Koch brothers’ network focusing on GOP Senate, not Trump
FAIRLESS HILLS, PA. >> To the Republicans in the red “Can’t Afford Katie” T-shirts, it’s as if Donald Trump doesn’t even exist.
These activists have been sprinting through Pennsylvania neighborhoods, talking to people about how bad Democrat Katie McGinty would be as a U.S. senator. Here to help save Republican Sen. Pat Toomey — and, more broadly, the party’s control of the Senate — are employees and volunteers for Americans for Prosperity, the best-known group financed by conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch.
Similar scenes are playing out in North Carolina, Florida and Ohio.
In addition to having nailbiting Senate races this year, those four states are some of the most important battlegrounds in the presidential race. Yet the Koch activists interacting with millions of people who could be Trump’s most crucial voters aren’t supposed to utter a word about him or Hillary Clinton, a Democrat they’d been preparing for years to attack.
Four years after spending heavily in a futile effort to prevent President Barack Obama’s second term, the Kochs have pushed all of their resources down ballot. And their resources are ample: They’re on track to spend about $250 million on policy and politics in the two years leading to Election Day.
The brothers and many of their wealthy donor friends who fund the political and policy groups known as the Koch network have no interest in backing Trump. In a television interview in April, Charles Koch called Clinton and Trump “terrible role models” and trashed Trump’s “monstrous” proposal for a temporary ban of foreign Muslims entering the U.S.
In the months since, while many Republicans flipped back and forth as to whether to support their nominee, the Kochs never considered engaging in a Trump-Clinton match, even when some donors pressed them at a conference in August.
Instead, Koch groups have spent about $42 million on TV, radio and digital advertising in Senate races. As of this month, they have abandoned paid media altogether, preserving their money for what is a much more critical hole to plug: door-to-door advocacy.
Trump’s campaign has eschewed traditional political grunt work, leaving that to overworked national and state Republican parties, which must advocate for GOP candidates from Trump down to the local council members.
Outside groups led by a former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., continue to spend on ads — they’ll hit about $100 million by Election Day. But the Senate GOP campaigns could really use help on the ground, and that’s where the Koch network comes in. Americans for Prosperity and other groups employ more than 1,200 across 36 states.
To operate as effectively as possible, the Kochs’ data analytics shop, called i360, identified what it believes are 5 million Senate control-deciding voters in eight states. Those voters are either Republicans who seem unenthusiastic this year, perhaps turned off by the ugliness of presidential race, or people who hadn’t quite made up their minds about the Senate contest but lean Republican.