The Koch Network Has A Backup Plan For A Trump Defeat

LANGHORNE, Pa. — In a hotel conference room a little over 20 miles northeast of the Philadelphia venue where the two major parties’ presidential nominees were set to debate hours later, a conservative group was preparing to rally its supporters Tuesday morning behind a Republican candidate locked in a tight battle for Pennsylvania votes.

No, the candidate was not former President Donald Trump. Americans for Prosperity Action, or AFP Action — a libertarian-leaning conservative group funded by the Koch network of conservative donors — and its Latino outreach arm, Libre Action, were instead holding a canvass kickoff event for Dave McCormick, a former hedge fund manager and Gulf War veteran engaged an uphill battle to unseat U.S. Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.).

“We’re fighting for our American dream — the American dream that is slipping away from us,” Jennie Dallas, the Harrisburg-based strategic director of the affiliated Libre Initiative, told the multiracial crowd of staff members and paid canvassers clad in light blue organizers T-shirts. “And we know that David McCormick knows that.”

AFP Action’s Tuesday event in the heart of suburban Bucks County — one of the most contested counties in a critical swing state — offers a window into what a non-Trump-aligned right looks like in 2024. It means waging campaigns more focused on tax cuts and deregulation than on mass deportation or populism, and focusing on Senate and House races with more conventionally conservative candidates.

A win for McCormick, who is considered far more of an underdog than GOP Senate challengers in Montana and Ohio, would virtually ensure Republican control of the Senate come November. While Democrats have a 51-49 edge in the chamber now, they are certain to lose West Virginia and their best pickup opportunities are long shots.

GOP control of the Senate could prove especially critical for conservatives if Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris defeats Trump in the White House contest, according to Emily Greene, a senior adviser to Americans for Prosperity Action who runs the group’s Pennsylvania operations.

“We know that if we can take back the policy majority in the Senate, we can prevent one-party progressive rule — and the key to that Senate firewall strategy lies right here in this room,” Greene told the crowd Tuesday.

AFP Action’s so-called Senate firewall strategy has concrete policy consequences, since it could affect a future president Harris’ ability to confirm federal judges and limit the scope of her legislative agenda. The group has backed up its words — and field canvassing operation — with a $10 million ad campaign on behalf of McCormick, as well as Republican Senate challengers in Nevada, Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan, all of whom are less well funded than the Democratic incumbents they hope to oust.

But warning of a scenario in which Trump loses his race doubles as a not-so-subtle way to cast aspersions on Trump’s electability and thereby claim I-told-you-so rights in the inevitable intraparty sniping that would follow another Trump defeat.

Shaping — and, more recently, surviving — changes in the Republican governing coalition and policy agenda are nothing new for Americans for Prosperity and its political spending arm, AFP Action.

But the Koch network — as AFP/AFP Action, The Libre Initiative/Libre Action, and their affiliate partners are often known — now finds itself in an extended period of ideological exile from the highest levels of Republican power. AFP opposes Trump’s trade tariffs, has a much more moderate approach to immigration policy than Trump and, unlike Trump himself, continues to defend the bipartisan sentencing reform bill he signed in 2018.

Americans for Prosperity’s surviving founder, the oil and manufacturing billionaire Charles Koch — who co-created the group with his late brother, David Koch — has made his aversion to Trump abundantly clear. AFP Action decided not to endorse a candidate in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, dedicating its federal resources to electing Republicans to Congress. And in June 2023, the Kock network announced that it had raised $70 million to help the Republican Party move away from Trump.

When Trump eventually emerged as the Republican presidential nominee this year, despite AFP Action’s $31 million super PAC spending on primary opponent Nikki Haley’s behalf, the group once again pivoted to Congress.

And at Tuesday’s event, Trump came up in conversations with reporters, but not in the remarks delivered by McCormick or the organizers hosting him.

McCormick, who needs AFP Action’s canvassing and advertising help but also cannot afford to run afoul of Trump, calibrated his message to the AFP Action and Libre Action canvassers carefully. He was most comfortable ripping Casey for voting with President Joe Biden — and Harris, who has provided tie-breaking votes in the Senate — what McCormick says is 98% of the time.

It didn’t have the same edge as a Trumpian candidate railing about an immigrant “invasion” or “stolen” elections, but it still cast the 2024 vote as a high-stakes battle for the future of the nation.

“Our country is headed in the wrong direction with terrible economic policies that are going to drive up inflation, a wide-open border that’s contributing to crime and the fentanyl crisis right here in our commonwealth, energy policies that are driving up the price of gas and killing good jobs,” McCormick told the AFP canvassers. “That’s one choice, a world where our adversaries are testing us and challenging us every day, versus another world of common-sense policies that get our economy back on track and make the American dream available for everybody.”

At his authentic core, McCormick, a former economic and national security policy official in George W. Bush’s presidential administration, is almost certainly more of an Americans for Prosperity-style conservative than a “Make America Great Again” acolyte. McCormick helped strengthen U.S. trade with China while in government, before going on to profit from those lower trade barriers as a hedge fund manager. And during the 2016 Republican presidential primary, McCormick raised money for the campaign of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

Then, as a Republican Senate candidate in 2022, McCormick likely lost out on Trump’s endorsement because of his criticism of Trump’s conduct leading up to the U.S. Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021. He would go on to narrowly lose the GOP primary to Trump’s pick, Dr. Mehmet Oz. Oz subsequently lost to now-Sen. John Fetterman (D) in the general election.

McCormick wouldn’t make the same mistake twice, locking up Trump’s endorsement this past April, shortly before a GOP primary election in which McCormick ran uncontested.

Trump has since campaigned with McCormick, who spoke at a Trump rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in August. “We need Trump and a new senator from Pennsylvania to secure our border,” McCormick said at the time.

When asked on Tuesday about any concrete areas of disagreement with Trump, McCormick cited the 2020 election outcome, which he said he did not think was stolen.

McCormick, who has welcomed Ari Fleischer, a former George W. Bush spokesperson, to campaign alongside him, even implied that he agrees with AFP about the need for more legal immigration pathways.

“We need to have legal immigration reform,” McCormick told reporters. “That’s a key part of making sure our economy remains vibrant.”

Casey’s campaign, which has highlighted McCormick’s ties to people linked to Trump’s fake elector scheme of 2020, characterized support from the Koch network as a liability.

“David McCormick may have the support of the Koch network and his Wall Street billionaire backers, but Sen. Casey has the support of working people all across Pennsylvania,” said Kate Smart, a Casey campaign spokesperson. “McCormick is trying to fool voters by lying about who he is, where he lives and how he made his millions, covering up how he made his fortune investing in building China’s military and in China’s largest producer of fentanyl, a drug that’s poisoning our kids.”

To American progressives, Charles and David Koch were once the country’s chief ideological villains. They bankrolled the tea party movement, which gave birth to a hard-line faction of congressional Republicans committed to obstructing then-President Barack Obama’s policy agenda.

But while many rank-and-file tea party activists were actually more concerned about immigration than their budget rhetoric would suggest, and welcomed Trump’s nativist program with open arms, the Kochs — and the cadre of right-wing libertarian activists and intellectuals they cultivated — were not ready to make the jump.

With programs like The Libre Initiative and Libre Action, the Koch network is also betting that appeals to Latino voters’ pocketbooks and interest in upward mobility would be more effective than Trump’s personality-centered populism — regardless of what polling suggests about his inroads with Latino voters. The Libre Initiative has, for example, argued that the Biden administration’s attempts to make it harder to classify workers as independent contractors would “hurt Latino workers,” since half of Latino workers fall under this category.

“They’re opening up, and they’re seeing what’s most important to us now is our prosperity,” said Dallas, the strategic director. “It’s about being able to prosper in America.”

At the same time, Libre’s moderate rhetoric on immigration, which combines calls for strict border enforcement with support for legalizing Dreamers and other bipartisan reforms, also hearkens back to the time period after Republicans’ loss in the 2012 presidential election, when the GOP began looking at softening its stance on immigration to appeal to more Latino voters.

One of Libre Action’s bilingual door hangers for McCormick says the Republican will “defend the American dream,” “drive down our cost of living” and “put party politics aside to find commonsense solutions to modernize our immigration system and secure the border.”

Out of Pennsylvania’s 1 million-person Latino population, Libre Action is targeting a universe of 100,000 swing voters in metropolitan Philadelphia, the Lehigh Valley and Hazleton, and in central Pennsylvania hubs like Reading and Lancaster. In addition to canvassing, the group has courted Latino voters at grocery stores by distributing $60 store vouchers to start conversations about inflation and politics.

People respond warmly to the grocery store vouchers, according to Dallas. “They say: ‘Oh, my God, thank you. I really needed it. I have to get gas, or groceries for my children, or I have to work two or three jobs to pay rent,’” Dallas recalled. “And all I can say is, you have the power — the Latino voting bloc can make or break this election.”