The Koch network of policy and political organizations is pouring tens of millions of dollars into the midterm elections through grassroots arm Americans for Prosperity, primarily to boost Republican congressional candidates who share its agenda on key issues.
In an interview, Americans for Prosperity honcho Emily Seidel detailed the group’s strategy for boosting the ranks of like-minded politicians in the House and Senate and explained the criteria for determining which primaries and general election contests to endorse in — and invest in. Americans for Prosperity employs 400 full-time field staff across 35 states and plans to spend most of its cash earmarked for 2022 on direct voter contacts in 300 races across the country.
Seidel declined to reveal her fall budget to the Washington Examiner. But Americans for Prosperity and its affiliates spent a combined $221.2 million in the 2020 election cycle, according to public disclosures, with two-thirds of that total devoted to policy advocacy and the rest to electioneering. Seidel emphasized that Americans for Prosperity had no plans to take its foot off the gas in the midterm contests shaping up as a Republican wave.
“We’re looking at the landscape this year, and we believe we have an even greater opportunity to engage in 2022 than we did in 2020,” Seidel said, explaining that she and a team of a half-dozen or so colleagues at Americans for Prosperity decide jointly on how and where to deploy the group’s substantial resources.
“We’re not going to jump on bandwagons of people who are likely to win no matter what,” she added. “We’re not going to support a candidate that’s sure to lose no matter what. We want to really focus our resources on making that marginal difference.”
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Seidel, the chief executive officer of Americans for Prosperity and a former House GOP leadership aide, assumed a more public-facing role with the grassroots behemoth in December after its longtime president, Tim Phillips, resigned under pressure due to a personal impropriety that was not disclosed.
The Koch network of policy and political organizations has branded itself “Stand Together,” and officials representing groups that operate under this umbrella tend to bristle when described as active on behalf of, or focused on advancing the electoral prospects of, the Republican Party. But as a practical matter, Stand Together groups, including Americans for Prosperity, have over the years put their financial and grassroots muscle almost exclusively behind GOP candidates.
That is because it’s mainly Republicans, and virtually never Democrats, who share Stand Together’s traditionally conservative, sometimes quasi-libertarian, philosophy on a majority of the issues the network uses as a de facto litmus test to decide whom to endorse, and support financially. Those issues include K-12 education, foreign policy, immigration reform, the size and scope of government via taxes and spending, criminal justice reform, deregulation, cronyism and corporate welfare, and free speech.
This election cycle is no different.
Americans for Prosperity has so far involved itself in more than six dozen primaries — and all are Republican primaries, among them two dozen for the House, one for the Senate, two for governor, two for state attorney general, and more than four dozen for seats in various state legislatures. The commonality? Americans for Prosperity believes all endorsees would make competitive general election candidates, but none are necessarily considered sure things, making the group’s assistance impactful.
“We’re never going to agree with everybody, any candidate, on everything. But we want to be able to support people who will be with [us] more than will be against [us],” Seidel said. “That is not synonymous with just supporting Republicans.”
On this point, Seidel was adamant. “If you’re looking at people not by the T-shirt that they’re wearing or the jersey, but by the policy issues that they represent and the type of leader that they are, you just see the landscape differently,” she said.
Americans for Prosperity and the network of political and policy groups under the Standing Together banner were originally spearheaded by Kansas billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch. David Koch died in 2019 and had stepped away from the groups due to failing health prior to his death. In Stand Together’s early years, its agenda was almost indistinguishable from the Republican Party’s, and both were seen as political collaborators, although the network rejects that description.
But in recent years, as cultural issues have come to dominate a party under the thumb of populist former President Donald Trump, the more traditionally conservative Americans for Prosperity, and other Koch groups, appear to have drifted somewhat from the GOP orbit. For instance, in many Republican primaries this year, election reform and transgender women in sports are the most discussed issues. But neither topic has cracked the Americans for Prosperity agenda.
Indeed, the network has had a rocky relationship with Trump — agreeing with him on some issues, such as criminal justice reform and judicial nominees, while disagreeing on others, such as immigration and trade. But Trump’s unsupported claim that the 2020 election was stolen, and that President Joe Biden’s victory was illegitimate, presents another, more potent source of friction moving forward, especially as the 45th president mulls a 2024 comeback.
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In part, this is because Americans for Prosperity, which immediately congratulated Biden for winning the election, considers among its criteria for endorsing candidates their position and rhetoric on the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, ransacking of the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s grassroots supporters. Seidel said Americans for Prosperity believes Republicans who support Trump’s claims and prioritize them are likely to make ineffective lawmakers.
“When we evaluate candidates, we said after Jan. 6 that we would weigh their position on that issue in our analysis partially because what we’re looking at is issue alignment — but also the ability to lead and bring diverse people together,” Seidel said. “Unfortunately, people who are more focused, perhaps, on other issues or are more focused on getting their name out there on those issues — it actually makes it harder for them to be the type of policy leader that we’re looking for.”
