Voter by voter, GOP super PAC tries to separate the party from Trump
By David Weigel July 26 at 3:32 PM
OMAHA — It was a humid Saturday morning, four hundred and seventy-three days before the next election, and Jack Mowat was walking door to door to support his congressman. At home after suburban home, voters heard a knock, then heard the pitch.
“I’m with the Congressional Leadership Fund,” Mowat, 17, told a voter in workout gear. “Do you support Congressman Don Bacon?”
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The CLF’s multi-million dollar campaign, unfolding now in 20 targeted districts and expanding next year to 30, is an ambitious bet that the Republican House majority can be spared from a Trump midterm backlash. If it works, each endangered Republican will be reintroduced to voters as a post-partisan who delivers on their key issues; each Democratic challenger will be framed as a vote for Nancy Pelosi to snatch back the speaker’s gavel, while empowering an anti-Trump “resistance” that only wants to wreck the country.
In an interview at the CLF’s Washington office, where the targeted districts are scrawled on the wall across from his desk, the PAC’s executive director, Corry Bliss, said the strategy was the culmination of what he’d learned in a run of winning campaigns. Veterans of Bacon’s 2016 campaign were running the CLF effort in Omaha; they’d scoured local high schools for volunteers who’d work for free to help their congressmen, gaining political experience while no other campaigns were underway.
“We don’t care about the national narrative,” said Bliss. “You can’t control the national narrative. You can control the narrative in 30 districts.”
The CLF spent more than $10 million to rescue Republicans in four special elections this year, investing early in opposition research and get-out-the-vote campaigns. In Georgia’s sixth district, Republicans won just 97,777 total votes in an April 18 jungle primary. Over the nine-week runoff campaign, the CLF complemented its TV ads with get-out-the-vote money; on June 20, Rep. Karen Handel (R-Ga.) won 134,799 votes, beating Democrat Jon Ossoff. In the CLF office, the race is commemorated with a banner that waved outside the final candidate debate: “San Francisco Loves Ossoff.”
For 2018, the strategy is to do more of the same, framing races as a choice between local heroes and “resistance”-obsessed Democrats, on a hoped-for $100 million budget.
“Donors get really excited about this,” said Bliss. “For the cost of one TV ad buy, you knock on tens of thousands of doors. We do a microdata survey in every district, and our goal is to come out of it in the 60,000-80,000 voter range. If we can switch 20,000 votes in the district, that’s the difference between winning or losing.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/voter-by-voter-gop-super-pac-tries-to-separate-the-party-from-trump/2017/07/26/b590198a-7099-11e7-8839-ec48ec4cae25_story.html
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