Brad Parscale, then manager of President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, recently boasted that his team had raised nearly a billion dollars by midsummer. What he left unsaid was that it had already spent more than $650 million. That includes a texting operation that reaches more than forty-five million voters, or about one-third of the total number of Americans who voted in 2016.
Like a shadow that’s larger than the person who casts it, spending by outside groups may well exceed spending by the campaign itself.
Despite this massive spending without a contested primary, Trump’s polling numbers have continued to fall as the President fails to mitigate the deadly pandemic. His failures have resulted in more people dying of COVID-19 in the United States than in any other country in the world, as well as surging unemployment, and widespread foreclosures and evictions. The U.S. death toll could top 200,000 by Election Day.
But Trump’s war chest for ads and fundraising, while fearsome, is just one part of the spending to come. Indeed, it is the only part of the 2020 coffers that includes caps on how much any one donor can give to an individual candidate or political party.
Trump’s campaign spending will be amplified by rightwing groups across the nation, especially in swing states. In 2016, these outside groups—even leaving aside Russia’s documented interference—played a key role in delivering Wisconsin to Trump by fewer than 23,000 votes.
Like a shadow that’s larger than the person who casts it, spending by outside groups may well exceed spending by the campaign itself. Some of that money is required to be disclosed shortly after it’s donated—if it is spent by super PACs or 527 groups. But due to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, there are no limits on how much money any given person or group can funnel through these channels, as there are for giving to a candidate or political party.
Other types of spending will be from dark money sources and will not be tallied until nearly a year after the election. That is when nonprofit groups that have run issue ads or “education” campaigns around the election (without expressly asking people to vote for or against a particular candidate) must report their disbursements to the IRS.
For such groups, there are no caps on contributions or spending. There is not even a bar on foreign donors—the U.S. Senate found that the National Rifle Association acted as a “Russian asset” and received funds to help Trump win in 2016. Plus, there is no requirement that the identities of major donors to such groups be disclosed to the American people.
It wasn’t until September 2013, for example, that the public learned a network backed by billionaires Charles and David Koch had raised more than $400 million and used an array of shell corporations and groups to influence the 2012 election. The Koch brothers maintained a “secret bank” for political spending, then dubbed the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce. It has since changed its name to Stand Together. It has used two other names in the past decade: the Seminar Network and the Association for American Innovation.
Last year, the Koch team consolidated some of its political operations into the longtime Koch group Americans for Prosperity. Its prior name was Citizens for a Sound Economy, which grew out of yet another Koch group, the Council for a Competitive Economy. The Koch team also has a massive voter-targeting effort, the “data mine” called i360, and a public relations firm that goes by the name In Pursuit Of.
In January, Emily Seidel, a top Koch official, told CNN: “We’ve been strengthening our capabilities to go bigger than ever before” in the 2020 election. Back in 2016, the Koch network planned to amass and spend $889 million to influence the election. Koch Industries, one of world’s largest privately held corporations, even bought the website address 889million.com.
Americans for Prosperity also hired more than 650 staffers to help in swing states in 2016. In Wisconsin alone, the group “made 1.5 million phone calls and knocked on nearly 30,000 doors,” reported journalist Lee Fang in The Intercept. The Libre Institute, another Koch offshoot, targeted Latinx voters in swing states including Wisconsin. In recent months, Americans for Prosperity has also been touting its role in Trump’s criminal justice reform at Black churches, including in Milwaukee.
But one of the things Americans for Prosperity never tells Black Americans is how Charles Koch and his right-hand man, Richard Fink, helped push for prison privatization, starting as far back as 1987. Koch Industries also backed the American Legislative Exchange Council, commonly known as ALEC, as it helped destroy countless families—with a disparate impact on Black and Latinx communities—by lengthening prison sentences through “truth in sentencing” and “three strikes” laws, as well as expanded immigrant detention.
Two other related groups with long ties to the Koch network, the Independent Women’s Forum and Independent Women’s Voice, specifically targeted Wisconsin in 2016.
They targeted more than 1.5 million registered voters, of the 3.6 million overall, and sent them multiple choice and “true or false” quizzes, consisting of questions on the Affordable Care Act and the U.S. Supreme Court, with the goal of moving independent and Republican women toward Trump. The quizzes were delivered via digital outreach, postcards, and phone calls starting eleven days before the 2016 presidential election.
According to a secret report obtained by True North, a watchdog group I head, these calls, postcards, and social media ads moved women toward Trump by a double-digit percentage. Heather Higgins, who has led the groups’ boards for years, summed up the report’s findings: “Had [this] educational messaging not occurred, Trump would have received an estimated 215,840 fewer votes in Wisconsin, the state completely written off by all the political professionals.”
The Independent Women’s Forum receives some funding from the Charles Koch fortune. It was led for years by Nancy Pfotenhauer, the former top lobbyist for Koch Industries, alongside Citizens for a Sound Economy and Americans for Prosperity, out of the same offices in Washington, D.C.
Higgins, heiress to the Vicks VapoRub fortune, has participated in Charles Koch’s soirées for his wealthy friends. She attended a 2010 event, held after the Citizens United decision, during which Koch allies were urged to attack the Affordable Care Act enacted earlier that same year. The ACA was also one of the two subjects of the “education” campaigns by Higgins’s groups in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and New York on the eve of the 2016 election. The other subject was the U.S. Supreme Court.
The single largest known donor to Higgins’s groups is the Judicial Crisis Network, which is focused on the Supreme Court. It is a dark money group that was funded primarily by the Wellspring Committee, whose primary donor is secret. Wellspring disbanded after Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed.
As The Washington Post documented last year, the main strategist behind the Judicial Crisis Network is Leonard Leo, the now former executive vice president of the Federalist Society.
The Post tallied Leo’s dark money network at $250 million. That amount does not include what the group spent to help push Kavanaugh onto the U.S. Supreme Court, despite evidence that he had attempted to sexually assault an acquaintance, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, and had lied to the Senate about stolen Senate documents he had received.
JCN is very active in Wisconsin. It gave $500,000 to the Republican State Leadership Committee earlier this year, in tandem with the same amount from another Leo group, now called the Concord Fund.
Then, twelve days before the 2020 Wisconsin Supreme Court election, the Republican State Leadership Committee gave $840,445 to its Judicial Fairness Initiative, which spent $824,445 to buy ads to run the week before the vote, to try to help retain Justice Daniel Kelly, a far-right conservative appointee appointed to the court by now former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.
The Judicial Fairness Initiative also spent $16,000 to launch a state text messaging campaign consisting of about 180,000 peer-to-peer texts from one GOP-aligned voter to another. Kelly still lost the race. But the Republican State Leadership Committee had run the same playbook in 2019 for a different seat on the state supreme court, spending about a million dollars in a single week before the election, and won.
The Republican State Leadership Committee is infamous for its role in “REDMAP,” the 2010 effort to expand GOP control of state legislatures to impose hyper-partisan state and federal legislative maps as part of the redistricting that the Constitution mandates.
New documents have recently surfaced that detail how Republicans “rigged” Congressional and state legislative elections. These efforts were remarkably successful in Wisconsin, where Democrats won all of the statewide elections in 2018 and yet remained a distant minority in the state legislature. Journalist Ari Berman has detailed how the GOP-controlled legislature advanced ALEC’s priority bill to make it harder for Americans to vote.
Notably, the newest dark money group tied to Leo calls itself the Honest Elections Project. Its mission? Attacking vote-by-mail and peddling debunked claims of voter fraud.