’s ad, John Parke of Little Rock, Ark., said he didn’t know the message was being bankrolled by the insurance industry — but says he should have been told.
“It is relevant to understanding who is sponsoring the message,” he said.
AHIP represents dozens of insurance companies, some of which are ALEC members, such as Guarantee Trust (which chairs ALEC’s Health & Human Services Task Force) and State Farm (which is also part of the ALEC corporate board).
Yet the insurance lobby donation wasn’t the NFIB’s biggest grant in 2012, which is the most recent year that records are available. The biggest donor to NFIB and its affiliated groups was the Koch brothers-backed Freedom Partners, an outfit that Politico described as “the Koch brothers’ secret bank.” Freedom Partners gave NFIB and its affiliates $2.5 million in 2012. NFIB received an additional $135,000 that year from another Koch funding outfit, the Center to Protect Patient Rights.
A Koch representative also sits on the ALEC corporate board.
A small business owner who joins the NFIB pays $195. Which means the Koch network’s donations to NFIB in 2012 was the equivalent of over 13,500 individual memberships. AHIP’s money amounted to more than 8,200 memberships.
Which raises the question, who does the NFIB speak for?
Small business owners run the gamut politically. Around a third say they are Republican, one-third Democrats, and one-third independent. Yet the NFIB’s political spending has not been representative of the small business owners it claims to represent. Its political donations go almost entirely to Republicans. And the NFIB’s funding sources place it squarely within the right-wing infrastructure.
The NFIB’s partisan and big business ties became evident in 2010, when it launched the lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act that eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court. That year, Karl Rove’s dark money outfit Crossroads GPS gave the NFIB $3.7 million. The Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation (which also donates to ALEC) chipped-in an additional $100,000.
Prior to the healthcare lawsuit, the biggest contribution to the NFIB from an outside source was $21,000.
By: Brendan Fisher, PR Watch, The Center for Media and Democracy, August 1, 2014
“Gray Matter”: ‘Bush’s Brain’ Short-Circuits
Karl Rove, the most brilliant political strategist of his generation, the man George W. Bush called “the Architect,” the man Stephen Colbert immortalized as “Ham Rove,” the pundit to whom Fox News viewers turn to give them the low-down, stuck his foot in it again. Should anyone really be surprised?
In case you’ve been in the desert on a vision quest, last week Rove implied, with some mangled facts, that Hillary Clinton might have lingering brain damage from the incident in 2012 when she suffered a concussion and had a blood clot removed. Democrats and even some Republicans got really mad, even as all agreed that the health of presidential candidates is a legitimate topic for discussion. Then over the weekend on Fox News Sunday, Rove was on the defensive but refused to back down.
“Look, I’m not questioning her health,” he said, right after questioning her health. “What I’m questioning is, is whether or not it’s a done deal that she’s running. And she would not be human if she were not—if she did not take this into consideration.” Everyone on the panel then agreed that Rove had done harm to the Republican cause, because this attack on Clinton made Rove look cruel and made her look like a victim.
Make no mistake, Karl Rove was an excellent political strategist back in the day, even if he was a particularly diabolical one (if you haven’t read Joshua Green’s great piece on Rove’s early career in Texas, which featured things like spreading rumors that one client’s opponent was a pedophile, do it now). But as a pundit, he’s awful and always has been.
It’s particularly problematic for Republicans, because Rove’s punditry has always been crafted with the purpose of advancing GOP electoral fortunes, even more so than your average “strategist” who goes on TV to spout talking points. Rove always claims to have access to secret information or more insightful analysis than anyone else, yet time after time, he’s just wrong. That’s partly because his supposedly informed assessment is usually that things are going to turn out great for Republicans and terrible for Democrats. And because he holds such an exalted place on the right that when he says something stupid it generates a lot of negative attention. So while listening to Rove makes Fox’s viewers feel informed, in the end he does the right far more harm than good.
Let’s just take a quick review of some highlights:
Just before the 2006 midterm elections, Rove was confident Republicans would retain control of Congress, because he had analyzed all the races. “You may end up with a different math,” he told NPR, “but you are entitled to your math and I’m entitled to THE math.” Democrats took both houses in a historic sweep.
In late 2011 he predicted that Sarah Palin would enter the presidential race. Four years earlier he predicted that Hillary Clinton would be the Democrats’ 2008 nominee.
He predicted that Mitt Romney would win the 2012 election by 3 percentage points while taking Florida, Ohio, Virginia, New Hampshire, and Colorado, all states Obama won. And of course, there was the dramatic on-air meltdown on election night 2012, when he refused to accept the network’s call that Ohio had gone to Obama.
Lots of pundits get things wrong, but Rove manages to combine wrongness with a contempt for those who disagree with him, and a tendency to get bombastic when subtlety is called for. For instance, in that Fox News Sunday discussion, he noted that Bill Clinton’s campaign made some digs at Bob Dole’s age in 1996. Clinton “ran for re-election by savaging Bob Dole. He ran television ad that said, the old ways don’t work…Bob Dole looked like Methuselah in the Clinton TV ads.” That’s fair enough, but when Clinton’s team did that, they at least made an effort to be circumspect about it. Unless I’m forgetting something, no Clinton adviser went on television and said, “You know what Bob Dole’s problem is? The guy’s too old!” If you want to get people talking about a sensitive topic, you don’t bash them over the head with it (so to speak), as Rove did by talking about Clinton’s “traumatic brain injury.” A more clever strategist would realize that just invites a backlash.
I suppose one could argue that Rove’s ham-handed approach to attacking Clinton is refreshingly forthright. But there’s no doubt that he was trying to implement a strategy, and he didn’t want the criticism that ensued, which shifted attention away from Clinton and on to him. Oh, and don’t forget that American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, the groups he co-founded to take down Barack Obama and other Democrats, flushed $174 million of their donors’ money down the toilet in 2012. So maybe we can stop considering him such a political genius.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 20, 2014
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