Companies Support Election Objectors Through Lobbyists

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses campaign finance.

Emily Birnbaum, Megan Wilson, and Hailey Fuchs at Politico:

In the weeks following last year’s riot at the U.S. Capitol, Amazon suspended all campaign donations to the 147 Republicans who objected to certifying the election that day, calling their behavior “unacceptable.”

Six months later, Amazon lobbyists began doling out thousands of dollars in personal donations to those very lawmakers.

Amazon lobbyists were hardly alone in sidestepping company bans on giving to Republicans who voted against certifying President Joe Biden’s victory on Jan. 6. Throughout 2021, in-house government affairs staffers for at least 13 companies gave personal donations to Republicans who objected to the presidential election results, according to a POLITICO review of campaign finance filings from the Federal Election Commission.

That includes lobbyists for Microsoft, Google, Meta, Allstate, Toyota, Nike and Dow Chemical Company. The big tech companies were the largest group, highlighting Silicon Valley’s balancing act as it faces increasing scrutiny from both sides of the aisle.

The under-the-radar donations meant that even as the companies stuck to their Jan. 6 pledges, their lobbyists ingratiated themselves with the GOP lawmakers, some of whom are expected to take leadership roles in the House if Republicans take back control in the midterm elections. POLITICO identified more than $28,000 in donations from lobbyists to lawmakers who voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election.

“It clearly is a workaround,” said Craig Holman, a government ethics expert at progressive consumer rights advocacy group Public Citizen. “If a company is serious about not giving a campaign contribution to insurrectionists, then they can’t allow people who are in senior executive positions who represent the company to make those same contributions. And that would include the CEO as well as the lobbyists of the company.”

Another 501(c)(4)

Politico reports:

Google, Microsoft, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and other digital heavyweights increasingly are borrowing a favorite technique from the world of politics: secret money.

These top tech executives and their companies are embracing stealth, not-for-profit campaigns that can advertise and advance their pet causes — from tax and immigration reform to new online privacy laws — without ever disclosing a single donation.

The groups are known by their tax designation, 501(c)(4), and until recently, they've been the domain of entrenched players such as Karl Rove and the Koch brothers. But interest on Capitol Hill in regulating the burgeoning tech sector has convinced Silicon Valley's power brokers they too must adopt a form of political advocacy that once would have been anathema to the Washington-wary industry.

The most prominent new example is FWD.us, the Zuckerberg-helmed collection of tech luminaries pumping millions of dollars into local television markets with ads promoting immigration reform to oil drilling. It joins a list of groups — from a Microsoft-backed immigration effort, to a Google-supported privacy campaign — that are also playing the D.C. secret-money game.

If anything, the evolution highlights something of an irony: Even as Zuckerberg and other tech titans proselytize openness, many have closed off any public access to the full extent of their influence operations.

"Just like we've seen the tech world get slowly into lobbying … now we're seeing them get deeper into the Washington game," said Melanie Sloan, the executive director of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

Google, Analytics, and the Democratic Edge

Many posts have discussed the Democrats' technological advantages over the GOP. At RedState, Ben Howe writes:

[F]ormer RNC eCampaign Director Michael Turk wrote Monday that “the frightening advantage the left has is in a less touted entity known as the Analyst Institute (AI) and a consortium of behavioral scientists” who are “concerned not only with your characteristics and voting behavior, but how they can manipulate that behavior.”

Now, combine Obama’s political campaign with Google’s near-comprehensive real-time data and the left’s behavioral analysis. What do you get? Beat.

This goes beyond just campaigns. Google likes to brag that they can detect flu outbreaks two weeks before the CDC based on search volume. Eric Schmidt once bragged that the company could predict stock market movements.

Imagine how much more could be learned if Google’s computer algorithms combined not only search data but also all of the data they get by reading everything written in or sent to Gmail and whatever you store on Google docs and Google Drive. Then imagine what Democratic voter data groups like Catalist (which launched as a for-profit operation, allowing it much more latitude in working with outside groups….or companies) could do with that data.

With a few tweaks to their algorithms Google could easily have near perfect insights into the voting behaviors and patterns of the U.S. population at large down to specific precincts, neighborhoods or even households.

Priorities USA Cyber-War

In cyberspace as in direct mail, Democratic Super PACs appear to have spent their money more wisely than their GOP counterparts.  Politico reports:

Priorities USA had a laser focus during the presidential election: to define Mitt Romney as an out-of-touch, super-rich, ruthless business profiteer with little regard for the middle class and poor.

The pro-Obama super PAC accomplished this, according to interviews with Priorities leaders and confidential documents obtained by POLITICO, through a multi-pronged Internet strategy — targeting certain groups of Web users, buying search terms on Twitter and Google like “47 percent” and “dressage,” and airing attack ads featuring laid-off workers and plant shutdowns blaming outsourcing during programming on Hulu and Pandora to reach younger voters.

“The hardest hits on the Bain stuff were not coming from the Obama campaign itself because Obama didn’t want to be the nasty guy,” said Liz Mair, online communications director for the Republican National Committee during the 2008 cycle. “They came from Priorities.”
...


The combined metrics underscore the sense that many GOP digital strategists had throughout the cycle that neither the Romney campaign nor allied outside groups used the Internet effectively.

“They didn’t understand how it worked,” said Eric Frenchman, a McCain 2008 digital strategist who ran the Web component of Rep. Michele Bachmann’s reelection bid this year. “The biggest disadvantage was they didn’t understand what buying online meant.”

[Bill] Burton shares the assessment of his rivals. “They made huge mistakes on how they spent their money,” he said. “They had a huge organization that had a tremendous amount of money and they squandered most of it.”

Romney Campaign on Twitter

The Romney campaign has used Twitter to react to the dog story, as well as Hillary Rosen's disparagement of Ann Romney, among other things.  Zeke Miller writes at Buzzfeed:

Senior Obama campaign officials questioned the strategy, and said it reinforced the view among reporters that the Romney campaign is not ready for the big leagues of messaging to the broader electorate.

But capturing the inside conversation has always been a central goal of political campaigns. And the Romney campaign argues that the digital efforts yield quantifiable results — Twitter links further clicks to the campaign’s web videos and website by a significant multiple, and the narratives they push enters into the political conversation.

“Twitter is as it happens, and Facebook is the next day, and you optimize everything else for Google the day after,” said a senior aide. [emphasis added]

The Romney campaign went so far as to create a Twitter presence for Beth Myers, the long-time Romney adviser who will be leading the search for his running-mate — a job whose major requirement is discretion.

Google Ads and the Camaign

At The Washington Post, T.W. Farnam writes:

Type in a Google search for the words “immigration reform,” and in the split second it takes for your results to pop up, the president’s reelection campaign may begin courting you. Up comes an ad for barack­obama.com, next to the search results.

And if you take the next step and click through to the campaign’s Web site, ads for the president’s reelection may start following you around the Web.

The Obama campaign, and to a lesser extent its GOP rivals, has embraced the potential of the Internet age to reach possible supporters this election season.

The president’s campaign has bought Google advertising space next to all sorts of searches, including “Warren Buffett,” “Obama singing,” “Obama birthday” and, for basketball fans, “Obama bracket.”

The assumption is that people interested in those topics may also fit the profile of potential Obama backers, making them perfect targets for a strategically placed ad.

The president is not alone in this. Mitt Romney has bought advertising space next to his father’s name, for example, and Rick Santorum has gone for the term “Rush Limbaugh,” according to Hitwise, a company that samples Internet traffic. The ads are rotated on and off the search pages, and campaigns often purchase the ad space for short periods.

 Here is a screenshot as of this morning:

Marketing Lessons from the 2008 Campaign

Sarah Palin is drawing on the 2008 campaign for marketing strategy and tactics. Peter Wallsten reports in The Wall Street Journal:

Sarah Palin will launch her national book tour next week, one part of a carefully crafted strategy that has allowed the former vice-presidential candidate to leapfrog traditional media outlets and appeal directly to her dedicated and vocal fan base. The coming tour through small towns and midsize cities is designed mostly to maximize sales of "Going Rogue: An American Life," which will be formally released Nov. 17. But associates say it also serves as a reintroduction for Ms. Palin and a warm-up for what promises to be a starring role in next year's midterm elections and, if her supporters get their wish, the next presidential race. Among the features of this new strategy: buying Internet advertising based on Google searches of her name, and using Facebook as a key means of communicating with voters. Her team also has considered filing libel suits against bloggers who spread rumors about her family.