Youngkin election is latest in string of failures by Lincoln Project

But those halcyon days may well be behind it with its latest incident backfiring — an embarrassing stunt with tiki torches aimed at painting newly elected Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin as a racist. It was a reminder of the multitude of issues the group has faced since rising to prominence.

BYRON YORK: HARD TIMES FOR LINCOLN PROJECT

After the tiki torch stunt, the most prominent dig came from the campaign of Winsome Sears, a black Republican elected as Virginia lieutenant governor and a supporter of Youngkin.

“Hey @ProjectLincoln, did you enjoy the fruit basket? (asking for a friend),” they tweeted Thursday.

“The Lincoln Project has to face a reckoning. You could argue it wouldn’t turn out this way if it was not for the hoax that they perpetuated with those tiki torches and trying to paint Youngkin as a racist,” Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said earlier this week. “That really, really hurt the Dems.”

Last year, the Lincoln Project raised more than $90 million, with more than half of it split among its leaders in consulting deals, according to the Associated Press. And while they helped bring down Trump, a review of its last election cycle shows they weren’t so successful in lower-profile races.

During last year’s election, the Lincoln Project failed to keep 11 GOP senators it targeted from being elected, including influential leaders such as Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Tom Cotton, Joni Ernst, and Susan Collins. Only Sens. Raphael Warnock, Jon Ossoff, Mark Kelley, and John Hickenlooper were in the win column.

The election data, found on OpenSecrets, showed an expenditure of $49,633,016 on the various campaigns for 2020. This year, the Lincoln Project’s coffers are substantially emptier, albeit in a non-presidential election year. According to the Federal Election Commission’s website, they only received $12,179,825 in contributions between Dec. 17, 2020, and June 30, with $1.6 million in cash at the end of the period.

The drop-off in funding coincided with news that broke in January concerning founder John Weaver, who was accused of sending sexually explicit messages to young men, including one boy. The Lincoln Project failed to contain the crisis as employees began leaking information to the media and asking to be released from nondisclosure agreements.

The PAC expressed surprise at the news until reports began surfacing that executives had been aware of the crisis for six months, but Weaver had continued working there.

The Lincoln Project seemed to fall off the radar until last month, when Youngkin was targeted by a group of white-clad tiki torch bearers, a callback to the violent 2017 Charlottesville rally. People quickly discovered that the Lincoln Project was behind the stunt, and outrage came from both the right and the left.

Sears, who has blasted the notion that America is a racist country, took on the Lincoln Project with tweets from her campaign.

On the day of the election, her team tweeted, “It’s a bad day to be @ProjectLincoln” with a crying emoji.

Arizona Sen. Wendy Rogers, who spearheaded a state audit of the 2020 election, tweeted Thursday, “The #LincolnPerverts in the Lincoln Project were Communists masquerading as Republicans all along. They are the worst of the worst.”

Then, former Lincoln Project adviser Tom Nichols was trashed on Twitter for mocking trucker Edward Durr, who defeated New Jersey Senate President Steve Sweeney in a grassroots effort.

“So, the guy who defeated the NJ Senate president ran because he was denied a concealed carry permit. I’m sure this will all go very well and produce a fine, informed legislator,” Nichols tweeted Thursday.

It’s unknown how much the group spent attempting to defeat Youngkin on a campaign that attempted to link him to Trump. The Lincoln Project funded numerous electronic ads and possibly a mailer with supportive quotes from Trump and photos of the two next to each other.

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Tara Setmayer, a former aide to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher and currently a Project Lincoln senior adviser, did not respond to two requests for comment including the question of who thought up the tiki torch stunt.

“Republicans do not give a f*ck about your feelings, they don’t give a f*ck about facts, or the truth,” Setmayer tweeted after the election.