Dems Fight RFK Jr.

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. The 2024 race has begun.

 Voters are not happy about having to choose between Trump and Biden.  Trump allies are trying to boost RFK Jr. in an effort to split the anti-Trump vote.

 Elena Schneider at Politico:

The coalition of Democratic groups that pressured No Labels out of the 2024 contest is now turning its sights on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Billboards funded by the Democratic National Committee have begun popping up outside Kennedy’s events. Trackers paid for by American Bridge, a Democratic super PAC, are following him with cameras. And another super PAC, founded exclusively to take on third-party threats, is message-testing ads on Kennedy in coordination with Future Forward, the flagship pro-Biden super PAC.

It’s a widespread effort among Democratic donors and strategists to neutralize Kennedy’s third-party threat to President Joe Biden’s reelection.

And Biden’s allies are now considering going even further, with a coalition of major Democratic groups privately discussing running a negative ad campaign against Kennedy.

Talks are preliminary, and the size and scope of the campaign — and even if it will go forward — remain unclear. But should it get the green light, the effort would likely be spearheaded by Future Forward; Clear Choice, another super PAC founded to stop third-party candidates; and American Bridge, another Democratic super PAC, according to two people involved in the effort who are not authorized to talk about it publicly.

If they cannot keep him off the ballot, they might try to drive antivax Trump voters into the RFK camp.

 

Joe Biden should run some ads about how he and Donald Trump don't agree on much, but they do agree that the COVID-19 vaccine Trump shepherded to completion and Biden successfully distributed to hundreds of millions of Americans was a modern miracle that saved lives. https://t.co/aUof7YrgN2

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) April 30, 2024

Defending Biden

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections. the 2022 elections gave the GOP a very narrow majority in the House, which they will use to help Trump in 2024.

In August, Jordain Carney reported at Politico that House Republicans will use investigations as an electoral tool: Gym Jordan said the quiet part out loud:

“That will help frame up the 2024 race, when I hope and I think President Trump is going to run again. And we need to make sure that he wins,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who’s set to chair the Judiciary Committee under a 2023 GOP majority, said at a CPAC conference in Texas late last week.

In 2015, Kevin McCarthy blurted out a similar admission, about how the Benghazi hearings had hurt Hillary Clinton.

Alex Seitz-Ward at NBC:

The Congressional Integrity Project, which already has focus groups underway, promises to be as much about offense as defense. It plans to investigate the lawmakers investigating Biden, many of whom hail from the safe congressional districts and have never faced a tough election and the kind of opposition research and media scrutiny it brings.
...

Herrig’s group is working with another, Courage for America, which just launched. While the Congressional Integrity Project is focused on the investigations, Courage for America is focused on the legislation and personalities of the entire House GOP caucus.
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With a seven-figure budget and support from the Hub Project, a giant Democratic dark money network, the group plans a robust operation including polling, paid advertising and social media campaigns, along with traditional opposition research and communications.

The third group, Facts First, was started by David Brock, the former self-described “right-wing hit man” who then had a political conversion and used his fundraising talent to start a series of groups that have become key parts of Democratic infrastructure. Those include Media Matters and American Bridge, both of which he stepped away from to start Facts First.

Brock said an American Bridge donor has already pledged six-figures to support Facts First, which he said would likely have a $10 million budget over two years. Co-founders include former Republican Rep. David Jolly, a Trump critic who has since left the party, and longtime Democratic strategist Maria Cardona.

Oppo 2018

 In  Defying the Odds, we discuss opposition research.

At New York, Gabriel Debenedetti writes about American Bridge, America Rising, and the changing world of oppo:

In the old days, the group’s trackers — junior staffers with cameras who follow Republicans around, waiting for a gaffe — were instructed to identify themselves as American Bridge operatives when they got to an event, and they were told to remain passive, not asking questions or trying to trick their targets. Rule eliminated. (It took just until May 2017 for the group to post unflattering footage of a Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate grabbing a tracker’s camera and then angrily pushing him away.) In the pre-Trump era, the group stopped short of snooping for dirt beyond publicly available documents or clips. The no-digging-and-no-working-the-phones-and-no-sniffing-around-in-person guideline is now gone, fully thrown out the window by the time American Bridge dispatched staff to Alabama to look into Roy Moore last winter. And, after consulting local campaign finance and consent laws, Brock convinced some of his funders to set up a small fund that trackers can now tap into if they want to pay their way into GOP candidates’ private events where that’s legal. That move opened up a massive new stream of potentially damaging material for Republicans who think they’re speaking behind closed doors to friends and supporters. The tactic didn’t take long to pay off, either: it’s how the group caught Ed Gillespie, 2017’s Republican candidate for governor of Virginia, calling the northern part of his state “enemy territory” in a private fundraiser last September.

American Bridge’s bet is that most of the old laws of politics remain intact, but that it takes a new kind of alert system to call out violations. At a time that Missouri’s Republican governor is hanging onto his seat while he fights a handful of scandalous charges — including an explicit accusation of sexual assault — a Montana GOP congressman was elected one day after body-slamming a reporter (and is now favored for reelection), and, of course, Trump remains firmly ensconced in the Oval Office, it’s not clear that politicians around the country are so confident in the old rules’ stability.

American Bridge v. Trump

Trump's GOP opponents failed at oppo, but Democrats are not making that mistake. At The New York Times, Maggie Haberman and Ashley Parker report that American Bridge seeks to define Trump as effectively as it defined Todd Akin in 2012.

In 2016, the group is taking every opportunity to do the same thing with Donald J. Trump. It is maintaining an archive of digital video footage, with 6,500 clips of Mr. Trump speaking or being mentioned, going back to the 1980s, and 17,000 hours of footage over all. It has also compiled more than 5,000 pages of research on the presumptive Republican nominee and has 25 trackers monitoring him.

American Bridge is playing a more significant role in 2016 than it did in 2012, when the Obama campaign was leery of the group, which was founded by a close ally of Hillary Clinton’s. This cycle, Democrats have relied on it openly for research.

There are special systems that allow it to search by specific strings of words to identify issue targets. It is trying to expedite their ability to quickly frame a case against Mr. Trump. And it is monitoring roughly 600 candidates up and down the ballot, in addition to Mr. Trump.

In the 25th paragraph of the Times story about the Trump Institute's sleazy business practices and plagiarism, we find where the story cam from:

Asked about the plagiarism, which was discovered by the Democratic “super PAC” American Bridge, the editor of the Trump Institute publication, Susan G. Parker, denied responsibility and suggested that a lawyer for the Milins, who provided her with background material for the book, might have been to blame.

Planning to Run Against Trump

At The New York Times, Amy Chozick and Patrick Healy report on how Democratic groups are planning to run against Trump:

The plan has three major thrusts: Portray Mr. Trump as a heartless businessman who has worked against the interests of the working-class voters he now appeals to; broadcast the degrading comments he has made against women in order to sway suburban women, who have been reluctant to support Mrs. Clinton; and highlight his brash, explosive temper to show he is unsuited to be commander in chief.

American Bridge, a pro-Clinton “super PAC,” has formed a “due diligence unit” of tax and business experts who are poring over Securities and Exchange Commission documents and court records related to Mr. Trump’s business career.

A staff member for an affiliated group, Correct the Record, which coordinates with Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, has collected footage of comments that have not hurt Mr. Trump’s standing among Republican primary voters, but that could be stitched together in what the group’s founder, David Brock, described as a montage of hateful speech that would appall a general electorate.
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“They’ll flip their top, and they’ll flip their panties...” read the subject line of a recent news release from Emily’s List, a group that works to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights. The quote came from comments Mr. Trump made about women on “The Howard Stern Show” in the 1990s, unearthed by BuzzFeed last month.
Those types of comments, spoken by Mr. Trump over the years as he served as a tabloid regular and reality TV star, could help Mrs. Clinton excite suburban women and young women who have been ambivalent or antagonistic toward her candidacy.

Stephanie Schriock, the president of Emily’s List, said that an expanded research shop at the organization had compiled “an endless amount of misogynistic and outrageous comments towards women.”

The strategy highlights a concern among Mrs. Clinton’s allies that her chance to become the first female president has not led to widespread excitement among young women. Mr. Trump is the perfect solution to the enthusiasm gap, many Democrats say.

America Rising, Emulation, and Photography

At AP, Julie Bykowicz reports on the iron law of emulation:

Republicans watched American Bridge with envy. Then they copied it.

"Republicans had completely dropped the ball on tracking," said Steven Law, president of American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, two of the best-funded outside groups of the 2012 election. "And we were deeply disappointed with the quality of the opposition research available to us."

Law and Crossroads co-founder Carl Forti persuaded Joe Pounder, the Republican National Committee's lead researcher, and Matt Rhoades, manager of Republican nominee Mitt Romney's campaign, to start America Rising in early 2013. Crossroads was its first client.

Like American Bridge, America Rising is part-super PAC. That entity raised $1.3 million by the end of last year. But the group also is part-corporation, selling its tracking, research and rapid response. Federal Election Commission records reviewed by The Associated Press show candidates and political groups have paid the corporate side more than $3.4 million for its services.

Its clients include the Republican National Committee and the main party committees for the Senate and House of Representatives as well as several state parties.

Both America Rising and American Bridge are expanding. Between the two, they'll employ at least 150 people through Election Day next year.

American Bridge recently spun off a second group, called Correct the Record, to defend Clinton against attacks coming from America Rising and GOP opponents. And America Rising this month brought aboard Spencer Zwick, the financial architect of Romney's campaign, to help raise money.

"I believe a donor gets more bang for their buck in participating with America Rising," Zwick said. The group "has a more direct impact than almost any other organization."

Reena Flores reports at CBS:

Right-leaning opposition research group America Rising has launched its own photo agency, announcing Thursday that it would begin selling its own original snapshots of candidates from the numerous political events they've attended "at a competitive price."

"Don't want to pay over $1,000 for a shot of Hillary Clinton?," America Rising LLC president Joe Pounder asked in an email unveiling AmericaRisingImages.com. "Building a new website? Putting together a direct mail piece? Need content for your digital campaigns? AmericaRisingImages.com will have the photos you need."
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The appeal of these photos, however, is the price point. AmericaRisingImages charges $250 for a blanket commercial license for what appear to be the majority of the photos for Democrats as famous as Hillary Clinton, as well as those less prominent.

America Rising LLC President Joe Pounder told CBS News that "[The] target audience is the public at large and everyone interested in politics from campaigns, to public affairs shops, to news outlets." The site is a boon for that first market - those cash-strapped GOP campaigns - which will be able to use the photos in digital and direct mail for that token cost.

Obvious Oppo Hit on Rubio

Brent Scher reports at The Washington Free Beacon:

The New York Times Friday report that Republican Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and his wife Jeanette have been cited 17 times for traffic violations was written after the citations were pulled by liberal opposition research firm American Bridge, according to Miami-Dade County court records.

Records show that each of the citations mentioned by the New York Times were pulled in person by American Bridge operatives on May 26, 2015.

Oppo's Golden Age

Kenneth P. Vogel and Byron Tau write at Politico:

In an election in which candidates have mostly dodged the big issues facing the country, the dark art known as “oppo” seems to be filling the void. And the trend lines suggest oppo’s golden age may just be beginning.

“In all my years of doing this I’ve not seen a cycle where I’ve seen this many seemingly oppo-driven hits shape so many big races,” said Joe Pounder, a veteran GOP researcher who last year co-founded America Rising, a new model of super PAC and LLC that plans to spend between $8 million to $12 million in the 2014 cycle digging up dirt on Democrats.

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Some of the best oppo hits are never definitively traced back to such research, or are only revealed well after the election. That often feeds speculation among rival campaigns and media outlets about the derivation of damaging scoops. After POLITICO in May broke the news that Oregon GOP Senate candidate Monica Wehby was accused by her ex-boyfriend of “stalking” him, The Oregonian revealed that the police report on which the story was based had been requested first by a Democratic Party researcher.

Reporters contacted about the stories cited in this piece either declined to comment or did not respond to questions.

Reporters and researchers have an interest in keeping the trade out of public view, since proof that a controversy started as oppo can be used to minimize it, even when the information is independently corroborated, bolstered and contextualized by diligent journalists whose credibility depends on getting it right.

Meanwhile, campaigns and committees — eager to avoid charges of playing dirty or of telegraphing their moves — have been known to cloak payments to opposition researchers by channeling them through general consultants or polling firms.

The article attributes the oppo boom to the rise of outside spending and  the decline of mainstream journalism.  That is, the oppo groups have the resources and newspapers don't.  Another important cause is the development of technology:

• Smartphones make is much easier to take video, and to do so surreptitiously.  Mitt Romney and Bruce Braley made gaffes while apparently unaware that somebody was recording them.
• The shift from analog to digital makes it much easier to store and transmit video.  And now we have sites such as YouTube (not even ten years old!) that allow for wide dissemination.  Such things were not possible 20 years ago.
• Nexis did exist 20 years ago, but the World-Wide Web was just getting under way.  There is vastly more material available.
• Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites provide for rapid dissemination and crowdsourcing.

Bridge and Rising

The Economist looks at American Bridge and America Rising (h/t BK):

And of course Bridge and Rising are at war over Hillary Clinton. The Republicans have a dedicated anti-Hillary team, are building a video archive of all her appearances, have published an e-Book to pick apart her recent memoir and are posting shareable barbs, such as pictures of two rather grand houses the Clintons bought around the time when Mrs Clinton said they were “dead broke”. Mrs Clinton’s defenders at Bridge have created an organisation called “Correct the Record” to rebut Republican attacks on the former secretary of state. 

Over the past decade oppo has turned from an art into a science, with fewer camera-wielding college students hiding behind trees and more staff staring at screens all day, monitoring livestreamed interviews and campaign events. Both sides dream of upending an opponent with an Akinesque “gotcha”, but the daily reality is more mundane. On Rising’s website, the self-explanatory headline above one video is “Rep. Joe Garcia (D-FL) Picks His Ear And Eats It”.

America Rising, American Bridge, and Trackers

At The Washington Post, Jackie Kucinich reports on tracking and trackers.  She interviews representatives from American Bridge and America Rising.

Big Political Dollars Today, Big Political Dollars Tomorrow

The Los Angeles Times reports that outside spending will continue after Election Day:

"Super PACs" and tax-exempt advocacy groups — on track to spend roughly $1 billion on federal races, an unparalleled sum — are poised to expand their influence even further.
Amid the white-hot final weeks of this election, outside groups are already plotting their next targets: the year-end battle over the federal budget, the 2014 congressional races and a possible fight over the next Supreme Court nominee.

"Our goal was to build an enduring institution on the conservative side to counter the outsized power of organized labor on behalf of Democratic causes and candidates," said Steven Law, president of the super PAC American Crossroads and its nonprofit sister, Crossroads GPS.
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"I do think this will be seen as a watershed year when parties were not as strong as they have been in previous cycles," said AFP President Tim Phillips. "Now groups like AFP have significant financial resources and massive grass-roots networks that in many ways mirror the party. We are going to beat up on bad guys, and we are absolutely going to hold accountable Republicans."

Another nexus of influence: the two Crossroads organizations, guided in part by veteran Republican strategist Karl Rove. Crossroads GPS plans to be active around the "fiscal cliff" debate over automatic tax increases and spending cuts slated to occur at year's end. And if Mitt Romney wins the White House, it will help promote a "first 100 days" agenda. Meanwhile, American Crossroads is working on an initiative to better coordinate the resources of its allies, which include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Americans for Job Security, a business-backed nonprofit.
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"To the extent that Crossroads isn't going anywhere, AFP isn't going anywhere, and they will have programs in the midterm elections, then I don't think we can cede that ground even for a second," said Rodell Mollineau, president of American Bridge 21st Century, a super PAC founded by conservative-turned-liberal activist David Brock that provides opposition research for the left. "You have to fight with all the tools you have."

Meanwhile, outside and party money had helped Team Red keep up with Team Blue. From the Center for Responsive Politics:
 

Oppo Week

USA Today reports:

President Obama is keeping up a drumbeat of skepticism over Mitt Romney's insistence — displayed in a blitz of TV interviews — that he stepped down from his private equity firm years earlier than federal records indicate.

Obama planned another day of campaigning in Virginia on Saturday, a state he won in 2008 but before that last supported a Democratic presidential nominee in 1964. Advisers said he would remind voters of the discrepancies between Securities and Exchange Commission filings and Romney's recollection of his role at the Boston-based firm.

The strategy follows calls by Democrats — and some Republicans — for Romney to release tax returns going back several years. Romney has said anew that he won't go beyond releasing his 2010 tax records and, before the election, his 2011 taxes.

"You can never satisfy the opposition research team of the Obama organization," Romney told CBS on Friday. In the same round of interviews in which he defended his account of his role at Bain, Romney said Obama owed him an apology for a top aide's suggestion that the SEC filings, if false, could bring a felony charge.

ABC reports:

In a non-descript Washington, DC office building within sight of the United States Capitol, a team of more than a dozen Democratic researchers have spent the last few months examining every nook and cranny of the records of several GOP vice presidential contenders.

The researchers work for the super PAC, American Bridge 21st Century, which is unveiling a new website on Friday called VeepMistakes.com. The site features more than 1,300 pages of opposition research and scores of video clips.

Political prognosticators can only speculate who is on Romney’s short-list, but now we know who the Democrats are preparing to target. The super PAC is shining their spotlight on three of the mostly likely contenders: former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Their research files, which the group is making public for the first time, also offers a sneak peek at the attacks the Democrats are poised to use against whichever potential V.P. ultimately gets the nod from Romney

Hollywood, Labor, and Outside Democratic Groups

Kenneth Vogel writes at Politico:

A network of Democratic outside groups designed to offset the fundraising juggernaut conceived last year by Karl Rove is off to a slow start, pulling in a combined $10 million in the first half of the year, while leaning heavily on big contributions from labor unions and Hollywood, according to campaign reports filed with the Federal Election Commission Friday evening.

By contrast, one of the key groups in Rove’s GOP-allied constellation, Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, will have spent more than $20 million on television ads ripping Democrats by the end of August, and – combined with a sister group called American Crossroads – intends to spend $120 million before the 2012 election.

The Crossroads groups raised $70 million for their advertising efforts in the 2010 midterm campaign, prompting Democrats to form their own network of groups in recent months.

The Democratic network comprises so-called super PACs including Priorities USA, American Bridge 21st Century, Majority PAC and House Majority PAC – all of which are required to disclose their donors and other finances to the FEC – and a connected network of groups registered under a section of the Internal Revenue Service code – 501(c)4 – that allows them to keep their donors secret.

In total, the groups raised $10 million in the first half of the year, according to a joint press release.

Trackers

Michael Shear reports at The New York Times:

Aaron Fielding quietly stalks his prey — Republicans — with his video camera, patiently waiting for a political moment worthy of YouTube.

At 27, he is a full-time “tracker” for American Bridge 21st Century, a new Democratic organization that aims to record every handshake, every utterance by Republican candidates in 2011 and 2012, looking for gotcha moments that could derail political ambitions or provide fodder for television advertisements by liberal groups next year.

The organization has hired a dozen professional trackers like Mr. Fielding, outfitted them with the latest high-tech cameras and computers and positioned them in key states where Republican candidates are busy chattering away to voters. If all works as planned, incriminating moments captured by American Bridge will quickly become part of the political bloodstream.

Combined with a team of 20 researchers in a Washington “war room” that has a large rack of computer servers, the effort is part of a push by Democratic groups to bolster their opposition research. Republicans also have trackers, but so far have not assembled the kind of centralized video archive of political caught-on-tape moments that their rivals envision.

Videos here and here.