During 2015 the Koch Network (a network of donors that is organized by the Koch Brothers) spent nearly $400 million to influence politics. That compares to the $404 million spent by the RNC and the $319 million spent by the DNC during the entire 2012 cycle. Increasingly, the Koch Network resembles a political party, with its own research and mobilization operations, as well as sophisticated data analytics that many candidates believe to be superior to the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) data capabilities. In addition, the Koch Network has begun vetting, cultivating and supporting candidates to run for office, fulfilling more party-like aspects.
To gain deeper insights on the Koch Brothers, who have been active in politics for more than three decades, and their network, I interviewed three distinguished political scientists. Alex Hertel-Fernandez has spent years studying the Koch Networkwith Harvard Professor Theda Skocpol. Brian Schaffner is a professor of political science at U-Mass Amherst and is considered a leading expert on campaign finance. His latest book, “Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail” is discussed here. Heath Brown is an assistant professor of public policy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He previously authored a book “The Tea Party Divided: The Hidden Diversity of a Maturing Movement,” about the origins of the Tea Party, and has an upcoming book on money in the political system.
Together we discuss the long-term strategy of the Koch Brothers, how the decline of the GOP has strengthened Trump and how to reduce the influence of money in politics.
Alex, could you lay out the three-pronged strategy of the Koch brothers, their overarching strategy to push their agenda?
Alex Hertel-Fernandez: I think an important thing to know is that the strategy has changed over time. They started off much more interested in ideas and funding think-tanks and academics through organizations like Cato and the Mercatus Center in the 1970s and ’80s. Then they switched gears to focus more on policy advocacy during the Clinton administration with organizations like Citizens for a Sound Economy and, later, at the 60 Plus Association and the Center to Protect Patient Rights. Then you’ve seen kind of a new innovation in the form of AFP [Americans For Prosperity], which was spun off of Citizens for a Sound Economy, where they’re not just lobbying in D.C., but they actually had a federated grassroots presence across the state. We think this is a really key innovation on the part of the Koch Network. They’re able to have this centrally directed organization, where the priorities are set from above, from the Koch’s inner circle of political leaders, but they have grassroots members in these chapters across the states and paid staffers at both the state and the regional levels, so they have the capacity to intervene both in state and national politics in that way.
I think the final move that the Kochs have made that’s important to know is moving to coordinating donors. They’ve moved from giving simply their own money into politics into corralling other wealthy conservative donors to give to their network and supporting organizations that they’ve created and are maintaining over time. These are the twice-yearly Koch seminars that now are putting together several hundred millionaires and billionaires who are right-leaning.
And where we’ve seen policy shifts at the state level coming from the Kochs? Where would their big wins be?
A.H.F.: I think two areas that I can speak to are Medicaid expansion as part of the Affordable Care Act, and then labor policies, which are two areas I’ve looked at with Theda and with another co-author in the case of Medicaid. We looked at these battles of whether or not the state would expand Medicaid to cover newly uninsured adults who were previously ineligible for the program and, it turns out, that Americans for Prosperity has been one of the key organizations pushing back against expansion in the state. What’s remarkable is that, in many cases, they’re lobbying precisely the GOPers that they helped to elect. I think Tennessee gives us a good example of this. Andrew Ogles is the AFP director there, who worked to elect many of the state’s legislative GOP members in the past electoral cycle and then immediately pivoted to joining the AFP and pushing them to reject expansion of Medicaid. That’s one area where you’ve seen [policy shifts], because that network’s been ineffective at pushing the state-level policy. The other one is right-to-work law as another measure to cut back public sector labor unions. We found that one of the best predictors of where you saw these cuts in 2011 passing legislatures was where AFP had the stronger presence and where they really made public sector labor unions a priority.
Right. Brian, I’m actually curious about your research on the state level. Do you think that there are big impacts coming from campaign contributions at the state level? Has the environment changed in the last few years with wealthy people mobilizing? What are your thoughts there, in terms of what we can gain from the research that you’ve done and other people have done?
Brian Schaffner: Yes. We can look at that several-decades time span in our book. Issue groups played significant roles in terms of campaign contributions but they were actually relatively small group compared to business interest, union interest and parties. In the more recent periods, the more recent decade, the issue groups like the Koch Brothers and other kinds of organizations like that have started giving more money in the state races. They tend to get to more extreme candidates and, also, the independent spending by these groups has taken off quite a bit and it’s been quite pronounced in a lot of states.
Does that spending correlate with wins? That is, are the Koch brothers getting a return on their investment? I’m specifically thinking of 2010 and 2014, this has been crippling for the Democrats. We expect losses off-cycle, but is there any possibility that the massive amount of spending has exacerbated those losses? What’s your read on the literature there?
B.S.: Well, I mean, it’s hard to say to what extent that matters compared to the simple changes of turnout and redistricting and another kinds of things that were happening at the same times. I hesitate to say that this is all the result of any one given force.
You think there’s evidence that this has had an impact?
B.S.: Sure. There are races, marginal races, in which these investments have I’m sure had to play some role in terms of moving a few legislative districts or a few state races that might’ve gone the other way.
Heath, you have studied the Tea Party and there’s sort of a running debate as to whether the Tea Party is a grassroots movement or a very corporate donor-class movement, driven by people like the Koch brothers, and your take is that it’s both; what is your read on the Tea Party and how it’s affecting politics?
Heath Brown: Well, I think your take is right. What I found in the book is what others have found, that there have been these two things going on. The Tea Party is sort of a name that we call a certain dimension of a much longer tradition that goes back to maybe the 1940s or so. The Koch brothers, in some way, have entered into the Tea Party phenomenon in 2009, 2010, 2011. But they were around, funding groups that preceded the Tea Party, that supported the Tea Party and will last past when the Tea Party is no longer called the Tea Party. That, I think, is going on but, at the very same time, the grassroots work that has very little association with big money, has very little association with the Koch brothers, it’s also a very real phenomenon.
They just so happen to use a lot of the intellectual stuff that’s been created by organizations like Cato and all the others that are around them. In that way, even if the grassroots, or grassroots organizations, and grassroots activists who have never received a dollar from any of the Koch brothers’ associated organizations, they still have been deeply influenced by the intellectual infrastructure that has been built over the last 30 to 40, even longer, years. I think that influence can be absorbed in tangible ways with dollars given to organizations, but also in much less tangible ways with simply the array of policies that have been a part of the Tea Party agenda since 2009.
Right. For this next part, I want to focus on the Koch brothers and the GOP. We’re seeing divides, but also a lot of cooperation here. Alex, I can see both arguments in your research. The GOP hates the Koch brothers because they can’t control the Koch brothers, and they create their own movements and sometimes publicly go against the GOP. But at the same time, the GOP should like the Koch brothers because they’re spending tons and tons of money to get Republicans elected. What do you think the relationship is between the Koch brothers and the GOP? Who’s gaining power? Who’s losing it? What’s going on there?
A.H.F.: It’s a tricky thing to wrap your head around. We struggled with it ourselves, because on the one hand, as you noted, the Koch Network has at this point built its own parallel operation that in many ways looks like the GOP and on some metrics is even larger than the GOP when it comes to staffers across the state at this point. It’s spending across all of its activities in the next electoral cycle, grassroots advocates who are on the ground and on the states on which AFP is operating and so on, so forth.
But on the other hand, as you mentioned, they are working with the GOP in order to advance their agenda, so the way we described it is as a force-field operating to the right of the GOP, pressuring them and pushing them further to the right, while taking advantage of this intertwined infrastructure. One thing that we noted about the Koch Network and AFP in particular is that many of the people who staffed the Koch Network have come from posts at the GOP. A large proportion of the people who are serving as directors of state chapters at AFP have previously served for state Republican lawmakers, on campaigns and whatnot, and will go back into GOP politics. These are closely intertwined organizations, and I think that’s a source of strength for the Koch Network. As I mentioned in the previous example of Tennessee, when this Andrew Ogles was tapped to lead the opposition to the Medicaid expansion, he knew exactly where to push because he had been helping elect all of the GOP folks in the legislature in the previous cycle. It’s a source of strength for the Kochs.
But from the perspective of the GOP, it’s a problem because it’s weakening their capacity to set agendas, defied candidates that they support, independently of these party groups. As we show in the changing organizational resources work that we’ve done, I think you stated that in the other piece, we were talking about that. The GOP does simply control fewer resources to direct towards politics than it once did, and a big, big part of that is that more money is flowing through the Koch Network.
Are we going see more outright antagonism between the GOP and the Koch Network? Or are we just starting to see it?