Haley Goes Better With Koch

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  The 2024 race has begun.  The DeSantis campaign has been troubled.  Nikki Haley is emerging as the top GOP rival to Trump, who is still far ahead.

Erin Doherty at Axios:

The political network backed by billionaire Charles Koch announced Tuesday that it is supporting former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley in the 2024 Republican primary.

Why it matters: The endorsement is a boon for Haley as she looks to chip away at former President Trump's commanding lead in the race for the GOP nomination with less than two months until the pivotal Iowa caucuses.

Driving the news: "The moment we face requires a tested leader with the governing judgment and policy experience to pull our nation back from the brink," said Emily Seidel, the senior adviser to AFP Action, the leading political arm of the Koch network, in a memo on Tuesday.

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Koch v. Trump

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

Alex Leary at WSJ:

A group funded by billionaire Charles Koch will work to support a Republican presidential nominee other than Donald Trump, concluding in a strategy memo that “we need to turn the page on the past.”

The organization, Americans for Prosperity, has stayed out of the last two presidential cycles but has concluded it needs to engage now as Mr. Trump mounts his third consecutive White House run. The memo released Sunday doesn’t mention the former president by name but is unambiguous in its purpose.


“To write a new chapter for our country, we need to turn the page on the past,” the document reads. “So the best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter. The American people have shown that they’re ready to move on, and so AFP will help them do that.”

A spokesman for Mr. Trump didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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AFP didn’t say how much it would spend but boasts of a large grass-roots and data operation. “The states with some of our strongest and most effective state chapters are the same ones that will play a crucial role in nominating the next Republican presidential candidate,” reads the memo, written by CEO Emily Seidel.

A related super political-action committee, AFP Action, “is prepared to support a candidate in the Republican presidential primary who can lead our country forward, and who can win,” the memo stated.

The New GOP

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie. 

 At Axios, Jonathan Swan and Lachlan Markay write that Trump changed the GOP power structure.  He revealed that old organizations had little sway with primary voters.  New organizations do.

Who had the power:

• The U.S. Chamber of Commerce
• The NRA
• The Koch network
• Heritage Action
• The Drudge Report
• National Review
• Conservative movement groups such as Tea Party Express, FreedomWorks, and the Senate Conservatives Fund.

Who has power now:

• Donald Trump
• Tucker Carlson
• Family and former aides to Trump
• Fox News
• Club for Growth
• Daily Wire
• Breitbart News
• Online influencers including Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, Joe Rogan, Jack Posobiec, Charlie Kirk and Marjorie Taylor-Greene.
• Steve Bannon
• Susan B. Anthony List

Selling Voting Limits

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses disputes over voting rights and election security.  

It's all true.

Here's the best three paragraphs I've read, maybe ever, on the extraordinary cynicism, deceit and anti-majoritarian nature of the modern Republican leadership.

Please read how the GOP is fighting H.R. 1. And thank you, @JaneMayerNYer!https://t.co/zeev29LboB pic.twitter.com/jGhWlObfWW

— Dan Froomkin/PressWatchers.org (@froomkin) March 29, 2021

Trump as Side Effect

At Politico, Kenneth Vogel reports that the Koch operation is cutting way back.

Ironically, though, some Koch insiders and critics alike agree that the conditions that are now challenging the Kochs are in some ways of their own creation. By helping to empower the anti-establishment tea party protests in 2009 and 2010, these people say, the Koch network inadvertently laid the groundwork for a movement that turned towards a strain of anti-immigrant protectionism that is anathema to the Koch’s ideology, and that proved fertile ground for Trump’s nationalist brand of populism.

“We are partly responsible,” said one former network staffer. “We invested a lot in training and arming a grassroots army that was not controllable, and some of these people have used it in ways that are not consistent with our principles, with our goal of advancing a free society, and instead they have furthered the alt-right.”

A major donor to the Koch network argued that the tea party’s early success at electing conservative champions “led to unrealistic expectations,” which then fomented disappointment with Washington gridlock and set the stage for Trump’s ability to tap into anti-establishment fervor.

“What we feel really badly about is that we were not able to educate many in the tea party more about how the process works and how free markets work,” said the donor. “Seeing this movement that we were part of creating going off in a direction that’s anti-free-market, anti-trade and anti-immigrant — many of us are really saddened by that. Unfortunately, there is little in the short term we can do about that.”

Oliver Darcy and Pamela Engel write at Business Insider:

Perhaps more important, however, the conservative media industrial complex successfully managed over the years to lock the Republican Party away from access to its own base. Those who consumed conservative media were taught not to trust politicians or, even worse, the mainstream media.

As a result, party leaders were beholden to a handful of individuals who controlled the conservative media and, thus, held the keys to their voters. Elected officials and candidates seeking office dared not criticize the conservative media’s most powerful members, for fear of the wrath that would ensue if they did.

The power the conservative press held allowed its members to decide who was accepted by the base and who wasn’t. True conservatives could be painted as unprincipled moderates, and, as in the case of Trump, unprincipled moderates could be painted as exactly what the base wanted.

The GOP "has appeased it, they've sucked up to it, they've been afraid of going up against it," said Charlie Sykes, an influential conservative radio host in Wisconsin. "I think that you have seen that played out this year. Has there been any willingness on the part of any mainstream conservative to call out this alt-right media? I'm not seeing it."
Republicans instead allowed their base to be held captive by a conservative press that moved their base further right, pushed conspiracy theories about Obama, and set unrealistic exceptions for them while in office.

So it should not be surprising that when Trump came along in 2016 and aggressively echoed this rhetoric, a significant portion of the base accepted him.

"This has been building for a long time," said Ryan Williams, the former deputy national press secretary for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign who is now the senior vice president of communications at FP1 Strategies. "Trump came in and capitalized on the mood."

Also note that the campaign featured a gap between the "mainstream conservative" media and the pro-Trump conservative media.

The Kochs Pull Back

At a February meeting in Wichita, Koch World decided not to take part in the presidential race. Tim Alberta and Eliana Johnson report at National Review:

[A]ccording to interviews with numerous people close to the brothers, including a half-dozen sources with direct knowledge of developments inside their donor network and political operation, the scope of recent changes extends well beyond their inactivity in the presidential race. These sources point to a mounting evidence —reduced budgets, the shuttering and streamlining of departments, the elimination of grants to allied political organizations, and the departure of top executives — demonstrating a shift of resources and attention away from federal campaign activity.

In the months leading up to the Wichita meeting, confidantes and key allies of the Kochs, including some in the room that day, had sensed this transformation was underway. As early as the spring of 2015, some had noticed a change in the brothers’ perspectives and priorities that only grew more apparent as the year wore on. In conversations last year, ‘there was much more an emphasis on getting back to the policy aspect, as opposed to the electoral aspect,’ says one Koch insider.

Concerned about the damage being done to their corporate brand, increasingly bothered by their public vilification, and convinced after Republicans’ 2014 Senate takeover that even significant victories were having a negligible impact on federal policymaking, the Kochs began signaling to their closest allies that they were reevaluating their approach to politics. They had always believed that building the intellectual foundation for libertarian ideas in think tanks and universities — and supporting important public-policy initiatives at the state and local levels — paid greater long-term dividends than spending on elections. And more and more, they worried that campaigns could actually prove detrimental to their educational and advocacy work. The Kochs’ corporate associates and public-relations team had warned them their involvement in politics could sully their legacies, and now they were beginning to agree.

This reassessment, coming from men who had stoically and stubbornly withstood the vituperation of everyone from President Obama to former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, was for some Koch insiders hard to believe. But it was evident: The Koch brothers, who had spent millions of dollars designing an electoral juggernaut that could overpower either of America’s two major parties, were losing their appetite for political campaigns.

Outside Spending is Way Up

Alex Glorioso writes at Open Secrets:

It’s been a month and a half since we last checked in on outside spending for the 2016 election. In that time, it’s grown by 50 percent — nearly $100 million dollars.

By this time in 2012, outside spending was a third of what it is today, or $103,016,139.

Since Feb. 12, the date of our post showing outside groups’ spending was homing in on $200 million, 103 different outside money groups have spent $91.3 million. Conservative Solutions PAC, the single-candidate super PAC that supported former presidential candidate Marco Rubio, spent by far the most of this lot — $27.8 million, likely in a last-ditch effort to save his campaign before he dropped out of the contest on March 16. Next in line was Our Principles PAC, which in the last six weeks has spent more $10 million of the total $13.1 million it has spent this cycle opposing Republican front-runner Donald Trump.

Also hitting the gas pedal hard was American Future Fund, a group that was once tied to the Koch brothers; it has paid out $6.5 million of its total $8.6 million in 2015-2016 spending since mid-February; it too has spent most of its money opposing Trump. The group has also run ads against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Gov. John Kasich (R-Ohio) — the two other surviving GOP White House hopefuls — this cycle.

Since our last story, nine brand-new groups have popped up, spending a combined $2.8 million. The biggest spender of these newbies is Trusted Leadership PAC, created to rally Republicans behind Cruz; it accounts for $1.9 million of the total. The super PAC announced March 10 that Cruz’s former chief of staff, Chip Roy, had joined as its executive director. Right Way Initiative, whose chairman is lobbyist Michael Baroody, was also created in the last month and has spent $703,492 on ads, most of which support Tim Derickson’s bid to win the open House seat in Ohio’s 8th Congressional District.

Kochworld Gears Up

Matea Gold reports at The Washington Post:

Already, roughly 1,000 full-time staffers are working for Koch network organizations such as AFP, Concerned Veterans for America and the Libre Initiative — more than double the number four years ago, according to officials. 

“One of the biggest things we learned and shared with our investors is that we can’t parachute in the last couple months of an election cycle with a bunch of activists into a new state and expect to have the same impact that President Obama had by staying in those states for four years and being invested in the community,” said Marc Short, president of Freedom Partners, the nonprofit business chamber that serves as the funding arm of the network.
...
The [i360] operation is similar to one run by Data Trust, a private data company that has an exclusive list-sharing agreement with the RNC and provides data to independent groups. 

The parallel efforts have created tension between the Koch network and party officials, who have worried that the RNC will lose valuable voter information when campaigns decide to work exclusively with i360. 

The friction broke out into the open in June, when RNC Chief of Staff Katie Walsh told Yahoo News that it was “very dangerous and wrong to allow a group of very strong, well-financed individuals who have no accountability to anyone to have control over who gets access to the data when, why and how.”

Trump and the Koch Network

As this blog has noted many times, political parties are networks that include operatives who move around from government to campaign to party organization to outside organization, and so on.  At Open Secrets, Alex Lazar offers an example:

While Trump is not an unfamiliar figure to many political, media and finance observers — the man behind Trump’s presidential operation has not garnered nearly as much coverage. That would be Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager, who has been a senior political adviser at The Trump Organization since January, according to his LinkedIn page.

Prior to his stint with Trump, however, Lewandowski served as New Hampshire state director, followed by east coast regional director, and subsequently as national director of voter registration at the Koch brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity (AFP) — among the biggest of the dark money groups that do not disclose their donors.

For the 2008 election cycle (and the year in which Lewandowski arrived at AFP), the group spent $462,291 on electioneering communications in federal races. That number increased to over $1.3 million for the 2010 cycle. Lewandowski did have success during that cycle, as both New Hampshire Democrats Ann Mclane Kusterand Carol Shea-Porter lost their respective races (though Kuster was victorious in 2012, and Shea-Porter has experienced alternating victories and defeats since 2008).

GOP Tech Troubles

At The New York Times, Ashley Parker reports that the GOP still lags the Democrats in campaign technology:

The lack of experience among Republican operatives and companies is captured in a coming study by Daniel Kreiss, an assistant professor of political communications at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Christopher Jasinski, a graduate student there.

Using the Federal Election Commission and other data sources, including LinkedIn, the two identified 626 political operatives with experience in digital, data and analytics on every presidential campaign since 2004.

The breakdown was stark: 503 of those staff members were hired by Democratic campaigns, 123 by Republicans.

They also found that 75 political companies or organizations were founded by those former campaign workers on the Democratic side, but only 19 on the Republican side.
“Historically, the one thing that’s pretty clear is that the Democrats, over the course of three cycles, have been investing much more in creating a deeper pool of talent that can do things like work in digital, data and analytics, and that runs from top to bottom in the party,” Mr. Kreiss said.

The study also found that Democrats have done a better job of actively recruiting and attracting employees from places like Silicon Valley who bring innovative thinking and new technologies from the commercial sector into the political arena.

Though the imbalance seems to stem largely from recruitment efforts, Mr. Issenberg added that Republicans suffered from a cultural disadvantage as well.

Many who work in technology have a somewhat libertarian worldview that, especially on social issues, more closely aligns with Democrats.

Jon Ward reports at Yahoo:

The Republican National Committee’s data arm last year called it a “historic” occasion when it struck a deal to share voter information with the Koch brothers’ rapidly expanding political empire.

It was an uneasy détente between the party committee, which views itself as the rightful standard-bearer for the GOP, and the behemoth funded by Charles and David Koch,

which is free of the campaign finance restrictions that bind the RNC and plans to spend almost $900 million in the 2016 election cycle to elect a Republican to the White House.
Party leaders, including the current chief digital officer for the RNC, hailed the deal as an important step forward in the GOP’s attempt to modernize itself.

But after the fall midterm elections, the deal was allowed to expire without being renewed. Since then, relations between the two sides have soured, turning into what one Republican operative described as “all-out war.” Interviews with more than three dozen people, including top decision-makers in both camps, have revealed that the Kochs’ i360 platform for managing voter contacts — which is viewed by many as a superior, easier-to-use interface than what’s on offer from the RNC — is becoming increasingly popular among Republican campaigns.

The RNC is now openly arguing, however, that the Kochs’ political operation is trying to control the Republican Party’s master voter file, and to gain influence over — some even say control of — the GOP.

Billionaires Bump Bundlers

At The Washington Post, Matea Gold and Tom Hamburger ask:  who needs a bundler when you have a billionaire?

“A couple presidential elections ago, somebody who had raised, say, $100,000 for a candidate was viewed as a fairly valuable asset,” said Washington lobbyist Kenneth Kies. “Today, that looks like peanuts. People like me are probably looking around saying, ‘How can I do anything that even registers on the Richter scale?’ ”
[Why super PACs have moved from sideshow to center stage]

Consider the scene last weekend in South Florida, where top supporters of the Republican National Committee gathered for their spring retreat at a luxury resort in Boca Raton. In the past, members of the RNC’s Regent and Team 100 donor programs attracted the focused attention of presidential aspirants. But this time, there were distractions.

A number of White House contenders in attendance — including former Texas governor Rick Perry and Govs. Scott Walker (Wis.), Chris Christie (N.J.) and Bobby Jindal (La.) — devoted much of their time to private meetings with high rollers, according to people familiar with their schedules. Bush came to Boca Raton after an afternoon super-PAC fundraiser in Miami.

Then on Sunday, the governors made a pilgrimage to Palm Beach for a private Republican Governors Association fundraiser hosted by billionaire industrialist David Koch at his 30,000-square-foot beachfront mansion.

In the words of one veteran GOP fundraiser, traditional bundlers have been sent down to the “minor leagues,” while mega-donors are “the major league players.”

The old-school fundraisers have been temporarily displaced in the early money chase because of the rise of super PACs, which can accept unlimited donations. This year, White House hopefuls are rushing to raise money for the groups before they declare their candidacies and have to keep their distance.

"The Type-O Blood of Politics"

At Buzzfeed, Ben Smith profiles RNC chair Reince Priebus, who will soon become the longest-serving RNC chair in modern history.

Raising money is the core of Priebus’ job — he spends, he said, between 60% and 65% of his time raising money — and he is exceptionally good at it: He outraised the Democrats in 2012, and raised $188.8 million in the 2014 cycle. And the money he raises is, he said, “the golden money. It’s the type-O blood of politics. Anyone can use it, there’s a limited supply, but it’s the universal blood of politics here at the RNC.”

Because of complex laws around coordination, the resources the Republican National Committee buys can be used and reused, passed around among Republican campaigns. Soft-money groups cannot share and coordinate like this. So instead of going to war with deep-pocketed outsiders like the Koch brothers, Priebus has found a role in their ecosystem. When it comes to data, for instance, the committee has — through an arrangement involving a new private company — essentially made itself the partner of a Koch-backed data company, i360, initially seen as a rival.

Priebus asks only that big donors make that golden money their first contribution, then they’re free to head off to the super PACs. And he has absorbed from his third round of calling donors before a big election that “as chair of the party, for our national party, 2016 is the most important election we’ve had.”

i360

Mike Allen and Kenneth P. Vogel write at Politico that the Kochs and allies are putting millions into a data company that’s developing profiles of 250 million Americans.

The Koch network also has developed in-house expertise in polling, message-testing, fact-checking, advertising, media buying, dial groups and donor maintenance. Add mastery of election law, a corporate-minded aggressiveness and years of patient experimentation — plus seemingly limitless cash — and the Koch operation actually exceeds the RNC’s data operation in many important respects.
...
The least-known vehicle for the Kochs is a for-profit company known as i360, started by a former adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign after McCain lost to Barack Obama in 2008. Subsequently, it merged with a Koch-funded data nonprofit. The Koch-affiliated Freedom Partners, formed in late 2011, eventually became an investor, officials confirmed to POLITICO.

Spending more than $50 million in cash over the past four years, i360 links voter information with consumer data purchased from credit bureaus and other vendors. Information from social networks is blended in, along with any interaction the voter may have had with affiliated campaigns and advocacy groups. Then come estimated income, recent addresses, how often a person has voted, and even the brand of car they drive. Another i360 service slices and dices information about TV viewing to help campaigns target ads more precisely and cost efficiently.

GOP campaigns can get less-expensive data through the RNC, but happily pay i360 for its superior profiles. Midterm clients included several of the GOP’s marquee Senate and gubernatorial victors, including Sens.-elect Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Joni Ernst of Iowa, and Gov.-elect Larry Hogan in Maryland.

Michael Palmer, a Florida native who started i360 after being chief technology officer of Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, said i360 has been able to develop superior campaign tools precisely because it isn’t beholden to the political calendar. With a steady stream of money comes the ability to think about the long term, he said.

“Right now, we’re talking about and building things that you won’t see in 2016, because it’s not going to be ready until 2018,” Palmer said.

Outside Money: The Next Generation

Kenneth P. Vogel writes:

Since federal courts struck down key campaign cash restrictions in 2010, a few dozen super-rich activists have gone on a historic spending spree that has reshaped American politics. The group skews older and male, and a single death in its ranks can fundamentally reorder the political landscape.

“Obviously, I knew that he was older and that he had his health issues, but he was always really vibrant and on the go, never frail,” [CREW's Melanie] Sloan said of [liberal mogul Peter] Lewis. “I always knew that Peter was not making bequests to his groups — that the money was going to be left to his kids. So I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t leave anything for us, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a shock.”

Like Lewis, neither Houston homebuilder Bob Perry nor billionaire Dallas investor Harold Simmons left much in the way of a political money succession plan, and their 2013 deaths shook the financial foundation of the right. The pair had combined to donate $132 million in federal contributions, including $44 million to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads super PAC.

“When they lost those two donors last year, it was really debilitating,” a prominent conservative fundraiser said of American Crossroads.

Thus, the most influential political money networks on the left and the right have increasingly encouraged their donors’ kids to attend the closed-door confabs that serve as de facto private conventions for the big-money set, complete with strategy presentations from operatives and get-to-know-you sessions with the most in-demand politicians.

Chase Koch, the 37-year-old son of billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, has been spearheading an initiative to involve the children of wealthy contributors in the Koch brothers’ vast political network, partly by holding special events for them at the network’s twice-annual donor seminars.

The Night of Crossroads

Two years ago, some on the left and the right criticized Karl Rove for the defeat of Crossroads-backed candidates.  The midterm is different as Michael Beckel, Carrie Levine, and Dave Levinthal write at Slate:

Groups connected to Rove and the Koch brothers were among the biggest winners in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Of the 10 U.S. Senate races where either the Rove-linked nonprofit Crossroads GPS or its sister super PAC, American Crossroads, was active, their favored candidates prevailed in at least six—with the Alaska Senate race still too close to call at this writing and a runoff election coming next month in Louisiana. Similarly, of the nine U.S. Senate races where the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity was active, its favored candidates also prevailed in at least five contests. Only in New Hampshire and Michigan did the Crossroads groups and Americans for Prosperity see defeat.

In the Granite State, incumbent Sen. Jeanne Shaheen kept Republican challenger Scott Brown, who previously represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate, at bay. And in Michigan, Rep. Gary Peters defeated former Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land to win an open-seat race. As of press time, incumbent Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, was trailing GOP challenger Dan Sullivan, the state’s former attorney general and natural resources commissioner, by about four percentage points.

Ultimately, the current occupant of the White House decided the 2014 election, said Steven Law, president of American Crossroads. “This election was about President Obama,” Law said in a statement. Levi Russell, a spokesman for Americans for Prosperity, did not respond to requests for comment.

The Sunlight Foundation reports:

Two years ago, when we took the post-mortem of the presidential-year elections, powerhouse conservative spenders like Crossroads GPS, American Crossroads and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had almost nothing to show for the tens of millions of dollars they funneled into that campaign. In 2014, conservatives turned the ship around, drubbing their liberal rivals in a year in which independent groups on both sides dropped unprecedented amounts of money.

The three conservative organizations mentioned above all had success rates under 20 percent two years ago. This year? Each group batted .800 or above. With several races remaining to be decided, the National Republican Senatorial Committee also boasts a 94 percent success rate.

Nicholas Confessore reports at The New York Times:

American Crossroads and its affiliated nonprofit group spent $50 million on political advertising, and at least $20 million more on so-called issue ads, a spokesman said. The groups dominated outside spending in Alaska, where the Crossroads groups put about $7 million into television advertising, and Colorado, fielding close to $14 million, which helped crush Senator Mark Udall, the Democrat who was once favored to win.

All told, Republican outside groups spent about $205 million on television advertising in Senate races, according to a Democrat tracking media purchases, who agreed to share the information on condition of anonymity, while Democratic groups spent $132 million.

For many conservative strategists, this election was a dress rehearsal for the next one. Beginning next year, they face the prospect of a formidable presidential contender in Hillary Rodham Clinton and a Democratic Party that is itself quickly mastering the mechanics of unlimited fund-raising.

“The key to success in most endeavors, including politics, is learning and adaptation,” said Stuart Stevens, who served as a top strategist to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. After Tuesday, Mr. Stevens said, “Republicans have that experience — and it’s an advantage.”

Lincoln Labs and the Iron Law of Emulation

At The Los Angeles Times, Seehma Mehta writes of GOP and conservative efforts to reach out to the tech community.

"It does make you stand out a little bit. You have to be careful how you position yourself. You have to be careful what you say in public," Eric Jackson, co-founder of CapLinked, said during a panel discussion Saturday about conservatives in the industry at the inaugural Lincoln Labs Reboot conference. 

...
Having taken a drubbing in the last couple of elections, I think the party has woken up to the idea of having better technology," said Harmeet Dhillon, vice chair of the California Republican Party, during a panel Friday evening. "I can order Uber to come to my house in two minutes. We still don't have good apps to give me a good map to walk precincts on a weekend." 

... 

Lincoln Labs is one of several efforts born in the aftermath of the 2012 election, which set off tsunami warnings in GOP circles because of the Democrats' stark advantage in the use of technology and data. The Republican National Committee is spending $17 million on efforts to modernize its technology and use of data, with mixed reviews.

The founders of Lincoln Labs said they saw the need firsthand when their technology efforts were rebuffed by some party and campaign officials in 2012.

They face obstacles in their current endeavor: One of Lincoln Labs' first hackathons had to switch locations when employees of the firm that had planned to host it complained about the group's backing by entities related to the Koch brothers, two wealthy donors who give money to conservative causes. 

The iron law of emulation kicks in:

Bret Jacobson, co-founder of the digital advocacy firm Red Edge, said conservatives need to understand what the left did well, create their own digital approaches, and replicate them across the party and campaigns. 

"We view 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 as a continuum, and a process the right will go through culturally, and then we'll be able to judge whether it worked," he said during a panel discussion Saturday.

The Democracy Alliance

The iron law of emulation continues to work. At Politico, Kenneth P. Vogel shines a spotlight on the Democracy Alliance:

The 21 groups at the core of the Democracy Alliance’s portfolio intend to spend $374 million during the midterm election cycle — including nearly $200 million this year — to boost liberal candidates and causes in 2014 and beyond, according to internal documents obtained by POLITICO.

While growing sums of that cash are being spent vilifying the billionaire conservative industrialists Charles and David Koch over their own network’s political spending, the documents reveal the extent to which the Democracy Alliance network mirrors the Kochs’ — and is obsessed with it.

“Conservatives, particularly the Koch Brothers, are playing for keeps with an even more pronounced financial advantages than in recent election cycles,” reads the introduction to a 62-page briefing book provided to donors ahead of April’s annual spring meeting of the DA, as the club is known, at Chicago’s tony Ritz-Carlton hotel.

The briefing book reveals a sort of DA-funded extra-party political machine that includes sophisticated voter databases and plans to mobilize pivotal Democratic voting blocs, air ads boosting Democratic candidates, while also — perhaps ironically — working to reduce the influence of money in politics.

...

Liberals and conservatives have been jealously eyeing and trying to copy each others’ extraparty political and intellectual infrastructure since at least the early 1970s, when future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell encouraged the business community to build institutions to fight well-financed “Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries,” including Ralph Nader. The Powell Memo was cited approvingly by the liberal strategists who started the DA back in 2005, while Karl Rove and operatives associated with the Kochs pointed to the DA and the unions as a model for their side to replicate after Obama’s win in 2008.

Reid Helps Crossroad GPS Fundraising

At The Washington Post, Matea Gold reports that Harry Reid's attacks on the Kochs have led some big GOP donors to seek the anonymity of 501(c)(4) groups.

The trend can be seen at the prominent GOP super PAC co-founded by strategist Karl Rove, American Crossroads, which discloses its donors to the Federal Election Commission.

The group, which hauled in $117 million during the 2012 election, has raised $9 million so far this cycle, including just $266,000 in April.

At the same time, group officials said, donors are more interested than ever in supporting Crossroads GPS, a sister organization with a tax-exempt status that allows it to keep its donor list private. The two groups recently kicked off a $10 million television advertising campaign against vulnerable Senate Democrats — $8 million of which was paid for by Crossroads GPS.

Paul Lindsay, a Crossroads spokesman, said the spotlight that Reid (D-Nev.) and others have put on major political funders on the right has driven more contributors to the nonprofit arm. Democrats are “dragging private citizens through the mud, and that’s led to a shift of sorts for donors,” Lindsay said.

Reid, Koch, Adelson

Jon Stewart takes down Harry Reid on trying to distinguish Adelson from the Kochs:

And When the Last Law Was Down...

Harry Reid want to adjust the First Amendment to get at the Koch brothers.  The Huffington Post reports:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Thursday called for amending the U.S. Constitution to bar big money donors from having an outsized impact on the nation's elections, saying billionaire donors were mounting a "hostile takeover" of America.

"Amending our Constitution is not something any of us should take lightly, but the flood of special interest money in our American democracy is one of the glaring threats our system of government has ever faced," Reid said on the Senate floor. "Let's keep our elections from becoming speculative ventures for the wealthy."

The amendment, sponsored by Sens. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), would reverse the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United and 2014 McCutcheon rulings, as well as part of its 1976 Buckley v. Valeo ruling, and restore certain congressional authority to regulate the raising and spending of money, including that of super PACs.

Thomas More has a few words for him.  From A Man for All Seasons:

Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!