DEMS’ SENATE STRATEGY SIMILAR TO GOP PLAYBOOK ON HOUSE RACES
Majority PAC in Alabama last year, during a special election for the seat Jeff Sessions vacated to become attorney general. Sen. Doug Jones, a Democrat, won the seat with the help of $6 million from Senate Majority PAC, which funded both heavy advertising and get-out-the-vote operations.
Because groups like super PACS can take contributions of unlimited size, they are not allowed to coordinate their activities with candidates. As a result, they have tended to dedicate most or all of their money to advertising — on television, radio and the internet — while leaving voter turnout to conventional political parties and campaigns.
But Senate Majority PAC took a different course in Alabama, sensing political opportunity for Jones but recognizing that the Democratic Party in Alabama had been hollowed out over years of defeat. So the group spent about a third of its special-election budget on mobilizing Democratic-leaning voters, especially African-americans.
J.B. Poersch, president of Senate Majority PAC, said the group had set up field offices for the first time in its existence, training volunteers and deploying them across Alabama. He said the operation ultimately knocked on more than half a million doors and reached out to black voters on college campuses and at popular businesses. Jones won the race by about 21,000 votes.
“This was clearly part of the difference maker,” Poersch said of the Alabama program. “And we wanted to carry it forward.”
The Senate Majority PAC program mirrors, in some respects, a field effort Republicans designed to help them compete in House races: the Congressional Leadership Fund. The group, which is well funded and aligned with Republican leaders in the House, has opened 38 field offices around the country as the party seeks to defend its 23-seat majority.
Much as many Senate Democrats are competing in red states where their party is weak, House Republicans are defending dozens of seats in Democratic-leaning areas where there is limited infrastructure to help them.
Both parties are also expected to benefit from field programs deployed by other groups on the left and right, including Americans for Prosperity, the conservative political network funded in part by the billionaire Koch brothers, and For Our Future, a coalition of Democratic-leaning groups backed by organized labor. On Wednesday, CNN reported that For Our Future was partnering with two other pro-democratic groups, House Majority PAC and Priorities USA Action, to fund a field operation in a special election for Congress in Ohio.
While many of the Senate races that Democrats must win are in largely rural and white states, the four states Senate Majority PAC will pursue most aggressively also include significant minority communities that do not always vote enthusiastically in midterms: mainly black voters in Tennessee, Missouri and Indiana, and Hispanic voters in Arizona.
In addition to those four states, the Senate Majority PAC field operation will also cover nine others, including North Dakota, Wisconsin and Montana, where Democratic senators are defending their seats in states President Donald Trump won, and Nevada, where Sen. Dean Heller appears to be the lone Republican incumbent at grave risk of losing his seat.
The $20 million dedicated for turnout represents a major chunk of the group’s entire budget for 2018. The organization announced separately last month that it had reserved $80 million in airtime for television ads across the country.
Poersch suggested the outcome in at least one historically Republican state could hold omens for the 2020 presidential election.
“It’s hard for me to believe the presidential map doesn’t go through Arizona in 2020,” Poersch said. “It’s growing too quickly not to, and Democrats have been improving from cycle to cycle.”