Club for Growth declared “mission accomplished” last week as Republican front-runner Donald Trump slumped to second place in Iowa. Now, the fiscally conservative group is hatching a takedown in other early voting states.
Last month, a super PAC affiliated with the club launched a $1 million negative ad blitz against Trump in the Hawkeye State. The ads began airing 24 hours after the first GOP debate and highlighted a handful of policy positions Trump once took that many conservatives would consider antithetical to their interests.
“The polls have made it clear: Trump loses when voters know the truth about him,” the group’s president, David McIntosh, said Friday.
But while Trump is down by double digits in Iowa, he continues to lead the Republican field both nationally and in the two earliest primary states. Thus, the club is looking to expand their efforts.
“We’re in the process of fundraising, but the plan has been to focus on the early states,” Doug Sachtleben, who serves as communications director for the Club for Growth, told the Washington Examiner. “We’ll look at South Carolina and what’s being done there and perhaps Nevada.”
“A lot of it is contingent on just raising the funds to launch ads, but we feel like the polls in the last week have confirmed that exposing Trump’s positions bring him down,” he added.
Sachtleben declined to say how much the club must fundraise and how long until anti-Trump attack ads appear in other states, instead he noted the group is engaged in “a steady outreach to other conservatives who share these concerns about Trump.”
“It’s been a daily process of reaching out and making those calls and showing potential donors, based on the polls, that a strategy that exposes Trump does work,” he said.
He did say, however, that any new ads would likely tackle similar issues and follow the same format as those broadcasted in Iowa.
“We know property rights resonated and, likewise, him continuing to like government-run healthcare. Those are the issues where people see these aren’t just past positions, they’re things [Trump] still believes,” he said.
Adding, “So we’re looking at those kinds of issues where he still takes positions that are contrary to conservative philosophy in a big way.”
Sachtleben said the club has also witnessed a rising number of other individual and group efforts to discount Trump, including a potential anti-Trump super PAC in South Carolina.
“There’s more of a movement, whether it’s partnering with us or doing something on their own. The lesson of Iowa is that exposing Trump’s positions does bring him down,” he said.
Still, Club for Growth is advocating for a concerted effort to bring the GOP’s leading man down.
“We have some who are still watching to see if what’s happening in Iowa will happen elsewhere,” Sachtleben said.
“CFG action has a lot of experience watching campaigns and the ebbs and flows of this campaign are something we’ll watch. But we’re committed to ensuring, at this point, that the truth about Trump not being a conservative continues to get out,” he added.
