Anything Jane Mayer writes is worth your time. But this piece so much so that Dan Froomkin made sure his followers saw at least three paragraphs from her latest report.
The Koch network is floundering in its attempts to respond to the Democrats’ election reform bill. Their biggest concern: Americans all across the political spectrum are aware the top 1% has rigged the economic and political game for themselves. People don’t like it. Or them. But Americans do like what they have heard of the For the People Act, House Resolution 1 and Senate Bill 1.
The New Yorker obtained a recording of a private, Jan. 8 conference call between a senior policy advisor to Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and leaders of several conservative groups, including a Koch-sponsored group. Participants expressed alarm over the bill’s provisions including “the broad popularity of the bill’s provision calling for more public disclosure about secret political donors,” Mayer writes.
If the act becomes law, its public disclosure provisions likely would stem the flow of dark money from millionaire/billionaire donors in groups like the Koch network. The provisions are so popular that such groups have decided that, rather than mount a public-advocacy campaign to defeat the bill, more “under-the-dome-type strategies” might work best.
Here are the key paragraphs Froomkin spotlights:
Kyle McKenzie, the research director for the Koch-run advocacy group Stand Together, told fellow-conservatives and Republican congressional staffers on the call that he had a “spoiler.” “When presented with a very neutral description” of the bill, “people were generally supportive,” McKenzie said, adding that “the most worrisome part . . . is that conservatives were actually as supportive as the general public was when they read the neutral description.” In fact, he warned, “there’s a large, very large, chunk of conservatives who are supportive of these types of efforts.”
As a result, McKenzie conceded, the legislation’s opponents would likely have to rely on Republicans in the Senate, where the bill is now under debate, to use “under-the-dome-type strategies”—meaning legislative maneuvers beneath Congress’s roof, such as the filibuster—to stop the bill, because turning public opinion against it would be “incredibly difficult.” He warned that the worst thing conservatives could do would be to try to “engage with the other side” on the argument that the legislation “stops billionaires from buying elections.” McKenzie admitted, “Unfortunately, we’ve found that that is a winning message, for both the general public and also conservatives.” He said that when his group tested “tons of other” arguments in support of the bill, the one condemning billionaires buying elections was the most persuasive—people “found that to be most convincing, and it riled them up the most.”
McKenzie explained that the Koch-founded group had invested substantial resources “to see if we could find any message that would activate and persuade conservatives on this issue.” He related that “an A.O.C. message we tested”—one claiming that the bill might help Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez achieve her goal of holding “people in the Trump Administration accountable” by identifying big donors—helped somewhat with conservatives. But McKenzie admitted that the link was tenuous, since “what she means by this is unclear.” “Sadly,” he added, not even attaching the phrase “cancel culture” to the bill, by portraying it as silencing conservative voices, had worked. “It really ranked at the bottom,” McKenzie said to the group. “That was definitely a little concerning for us.”
The gold leaf is off the rose.
Seeing that, progressive messaging pro Anat Shenker-Osorio wants lefties to sit up, pay attention, and act right now as if “we’re as popular as the right fears we are and to crow about how great our plans are” instead of wringing their hands about the formidability of their opponents.
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars …”
The wrinkle in that advice is that bad news draws more eyeballs. Eric Boehlert noted days ago that in these early days of the Biden administration the Beltway press is in a kind of withdrawal. For four years Donald Trump made news on the hour “with his cascade of lies, taunts, and erratic behavior. And Beltway journalists loved it — they loved being in the middle of the tumult and being the creators of the roiling content.”
That is true elsewhere on the Net. Responding to Boehlert, Nancy LeTourneau of Washington Monthly, tweeted, “whenever I wrote about something awful Trump did – it got tons of page views. Meanwhile, pieces about actual policy issues were pretty much ignored.”
The key to passing election reform is not simply Democrats somehow overcoming the filibuster in the Senate. Conservative movers and shakers know their program is unpopular. Despite Fox News brainwashing, conservatives in the heartland do, too. They may hate and fear liberals, but they are not keen on billionaires buying elections either. This is another “cut over the eye” moment that requires the left to focus. Republican senators may be unmovable, but they must feel the heat. They need pressure via phone calls and letters and media stories where we can generate them that Americans support these election reforms. We cannot win this fight simply by shouting louder how bad Republican vote suppression is.
Snap out of it
As the call demonstrates, conservative big donors feel they are on the ropes and in the corner.
McKenzie told listeners their best bet was not to engage the Democratic message but to repeat “that Congress shouldn’t be focusing on this right now. Our country has much bigger fish to fry at this moment.” Get the public to focus instead on health care and the economy. “Congress should focus on getting people back to work, not on these kind of niche, donor-disclosure type of endeavors we’re working on.” Now the right wants to focus on health care.
Don’t let them. Biden and Democrats have the upper hand on health care right now. Don’t let the subject be how bad Republicans are but how the Democrats’ package of reforms will help Americans take back control of their democracy from the 1%.
McConnell failed in 2017 to repeal Obamacare in the Senate. The morning of that vote and Sen. John McCain’s dramatic “thumbs down,” I commented, “The Obamacare repeal has been cut over the eye. Don’t let your guard down. Keep punching and work the eye.”
That is still good advice.