by David Brock
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with political organizing—and the practice of “Astroturfing,” or pretending that a well-organized and well-financed operation is really a grassroots groundswell—is common across the political spectrum.
But the Kochs work unusually hard to avoid public scrutiny—and the accountability that may come with it—hiding behind what the Washington Post calls “a labyrinth of tax-exempt groups and limited-liability companies” with cryptic names like POFN LLC and the TC4 Trust. And in the era of Citizens United, their ability to do so has only been strengthened. In 2012, they spent over $400 million trying to defeat President Obama and Democrats in Congress.
And they’re really good at what they do. Forget for a moment that Obama managed to win reelection, and think of all those Democrats who lost their seats thanks to a flood of (generally misleading) negative ads from Americans for Prosperity—or look at the way they’ve succeeded in changing the Republican Party.
In 2007, when the House passed a minimum wage increase, eighty-two Republicans voted for it. When the bill went to the Senate, it passed with ninety-four votes—half of which came from the GOP. Today, with Americans for Prosperity warning that Republicans who deviate from their edicts will face the wrath of their activists, good luck finding one who will stand up for giving America’s poorest workers a raise.
In 2008, the Republican platform acknowledged the impact of “human economic activity” on our climate, and their nominee, John McCain, campaigned on a cap-and-trade proposal. Today, membership in the GOP is equivalent to membership in the Flat Earth Society—because the Kochs haven’t just made our air and water toxic for everyone, they’ve made holding a reasonable position on climate change toxic for Republicans.
But if you really want to see the Koch brothers’ influence in action, take a trip to Columbus, Ohio.
The Columbus Zoo is widely regarded as the best zoo in Ohio, and one of the best in America. Its director emeritus, Jack Hanna, is familiar to late-night TV audiences as “Jungle Jack,” the man who shows up to terrify Conan O’Brien with a komodo dragon or inspire awwws with a baby red panda. And with more than nine thousand animals representing nearly seven hundred species, it’s more than a hub for conservation—it’s one of the city’s top tourist attractions, boasting upward of 2.3 million visitors every year.
In early 2014, the people of Columbus were set to vote on a ballot measure to increase funding for the zoo. It wasn’t a big deal, just $31 million for capital improvements, the kind of measure that voters had approved time and time again. And there was no reason to believe that this time would be any different.
That was when voters started receiving flyers in their mailboxes featuring a gorilla hand holding a $100 bill, urging them to “stop the money grab.” Soon, voters’ doorbells were ringing—canvassers were going door-to-door to spread the same message, arguing against the funding increase. The pressure campaign was effective: When Columbus voters went to the polls, they vetoed the money for the zoo.
Who was behind the effort to stop the funding increase for the Columbus Zoo? Was it secret agents sent by jealous administrators at the Cincinnati Zoo? Had a group of orangutans evolved the capacity for political organization and used the referendum as a chance to protest their captivity?
None of the above, as it turns out. The organization behind the flyers and the door knocks was none other than Americans for Prosperity.
You’ve heard of the Matt Damon film We Bought a Zoo?
Well, in Columbus, Ohio, Charles and David Koch bought a zoo ballot initiative.
A zoo funding ballot initiative in Ohio. A city council race in Coralville, Iowa (population: 20,092). A Board of Supervisors election in Iron County, Wisconsin, where the Kochs helped elect a majority for around $10,000 a seat—a majority that promptly approved a controversial mining project.
The Koch brothers did not manage to buy the White House in 2012. But when you are as wealthy, as uninhibited, and as committed as they are, there’s little limit on what you can buy when you shop in the state and local aisles. And the Kochs fund a wide variety of groups determined to wield influence over who gets elected to these down-ballot offices and what they do once they get there.
There’s the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which drafts “model legislation” designed to benefit its corporate donors. ALEC bills were introduced in every state legislature in 2013—more than four hundred in all: bills to repeal renewable energy standards, protect big corporations from lawsuits, weaken public employee unions, require photo IDs at the polls, privatize education, and more.
There’s the Susan B. Anthony List, which supports antiabortion candidates (not exactly in line with the Kochs’ libertarian leanings). There’s the State Policy Network, an umbrella organization for a network of mini Heritage Foundations that push conservative ideology in states across the country. Arizona has the Goldwater Institute, Louisiana has the Pelican Institute for Public Policy, South Carolina has the Palmetto Promise Institute, and the Koch brothers have a stake in all of it.
There’s the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, which trains right-wing think tanks to do “investigative journalism,” although the fact that it was founded by a former Republican campaign operative with no journalism experience gives you a clue as to its true mission: harassing progressives with frivolous dirt-digging expeditions under the guise of news reporting and publishing right-wing blog posts about evil union bosses, Marxian senators, and the perils of renewable energy. The Franklin Center now has affiliates in most states; it claims to account for 10 percent of all daily reporting from state capitals nationwide, and its stories regularly filter up to local newspapers and TV.
And, of course, there’s the granddaddy of them all, Americans for Prosperity, the Kochs’ personal Astroturf group, ready to descend wherever someone wants a little more money for the local zoo.
One of the Kochs’ allies is a man named Art Pope, a discount store magnate who has done in his home state of North Carolina exactly what the Kochs have done on a national scale. Pope has been working at turning North Carolina reactionary red for thirty years, bankrolling an entire network of think tanks and pressure organizations and funding sympathetic candidates for down-ballot offices. You might call him “Diet Koch.”
North Carolina had always been a relatively progressive Southern state, with a reputation for racial tolerance and strong schools. President Obama carried it in 2008, and as the 2010 cycle began, Democratic governor Bev Perdue enjoyed a 30–20 Democratic majority in the state senate.
Then came Citizens United, and the end of North Carolina’s ban on political expenditures paid for by corporations. In flowed the money—independent spending in 2010 more than quadrupled from four years earlier. Nearly three quarters of that money came from organizations tied to Art Pope (including, of course, Americans for Prosperity).
In 2010, Pope’s groups spent $2 million targeting twenty-seven legislative races. They won twenty. Republicans turned their ten-seat deficit into an eleven-seat advantage in the state senate, and picked up more than a dozen additional seats in the House, flipping the majority there, too.
Then, in 2012, Republican Charlotte mayor Pat McCrory defeated Democrat Walter Dalton in an election in which 70 percent of the $14.5 million spent by outside groups went to benefit Republicans. Of the top ten outside groups accounting for 90 percent of the spending, seven were conservative.
In the span of four years, Republicans had seized full control of the North Carolina state government for the first time in more than a century. But like the Kochs, Pope wasn’t just about electing his preferred candidates, but about setting their agenda—an agenda described through its slogans as “Scale Back Taxes,” “Slice Away at the Social Safety Net,” and “Reverse the State’s Focus on Public Schools.”
Indeed, with Pope himself newly installed as Governor McCrory’s budget director, the new Republican establishment in North Carolina went on a right-wing
rampage, passing more than three hundred bills in their first year in power.
They implemented drastic cuts in tax credits for low-income workers and slashed unemployment insurance. They reduced the number of openings available for children in state-run pre-K programs. They moved to cut college aid and teaching assistants, freeze teacher pay (it was already forty-sixth in the nation), and stop a minimum wage increase. They worked to flatten the income tax, expand the regressive sales tax, and eliminate the estate tax entirely. They rejected federal money for Medicaid and brought an end to tenure for teachers. They made it easier to carry guns onto school campuses and into bars. They adopted some of the most severe antiabortion and antivoting rights measures in the nation. They even passed a law to bar courts from applying sharia law (which hadn’t really been an issue in North Carolina).
One GOP operative called it the “national Republican agenda on steroids.” And none of it was an accident. During the campaign, the John Locke Foundation, a Pope-funded think tank, published a book laying out a series of proposals. Their president, John Hood, later crowed, “Virtually everything we proposed in the book in 2012 was enacted in 2013.” And besides Art Pope’s influence, the Raleigh News and Observer counted at least two dozen bills straight out of the ALEC playbook.
The lesson: When it comes to institution building, conservatives understand that you get what you pay for.
North Carolina isn’t the only state to end up in the right’s shopping cart. The Kochs themselves took an active interest in Wisconsin, home to “Fighting Bob” LaFollette and a progressive stronghold that had been the birthplace of policies like progressive taxation, workers’ compensation, and collective bargaining.
In 2010, the Kochs and their cronies spent about $1.6 million targeting eighteen incumbent Democratic state legislators, defeating fourteen of them—a 78 percent win rate, and more than enough to hand Republicans a majority. Meanwhile, progressive stalwart senator Russ Feingold was defeated by Ron Johnson, an intellectually incurious businessman parroting the Koch party line. And Scott Walker became governor.
Overnight, the New York Times noted, Wisconsin “moved from Democratic dominion to total Republican control.” The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel pointed out that Wisconsin was “the only state in the country where Democrats lost the governorship, a Senate seat, and an entire legislature.”
As in North Carolina, the new Republican establishment in Wisconsin understood where its bread was buttered, and immediately set about implementing the Kochs’ agenda. Governor Walker cut taxes for millionaires, and then took away unions’ collective bargaining rights so he could slash their benefits to make up the shortfall. When that collective bargaining law was challenged in the state Supreme Court, Justice David Prosser—himself the beneficiary of $2.7 million in funds from the Kochs and their allies in his own campaign—was there to cast the deciding vote to uphold it.
Wisconsinites were outraged, forcing Walker into a recall election—but the Kochs stood by their man. Americans for Prosperity spent $1.5 million on TV ads during the recall alone, part of a $10 million effort to support Walker’s career and agenda. They bused conservative counterdemonstrators to the state capitol. They even mailed absentee ballots with the wrong election date on them (calling it a “printing mistake”) as part of a voter suppression scheme.
It was a sizable investment on the part of the Kochs. And Scott Walker knew it. One day, his office received a call from a man identifying himself as David Koch. You can imagine Walker straightening his tie and taking a deep breath before sprinting to the phone to take the call. They talked strategy for twenty minutes. Walker never realized that the call was a fake—it wasn’t David Koch on the line, but rather a blogger executing a practical joke. But you don’t ask questions when your sugar daddy calls. “I’ll fly you out to California and show you a good time,” the prankster “Koch” told Walker. “That would be outstanding,” he replied.
In the end, the Kochs’ investment paid off. In just a few short years, Walker and his allies in Madison were able to push through even more right-wing legislation: slashing $800 million from Wisconsin public schools, blocking a minimum wage increase, putting new work requirements on recipients of food stamps (which basically cut off support for thirty thousand poor people), enacting a blatantly unconstitutional voter ID law, passing new restrictions on abortion, allowing concealed weapons in parks and near schools, and, the Kochs being the Kochs, “streamlining” environmental regulations to allow for more mining.
If states are the laboratories of democracy, the Kochs and their allies have proven what it’s like when a mad scientist is in charge of the lab.
In the 2010 elections, with the Koch brothers capitalizing on the Citizens United decision and Democrats shaking their heads in principled dismay, Republicans seized full control of twelve states. And it cost them less than you might think.
Between 2004 and 2012, the right spent around $120 million directly trying to elect Republicans in state races—most of it coming through the Republican State Leadership Committee, run in the 2010 mid-terms by former Bush administration figure Ed Gillespie. They spent another $100 million or so on policy and advocacy work—ALEC, the Franklin Center, and similar groups. That’s a lot of money by the standards of anyone not named Koch. But for the billionaire brothers and their allies, a couple of hundred million dollars to essentially orchestrate a hostile takeover of a dozen states is an enormously successful investment—especially when you consider the timing.
In addition to being an election year, 2010 was also a census year, meaning that the governors and legislatures elected in 2010 would be in charge of drawing new congressional and legislative district boundaries for the next decade.
Like Astroturfing, gerrymandering—the intentional drawing of districts to benefit one party over another—is common. Both sides do it. But because Republicans did so well in state elections in 2010, they’re the ones who got to do it this time. And in 2012, Republicans retained control of the U.S. House of Representatives—even though Democratic congressional candidates won a million more votes than their Republican counterparts.
In six states where Obama won, Republicans still maintained a majority in the congressional delegation. Virginia, a state in which Obama carried 51 percent of the vote, sent eight Republicans and just three Democrats to the U.S. House of Representatives. Michigan, despite giving 54 percent of its vote to the president, elected nine Republicans and just five Democrats.
And because the next opportunity to redraw boundaries won’t be until after 2020, Americans are pretty much stuck with this ugly math until the end of the decade. It doesn’t really matter how good a year Democrats have; winning the House back will be a nearly impossible task thanks to the state-level GOP sweep in 2010 and their gerrymandering.
Meanwhile, the Koch brothers spent another $300 million in 2014, and with Republicans watching out for American Bridge cameras (and refusing to nominate more Todd Akins), they didn’t blow their chance to seize the Senate majority this time. Thom Tillis, the speaker of the North Carolina House who ushered through so much of Art Pope’s legislation, defeated Democratic U.S. senator Kay Hagan in 2014 thanks to an insane $50 million-plus in outside spending, much of it from Americans for Prosperity. And Harry Reid lost his majority leader position to Mitch McConnell, who promised at a Koch network summit to block “gosh-darn proposals” like raising the minimum wage.
If the Kochs and their allies are able to buy the White House in 2016, then they can look forward to full control of the federal government: a president who will owe everything to their support, a Senate majority consisting largely of Republicans who got there with the help of Tea Party energy and Americans for Prosperity’s largesse, and a House majority that’s largely bulletproof thanks to gerrymandering. And a Koch approved Supreme Court. They’ve promised to spend a billion dollars to make it happen.
And they won’t just have the power to set the agenda—they’ll have an agenda ready to go, one tha
t’s been developed at Koch think tanks and tested in Koch-bought states. They’ll make Richard Mellon Scaife look downright small-time.
}They also may succeed in making Scaife seem like a nice guy by comparison. Though the Kochs do what they can to avoid the spotlight and hide what they’re funding, privately they’re blunt about their objectives, sometimes brazenly so. Aside from politics, the Koch brothers are generous with their philanthropic dollars, funding major arts and cultural institutions and medical centers, with David Koch especially active on the New York City charity circuit. At one such glittery event that attracted a bipartisan crowd long before Hillary announced her candidacy, I learned that Hillary had bumped into her would-be nemesis. Hillary was her gracious self; Koch, not so much. While he expressed admiration for her service as secretary of state, partisan politics, not charity, was on his mind. “I’m going to spend a lot of money to defeat you,” Koch gruffly told her, before turning on his heels and vanishing into the crowd.
So how the hell do we beat these power-mad plutocrats? We can’t stop them from spending their billions; indeed, the more powerful they become, the less likely it is that we’ll see the passage of campaign finance reform that would rein in their power. Nor should we bank on being able to match their financial resources; the only reason they didn’t spend more in 2014 is that they didn’t have to.
