#AFP ActionL

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Daniel Marans at HuffPost:

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 w,as 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.

[...] 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.

[...] 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.

The Koch Brothers, determined to stay in the GOP apparatus of influence, are focused on the #PASen race in a quest to flip control of the Senate.