Gotv Bak

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RWW

Mike Johnson Used The 'Rededication' Prayer Rally To Mobilize Pastors For The Midterms

[VID]

05/27/2026

When the Trump administration held its National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving gathering on the National Mall earlier this month, it was quite obvious that the event was designed to mobilize conservative Christian voters ahead of the midterm elections.

That was confirmed when right-wing evangelist David Herzog appeared on the Elijah Streams program last week and revealed that pastors in attendance were invited to attend a private gathering with House Speaker Mike Johnson before the event where they were encouraged to mobilize their congregations for the midterms.

"They invited us," Herzog reported. "It was an invitation to be here and get this special briefing from the Speaker of the House and [MAGA pastor Lorenzo Sewell]."

Herzog said that Johnson stressed that pastors are key to ensuring that the effort to "rededicate" the nation to God succeeds

"What he came down to was the reason why we need you pastors here is because you guys are the difference that can decide if this thing is going to go one way or the other," he said. "Basically, he's saying we need the pastors and the leaders, the Christian leaders, to get on board because if you guys don't get on board and spread this thing, it's not going to shift the way it needs to shift."

"They see the importance of the church as the missing link," Herzog added. "You could have a good politician, you could have a good president, you could even pass the right laws, but if the church is asleep at the wheel, nothing going to happen. And then it's also connected to the midterms. I think they want the church to pray, fast, and also mobilize the people to really wake up and be active."

"He was waking up the pastors and the leaders saying, 'Guys, wake up. We need you to be part of this awakening, to spread it to your churches, to pray, and to vote, everything so that we can continue with what God has put Trump in it to do,'" Herzog said.

"The midterms are coming up and if that is lost, and Trump is a lame duck president, he can't really do much more," Herzog warned. "If the Democrats start taking over—you got New York City and an Islamic mayor of a city? You got that in parts of Michigan. In Texas, they're trying to make a Sharia law region—evil's at the door. We have this little sliver of time right now—a president that's for Israel, for the church—we maybe have a year, two years. If we maximize this time, we can not just see a spiritual awakening of conservatism, but actual revival, harvest, people coming to the Lord."

"Basically, that was his main message," Herzog revealed. "You guys have to really take this seriously. We're doing all this for you guys. We're giving you the baton."

Herzog claimed that Johnson also promised those pastors in attendance that the Trump administration has billions of dollars it wants to funnel to right-wing churches to carry out social programs.

"What they were saying was, 'Guys, we have money for you guys for ministries that are helping the poor, that are helping this, that are helping that,'" he said. "There's tons of money just sitting there. We'd rather you guys do those programs. Basically, it's putting the position of power in the church's hand, kind of like Daniel was in a position of power and Joseph. They're saying we want you guys to have those positions, not those who are against God's plans and ideals."

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an 11 24 gotv fail

Many political strategists, over the years, have argued that as important as messaging is to a political campaign, the things that matters the most in the end is turnout.

With Election Day 2024 only a day away and countless national and battleground state polls showing a very close race, Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican former President Donald Trump are both trying to fire up their parties. But according to the Washington Monthly's Bill Scher, Harris will have the advantage if the race ultimately comes down to turnout.

"Every national and battleground state poll shows a statistical dead heat, with neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump holding a lead outside the margin of error," Scher explains in an article published on November 4. "Many factors could determine the outcome of a race this close. One of those factors is the relative strength of the competing campaigns' get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operations…. In a contest where one or more states may be decided by less than a percentage point, the rational strategic decision is to invest money and talent in an effective turnout operation."

Scher adds, "All available evidence indicates that Harris did that and Trump did not."

On June 20, the Washington Monthly published an article by Scher headlined, "Donald Trump's Get-Out-The-Vote Plan is Bonkers." Scher detailed the GOP's get-out-the-vote efforts, which were greatly influenced by far-right Turning Point USA and its leader Charlie Kirk.

"The plan was premised on eschewing swing voters in densely populated suburbs and cities in favor of chasing ultra-conservative 'MAGA' types who mainly live in rural areas and don't reliably vote," Scher explains. "Then-Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel gave Turning Point the cold shoulder, and some Republicans warned the plan smelled like a grift. Turning Point's Charlie Kirk fought back and publicly pressed Trump to shiv McDaniel. Trump obliged, and McDaniel quit under pressure in February 2024."

Kirk's get-out-the-vote plan, Scher emphasizes, has not served Trump well.

"Doing things the old-fashioned RNC way — with door-knocking efficiently concentrated in more densely populated areas where more swing voters live — meant behaving like a responsible adult," Scher argues. "Following Kirk's strategy of digging up stray MAGA voters in far-flung places allowed Trump to indulge in his darkest impulses."

Scher adds, "We can't say yet who will win. But, almost surely, if Trump wins, it will be despite his GOTV team, not because of it."

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an 10 24

Churches helping a far-right group get predominantly Republican voters to the polls may be in violation of federal tax laws, according to several experts.

NBC News reported that Turning Point USA (TPUSA) — an Arizona-based group founded by MAGA activist Charlie Kirk — is primarily depending on churches to get out the vote for former President Donald Trump in Tuesday's election. And while churches have traditionally been an important tool for both major parties to spread awareness about upcoming elections, Kirk's clergy partners are engaging in explicitly partisan activity. This risks those churches losing their tax-exempt status with the IRS.

At Restoration Hope Church in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, Pastor David Rose recently allowed TPUSA to host one of its "Super Chase" events. These events involve training members of congregations on "ballot-chasing" apps that pinpoint likely Republican voters for them to target in phone-banking and door-knocking efforts. Likewise, the training sessions train participants to avoid reaching out to members of the "wrong party," meaning Democrats.

Rose insisted that the "Super Chase" session was "not an event hosted by our church nor was it a church related event," though NBC reported that it still "most likely violated tax law." The network reported that Rose was seen posing next to signs that read "Commie Kamala" and Trump's catchphrase, "Make America Great Again."

"It is common for churches to allow other organizations to use their facilities outside of church related events," Rose said.

But some tax law experts told NBC that Rose and other churches that have hosted "Super Chase" events — including in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin — are likely in violation of the Johnson Amendment. That's the 1954 federal law prohibiting tax-exempt organizations from participating in partisan politics.

University of Pittsburgh law professor Philip Hackney, who is also a former IRS employee, told the network that TPUSA's partisan political activity at churches "is at a different level than anything I’ve seen before," particularly given the group's documented ties to both the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee.

“The Republican Party, in effect,” Hackney said, “is explicitly using churches through this system in order to get out the vote.”

Notre Dame law professor Lloyd Mayer agreed that Kirk and TPUSA's congregational partners were risking losing their tax-exempt status given their blatantly pro-Republican electioneering. This is despite TPUSA insisting that the "Super Chase" events are perfectly legal.

“They can’t favor a particular candidate or, by implication, a group of candidates, like Republicans versus Democrats,” Mayer said. “This effort is obviously favoring getting out voters who will favor the Republican candidates.”

Click here to read NBC's report in its entirety.

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rww

10/25/2024

Peter Montgomery (https://www.peoplefor.org/spokespeople/peter)

The New York Times profiled (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/us/politics/donald-trump-campaign-america-first-policy-institute.html) the MAGA movement organization America First Policy Institute this week. AFPI was created as a sort of Trump administration in exile after voters dumped Donald Trump from office. AFPI has provided jobs and salaries to a lot of Trump loyalists, who are working to put Trump—and themselves—back into power. And they’re preparing to make the most of that power.

AFPI’s own version of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda for a new administration reportedly includes nearly 300 executive orders for a returning Trump to sign. Right Wing Watch reported (https://www.peoplefor.org/rightwingwatch/post/revolutionary-the-far-right-plan-to-seize-control-of-the-administrative-state) last year on an AFPI summit called “Laying the Groundwork for the Next America First Administration,” at which the group’s president Brooke Rollins bragged about the “revolutionary” nature of its ambitions to “seize control of the administrative state and use it—while also dismantling it,” describing “an America First confrontation against anti-conservative institutions.”

Now that there’s bad blood between MAGA insiders and the Heritage Foundation over the unfavorable publicity Project 2025 brought Trump’s campaign, AFPI is positioned to be in control of the transition team and domestic policy agenda if Trump wins. One example of what that could look like: the Times reports that AFPI’s plan to allow Trump to fire federal employees and replace them with political loyalists is even more radical than Project 2025’s proposal—it would essentially turn the entire federal workforce into a political patronage system.

One important aspect of AFPI’s work that this week’s Times story did not explore is AFPI’s partnership with dominionist Lance Wallnau (https://www.peoplefor.org/rightwingwatch/post/taking-christian-nationalist-to-the-next-level-trump-supporters-merge-political-rallies-with-spiritual-revivals) and his “Courage Tour” to turn out conservative Christian voters in crucial swing-state counties in the upcoming election. As the Times noted, one of AFPI’s funders and board members is Texas pastor-billionaire Tim Dunn (https://www.propublica.org/article/tim-dunn-farris-wilks-texas-christian-nationalism-dominionism-elections-voting), whose funding and theocratic vision have been aggressively pushing the Texas Republican Party further to the far right.

Right Wing Watch has reported that the Courage Tour blends religious revivalism, spiritual warfare rhetoric, right-wing politics, and targeted voter turnout work all designed to overcome “demonic strongholds” and put Trump back into the White House. Some other media reports (https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-guardian-usa/20240803/281754159597359) on the Courage Tour have noted (https://washingtonspectator.org/michigan/) the partnership (https://religiondispatches.org/wheres-wallnau-a-nar-apostle-takes-aim-at-swing-counties-in-the-battle-for-the-mountain-of-government/) and described (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/eau-claire-tent-revival/680097/) the participation of America First Works—AFPI’s political action affiliate—and its voter registration efforts (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-evangelicals-calling-for-spiritual-warfare-to-elect-trump/ar-AA1rZtNf). Wallnau and AFPI have focused on 19 crucial counties in swing states that they believe could swing the election for Trump with increased turnout from MAGA-minded Christians.

The extent of the partnership between AFPI and New Apostolic Reformation dominionists like Wallnau is revealed in video (https://www.youtube.com/live/H6EWT3NMeA4?si=hwKB-kZsrXgReHlP&t=8643) from a Michigan stop on the Courage Tour in May. Wallnau described AFPI as “the group I work with,” adding that it “is holding the key appointment for the hoped-for Trump administration….They’ve got all the placeholders for who’s going in.”

Wallnau introduced Richard Rogers, who is affiliated with Georgia-based MAGA pastor Jentezen Franklin’s Free Chapel church, and who is serving (https://americafirstpolicy.com/team/dr-richard-rogers)as AFPI’s national director of faith engagement. He got that assignment, Rogers said, when AFPI called Franklin saying that the movement did not have enough resources on the ground to actually do the necessary voter registration and turnout in those targeted counties. Rogers went to work, he said, and now AFPI has a “faith department” that has been built “to put boots on the ground to motivate the voters in those states to turn the tide on the election in 2024—and we’re doing it.”

Rogers said that AFPI has developed closer collaboration between other groups doing voter registration and turnout among conservative Christians, citing Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA and Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition as examples. Rogers also said AFPI has raised enough money to have paid attorneys ready to intervene in key precincts and counties.

Also reflecting the increasingly Christian nationalist orientation of the MAGA movement—and the agenda of AFPI funder Dunn—is the think tank’s effort to claim a scriptural basis (https://americafirstpolicy.com/issues/biblical-foundations-ten-pillars-for-restoring-a-nation-under-god) for every part of its social, economic, and foreign policy agenda.

AFPI calls its policy agenda “10 Pillars for Restoring a Nation Under God (https://americafirstpolicy.com/issues/biblical-foundations-ten-pillars-for-restoring-a-nation-under-god),” though some of its claimed scriptural foundations seem strained, to say the least. To buttress its opposition to “Marxist and Socialist ideology in our healthcare,” AFPI offers four Bible verses, including ones that describe our bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit and a prayer for good health.

AFPI’s “Biblical Foundations (https://americafirstpolicy.com/centers/biblical-foundations)” project was launched last year (https://youtu.be/rjkpkih3fCc) at an event featuring Trump spiritual adviser and former White House aide Paula White, who chair’s AFPI’s Center for American Values. At the event, AFPI President Rollins said that in her White House role running Trump’s domestic policy agenda, “we saw the benefit of policy driven by faith.” Policy, said White, must be “guided by eternal truths, biblical truths.” Also speaking were Jentezen Franklin and New Apostolic Reformation figure Jim Garlow.

Goya CEO and AFPI board member Bob Unanue declared, “We are in a spiritual war.”

That kind of spiritual warfare rhetoric can also be found on the Biblical Foundations portion of AFPI’s website, which reads, “This fight is not just about the culture of America; it’s about the kingdom of God and the Church’s divine mission to be the salt and light of our day in an era of increasing darkness.”

rww

10/25/2024

Peter Montgomery (https://www.peoplefor.org/spokespeople/peter)

Goya CEO and AFPI board member Bob Unanue declared, “We are in a spiritual war.”

belated category 11/16

primary 10 24

see i360 for data gotv

see evang (boast vs performance?)

===

rnc oitsrc to musk and miller xian?

rww

10/25/2024

Peter Montgomery

The New York Times profiled the MAGA movement organization America First Policy Institute this week. AFPI was created as a sort of Trump administration in exile after voters dumped Donald Trump from office. AFPI has provided jobs and salaries to a lot of Trump loyalists, who are working to put Trump—and themselves—back into power. And they’re preparing to make the most of that power.

AFPI’s own version of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda for a new administration reportedly includes nearly 300 executive orders for a returning Trump to sign. Right Wing Watch reported last year on an AFPI summit called “Laying the Groundwork for the Next America First Administration,” at which the group’s president Brooke Rollins bragged about the “revolutionary” nature of its ambitions to “seize control of the administrative state and use it—while also dismantling it,” describing “an America First confrontation against anti-conservative institutions.”

One important aspect of AFPI’s work that this week’s Times story did not explore is AFPI’s partnership with dominionist Lance Wallnau and his “Courage Tour” to turn out conservative Christian voters in crucial swing-state counties in the upcoming election. As the Times noted, one of AFPI’s funders and board members is Texas pastor-billionaire Tim Dunn, whose funding and theocratic vision have been aggressively pushing the Texas Republican Party further to the far right.

The extent of the partnership between AFPI and New Apostolic Reformation dominionists like Wallnau is revealed in video from a Michigan stop on the Courage Tour in May. Wallnau described AFPI as “the group I work with,” adding that it “is holding the key appointment for the hoped-for Trump administration….They’ve got all the placeholders for who’s going in.”

Wallnau introduced Richard Rogers, who is affiliated with Georgia-based MAGA pastor Jentezen Franklin’s Free Chapel church, and who is servingas AFPI’s national director of faith engagement. He got that assignment, Rogers said, when AFPI called Franklin saying that the movement did not have enough resources on the ground to actually do the necessary voter registration and turnout in those targeted counties. Rogers went to work, he said, and now AFPI has a “faith department” that has been built “to put boots on the ground to motivate the voters in those states to turn the tide on the election in 2024—and we’re doing it.”

Also reflecting the increasingly Christian nationalist orientation of the MAGA movement—and the agenda of AFPI funder Dunn—is the think tank’s effort to claim a scriptural basis for every part of its social, economic, and foreign policy agenda.

AFPI calls its policy agenda “10 Pillars for Restoring a Nation Under God,” though some of its claimed scriptural foundations seem strained, to say the least. To buttress its opposition to “Marxist and Socialist ideology in our healthcare,” AFPI offers four Bible verses, including ones that describe our bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit and a prayer for good health.

AFPI’s “Biblical Foundations” project was at an event featuring Trump spiritual adviser and former White House aide Paula White, who chair’s AFPI’s Center for American Values. At the event, AFPI President Rollins said that in her White House role running Trump’s domestic policy agenda, “we saw the benefit of policy driven by faith.” Policy, said White, must be “guided by eternal truths, biblical truths.” Also speaking were Jentezen Franklin and New Apostolic Reformation figure Jim Garlow.

Goya CEO and AFPI board member Bob Unanue declared, “We are in a spiritual war.”

===

OMG anti-stay at home/mask protests could be prep for voter intim at polls or worse in chaos after?! xian

guk 9 24

Trump-allied Pac fires canvassing vendor in crucial states weeks before election

Elon Musk’s America Pac replaces voter turnout operations in Arizona and Nevada with fewer than 50 days till election

Hugo Lowell in Washington

Tue 17 Sep 2024

America Pac, one of the largest and the most ambitious of the groups supporting Donald Trump’s campaign, is replacing its ground game operations in the crucial battleground states of Arizona and Nevada, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The political action committee, backed by billionaire Elon Musk, has ended its contract with the September Group and will hire a new company to knock on doors with fewer than 50 days left until the election.

America Pac used non-performance as the stated reason to back out of the contract in the past few days, claiming the September Group was not hitting its door-knocking targets, one of people said.

The shakeup comes at a crunch moment for the Trump campaign, which has outsourced virtually its entire ground game operation to a number of political action committees in this presidential cycle. America Pac is seen as the most ambitious, with a presence in every swing state.

As a result of the shakeup, America Pac has not canvassed any neighborhoods in Arizona and Nevada on behalf of the Trump campaign for the past few days as it resets its operations in the two states.

America Pac hopes the roughly 300 canvassers employed by the September Group will be rehired by its successor but whether that occurs remains uncertain.

To some degree, it would be in America Pac’s interest to rehire the people given the talent pool for knocking on doors in the blazing Arizona and Nevada heat is dramatically reduced this late in the cycle, having already been hired by congressional and other campaigns.

The New York Times reported earlier that America Pac would replace the September Group with a new canvassing vendor. The September Group was paid just under $1.4m for its work since August, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

A Trump campaign spokesperson could not immediately be reached for comment.

The move inside America Pac comes as Republican officials in swing states have raised concern about the Trump campaign’s own formal presence for the get-out-the-vote operation, the Guardian has reported.

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Trump has scant ground game operation in swing states, GOP worries

Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/09/trump-campaign-rnc-ground-game-pacs)

The Republican National Committee once envisioned an extensive field operation for the 2024 election, until the Trump campaign scrapped those plans when it took over the party in March, pursuing a twin voter turnout strategy of relying on Pacs and ardent Trump volunteers.

The Trump campaign took the gamble to outsource its ground game, after the Federal Election Commission gave permission for campaigns to coordinate their voter turnout efforts with the Pacs, freeing Trump to spend his war chest on rallies and television advertising.

But the Pacs, which are supposed to bridge the gap, have been slow to spool up, according to people with direct access to the data for groups such as America Pac, Turnout for America, Turning Point Action and America First Works.

They have only started to hire at a rapid clip in recent weeks, the people said, meaning they are reaching Trump supporters late in the cycle when it often takes repeated “voter contacts” to get them to return a ballot.

The situation means that not only is the size of the formal Trump operation particularly small for the 2024 election, but the door-knockers and canvassers recruited by the Pacs might be less effective compared with previous presidential cycles.

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tpm 10 24

Over recent weeks I’ve tried to share with you a series of questions about the campaign or features of the campaign that could mean the difference between victory and defeat. Most of these aren’t cases where you say “this campaign has to do this” or “this campaign has to do that.” They’re mysteries to me at least at a deeper level. The one I’d like to discuss today I’ve mentioned a few times in earlier posts.

Remember back in the spring the Trump campaign and really the Trump family did a sort of forced takeover of the RNC and as part of that move they closed down the RNC’s Get Out The Vote or field operations and decided to outsource that work to a series of super PACs of which Elon Musk’s America PAC and the Turning Point USA’s PAC are the biggest? This wasn’t totally out of the blue or not totally without some rationale behind it. The FEC recently made a ruling that gave campaigns and parties greater ability to coordinate with super PACs on GOTV work. So there’s some logic to that. But it’s not obvious on that basis why you’d shut down the RNC’s GOTV operations. So questions about that move have hovered over this. Was this just dumb? Is there some financial interest at work? Is it just part of asserting total control over the party apparatus? Or is it actually just a good idea, allowing the unlimited dollars of these PACs to up the party’s game? The weight of logic and some evidence points to some mix of the first few answers. But it’s been hard to totally rule out the last one.

So now we’ve had two separate articles with state and national Republican operatives sounding alarm bells about how this is going. One was published about a week ago by the AP. And then a new one just came out in Politico. The gist and even structure of each article is similar enough that I’ll describe them as one, even though I assume they’re based on independent reporting and came out a week or so apart. Each focuses on unnamed, and in some cases named, Republican Party officials in the swing states essentially saying we’re not seeing any evidence of a ground game and we’re getting worried that we’re going to get swamped. These accounts are pretty credible — or at least it is pretty credible that these people mean what they say. Both in terms of morale and in terms of getting cross-wise with party leadership, no one wants to be saying this kind of stuff to the press. You do it because you’re trying to send up a warning sign to people in charge at the national level. It can also be, to some extent, the result of sour grapes. But in this context that’s not a very good explanation.

So the gist is that people working out in the swing states aren’t really seeing much of a ground operation and they’re getting worried. The Trump campaign’s response is that they’re super focused on very low propensity voters, and those voters are going to be especially present in rural and exurban areas while these operatives are used to focusing on the suburbs. On its face that doesn’t make a great deal of sense to me. The current GOP is really a party of rural and exurban America. Not exclusively of course. But that’s the base of the party, just as cities are for the Democrats. So it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me that GOP operatives aren’t familiar with these geographies or these kinds of voters. But I’ve never worked in GOTV operations and I certainly don’t have a strong sense of how Republicans do it. There’s also a question of just how low a propensity a voter you’re trying to get. The accounts suggest the focus is on Trump-inclined voters who weren’t successfully activated in 2016 or 2020 or at least not in both years. By definition those voters are probably pretty hard to turn out if they blew off one or both of the elections in which Trump was on the ballot. The strategy the Trump campaign is describing is at least consistent with the strategy stated in other contexts of semi-abandoning the suburbs and trying to squeeze a bit more juice out of rural and exurban America and, particularly, trying to turn out men in those areas.

So which is it? Is this an ingenious plan or is it just BS to explain why a lot of the purportedly outsourced super PAC GOTV isn’t happening. I genuinely don’t know. I don’t really know enough about that part of campaign work to have a knowledgable take on what I’m hearing. But there’s enough out there to suggest that some significant number of swing state Republican operatives and campaign people think the whole effort either looks like a bust or is just entirely MIA.

I’m curious to hear from readers who have experience with GOTV work generally or who are in the field in the swing states and might be able to share their own perceptions of what’s happening. For everyone else, as I noted at the top, it’s a basic question on which the outcome of the election could turn. So it bears watching closely.

===

an 7 23

,,,

You could also call an election in my town for literally anything and within minutes there’d be lines wrapped around every corner of the city. We are furious voters who have fought to reclaim what’s good and right about Wisconsin and America.

Choice for one thing.

We stand with the women and the right to vote. We stand up for the climate and put down racist hate. You could throw a rock in any direction around here and hit an activist. We are everywhere, and we are paying attention.

We are also growing by the second, which I can tell you positively terrifies Republicans.

I’d argue we have the most organized get-out-the-vote machine in the country, which is really saying something for such an odd group of people.

In the most recent statewide election here in April to decide the majority of our Supreme Court, Dane County and Madison voters showed up and pushed the liberal justice, Janet Protasiewicz, to an 11-point thumping of Trump’s conservative candidate, Dan Kelly.

Protasiewicz got 82 percent of the vote here in Dane to Kelly’s pathetic 18, winning 197,029 votes to Kelly’s 43,372. Our turnout was 63 percent. Those are remarkable numbers for an off-year election in the spring with no other state or national races on the ballot.

Just in case I haven’t impressed you yet, consider this: When Joe Biden beat Trump in Wisconsin in 2020, the turnout for registered voters here in Madison was an incredible 89.3 percent. The turnout across America was 66.1 percent.

Biden beat Trump by more than 20,000 votes statewide, but he beat Trump here in Madison by more than 181,000 votes.

Madison and Dane County are the engines that have led the Democrats’ resurgence in this battleground state. Since the disaster of 2016, liberal voters have flipped the Supreme Court, elected and reelected Democrat Tony Evers as governor and elected and reelected Democrat Josh Kaul as the state’s attorney general.

Currently, you will find us at all the choice spots, drinking beer, knocking back brats, hiking our beautiful parks, fishing our pristine streams, and readying ourselves to put in the necessary work in 2024 in this the battlegroundiest of all the battleground states.

We aren’t much about toxic masculinity or bragging about the size of our guns. We will put on a pink hat, however, organize and drive people of all shapes and colors to the polls.

Mostly, we are winners.

You don’t come around my town unless yer lookin’ to vote.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough

===

r ww 6 23

former President Donald Trump received a rapturous hero’s welcome Saturday night as he delivered the closing keynote address to a room packed with religious-right activists in Washington, D.C. for the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s annual Road to Majority conference.

Trump knew his audience. “We are warriors in a righteous crusade to stop the arsonists, atheists, globalists, and the Marxists,and we will restore our republic as one nation under God with liberty and justice for all,” Trump said. As part of his typically long and rambling speech, he denounced his recent indictments, bragged about his administration’s accomplishments–including his Supreme Court justices cementing the right-wing majority to overturn Roe v. Wade—and declared that Democrats have become “monsters.”

Trump thrilled the crowd with promises about what he would do as the 47th president, saying, “When I get back in the Oval Office,I will totally obliterate the Deep State.”And he vowed to push “school choice” plans—which divert public education dollars into private and religious schools and homeschooling—and, oddly, called for public school principals to be chosen by direct election by parents.

Trump’s speech and others at the conference signaled the issues and strategies around which the MAGA movement is mobilizing to try to take power in the 2024 elections: waging war on “wokeness,” demeaning transgender people and calling for institutionalized discrimination against them, mocking corporate support for diversity, equity, and environmental protection, and, in the name of parents’ rights,purging schools and libraries of materials that do not align with MAGA activists’ political and religious worldviews.

Trump’s speech was preceded byawards given to right-wing movement fundraising godfather Richard Viguerie and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Viguerie declared that the nation is in “a spiritual civil war” that “the left has launched against Western civilization, America, our Constitution, Judeo-Christian moral values, and much else we value at home.” Viguerie encouraged activists to get more involved in any way they can, signing off with, “Good night, ladies and gentlemen. See you on the battlefield of the spiritual civil war, and don’t be late!”

Viguerie was not the only speaker equating American politics with spiritual warfare. Huckabee said that “the battle that we’re facing in this country is not a political battle. And it’s not an economic fight. And it’s not a sociological fight. It is a spiritual battle between the forces of evil and good.” Huckabee concluded with, “Let’s not give up, because the battle is not over, folks. It’s just getting started.”

Earlier in the conference, Christian nationalist and anti-LGBTQ North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson drew cheers when he declared, “This nation is at war, and we need a warrior at the helm,” and endorsed Trump’s bid to return to the White House. Robinson noted his own campaign for governor, and compared himself to the Union soldiers at Gettysburg, the Marines on Iwo Jima, and civil rights marchers, and insisted that he only looks “crazy” to people who are “insane.”

Before Saturday night’s gala, activists heard from nearly all the Republican presidential candidates, hard-right Republican elected officials, and MAGA movement activists likeKari Lake, the defeated-but-still-refusing-to-admit-it candidate for Arizona governor in 2022.

Trump’s major contender for the Republican nomination, Florida’s authoritarian Gov. Ron DeSantis, was greeted enthusiastically on Friday—giving a stump speech attacking “the woke mind virus” and declaring “We did not start this fire, but as president of the United States, I will lead the effort to extinguish the fire of cultural Marxism once and for all.”DeSantis pledged to “discipline” the federal bureaucracy, “impose our will on it,” and turn the Justice Department “inside out.”

At the beginning of Road to Majority, Reed urged participants to treat all speakers respectfully, which most did until former New JerseyGov. Chris Christie had the audacity to question Trump’s character and tell activists that Trump had let them down—eliciting a chorus of boos.

The conference kicked off at a Thursday afternoon “town hall” on Capitol Hill, where Faith and Freedom founder Ralph Reed told the audience that God told him to create the organization because Christians who love this country and love God “should be the head and not the tail, and at the top and not the bottom of our political system.” Among the members of Congress who spoke were Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty and Reps. Jim Banks, Patrick McHenry, Burgess Owens, Alex Mooney, and Tom Emmer—who spent much of his speech attacking the government of his own state of Minnesota.

Other speakers sounded Christian nationalist themes, including former Trump faith advisor Paula White, who declared, “We were established as a nation under God,” and Lake, who said, “With God on our side, nothing can stop us from taking back this government.”

At a panel featuring African American speakers representing the seven “mountains” in Seven Mountains Dominionism, Florida congressional candidate Carla Spalding declared that public officials must “write laws that are going to be according to the Bible” and if they don’t, “one by one we get them out.” Other speakers on the panel include anti-abortion activist Alveda King and failed congressional candidates Kim Klacik and Mark Burns. Burns is a Trump-promoting Christian nationalist pastor fond of warfare rhetoric; he spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally on the eve of the Capitol insurrection, where he declared that the attempt to deny Trump a second term was “a demonic attack from the gates of Hell” and insisted that Joe Biden would “never” become president.

In addition to the relentless invocations of “wokeness” and its variants—Indiana representative and Senate candidate Jim Banks bragged about creating an “Anti-Woke Caucus” among House Republicans—speakers frequently denounced transgender people and their supporters, the “deep state,” and corporations that consider diversity and environmental consequences in their investment decision-making.

Another theme running through the conference—which fell on the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade—was the need for Republican candidates to deflect focus from their unpopular abortion ban laws by portraying pro-choice Democrats as the “real extremists”—complete with lies from Trump and others that Democrats support killing babies after they are born.

Feminism itself—now “woke feminism”—continues to be a target of the religious-right movement. Nick Adams, a right-wing activist who immigrated to the U.S. from Australia, claimed that men are the most persecuted and maligned demographic in the world. “Every single problem in America today can be traced back to the absence of strength, strength that can come only from real men, genuine masculinity, and an alpha male mindset,” he said.

Also on display was the right-wing political strategy of “parents’ rights” as a rallying cry and voter mobilization tool. Moms for Liberty, a group founded to resist mask requirements that moved quickly into promoting book bans, school board takeovers, anti-LGBTQ smears, and authoritarian politics in general, had a significant presence at Road to Majority, which was held just a week before their own national summit in Philadelphia. During Q&A at a panel on school choice, M4L’s national director Catalina Stubbe calledteachers unions “enemies” and claimed that public schools are “abusing” and “indoctrinating” children.From the main stage, M4L cofounder Tiffany Justice claimed that “our parental rights are being obliterated by our government every single day.” She said that the group’s 135,000 members in close to 300 chapters spread out over 45 states are “unifying” their communities, a laughable assertion given the anger and chaos they have created at school board meetings and after they take over school boards.

In its speakers and panels, the Faith and Freedom Coalition made an effort to highlight its outreach to conservative Black and Hispanic Christians, a group that the Republican Party hopes to win over in greater numbers in 2024 and beyond. The 2024 elections were a major focus of conference speakers, and not just the presidential candidates. Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Adam Pipkin described the organization’s turnout strategies, including its use of postal change of address data to track targeted voters and make sure they update their registrations, and evangelical church-based ballot harvesting operations in Californiaand other states where permitted by law.

While Reed and the Faith and Freedom Coalition gave a platform to major, minor and relatively unheard of Republican presidential candidates,Road to Majority made it utterly clear that it is Donald Trump who has won the hearts of these activists, and that they will do everything they can to once again put him in the White House so that he can wage merciless war against the Americans they view as their common enemies.

Tags: Alex Mooney Bill Hagerty Burgess Owens Carla Spalding Catalina Stubbe Donald Trump Jim Banks Kari Lake Kimberly Klacik Mark Burns Mark Robinson Marsha Blackburn Mike Huckabee Patrick McHenry Paula White Ralph Reed Richard Viguerie Ron DeSantis Tiffany Justice Tom Emmer Anti-Abortion Anti-Choice Anti-LGBTQ Christian Nationalist Civil War Election 2024 Road to Majority Conference Spiritual Warfare Faith and Freedom Coalition Moms for Liberty Republican Party

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not much coverage

moline fla

https://floridaphoenix.com**/2021/08/**02/a-brazen-scheme-alec-software-giveaway-to-gop-lawmakers-violated-fl-campaign-finance-laws/

An organization backed by major corporations gave state legislators, including at least two from Florida, campaign software worth thousands of dollars in violation of state campaign-finance law, according to complaints filed by three progressive organizations.

The alleged gifts from the American Legislative Exchange Council, which Gov. Ron DeSantis addressed last week in Salt Lake City, amount to illegal in-kind campaign contributions, according to the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), Common Cause, and the Alliance for a Better Utah.

Recipients in Florida include, but might not be limited to, Republicans Rep. Spencer Roach and Rep. Jason Fischer, according to a complaint filed with the Florida Elections Commission. Roach is an attorney and represents part of Lee County in the Legislature. He is listed as vice chair of the Public Integrity & Elections Committee in the state House. Fischer represents part of Duval County.

It’s hard to know the exact number of Florida legislators who may be involved because ALEC doesn’t release its membership list, the organizations said.

“ALEC keeps its membership list secret — they don’t publish it,” said David Armiak, research director for CMD, during a telephone interview.

A separate whistleblower complaint filed with the Internal Revenue Service alleges the software transfer to ALEC’s predominantly GOP membership evidences broader campaign-related activity in violation of ALEC’s tax-exempt status as a nonprofit.

“Voters deserve to know who is buying influence with their elected officials, and that is exactly what ALEC is doing in providing this software to legislators,” Karen Hobert Flynn, president of Common Cause, said in a written statement.

“This is sophisticated software worth thousands of dollars that aids the reelection efforts of these legislators, and the legislators know that. This isn’t buying a legislator a cup of coffee to bend their ear about your bill. These are valuable in-kind contributions, plain and simple,” she said.

“ALEC has abused its tax-exempt status for a decade or more,” said Eric Havian, an attorney for CMD. “I can only hope that we have not become too accustomed to fraud in plain sight, and that the IRS will finally take action to stop taxpayers from subsidizing ALEC’s partisan electioneering and lobbying.”

Fischer and Roach have yet to reply to requests for comment.

The progressive organizations have filed similar complaints in 14 other states, asking government watchdogs to investigate and if possible identify other lawmakers who received the software.

ALEC, backed by some of the country’s biggest corporations, gathers state lawmakers for workshops and distributes model legislation for introduction in statehouses. Recent examples would ban state limits on greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change and an “Energy Discrimination Elimination Act,” forbidding discouragement of fossil fuels.

“While ALEC publicly emphasizes the ‘constituent research and engagement’ benefits of the [software] service, the voter database and management software provided by ALEC is clearly designed to help ALEC legislators win reelection,” the elections complaint alleges.

ALEC has claimed the software, “ALEC CARE,” developed by GOP affiliated consultancy VoterGravity, would normally cost $3,000 but distributed it as a “member benefit,” the complaint adds.

“Voter Gravity explicitly markets the software as a ‘powerful’ tool for political campaigns from ‘an approved mobile app vendor for the Republican National Committee and fully integrated with the RNC’s database,” the complaint says.

Florida law defines a campaign contribution as “a gift, subscription, conveyance, deposit, loan, payment, or distribution of money or anything of value, including contributions in kind having an attributable monetary value in any form, made for the purpose of influencing the results of an election or making an electioneering communication.”

The law limits contributions to $1,000 per legislative candidate. Persons knowingly making or accepting gifts worth above that amount are guilty of a first-degree misdemeanor, punishable by up to one year imprisonment. Corporate violators face fines of as much as $10,000 and could love their right to do business in Florida.

“Provision of the voter management software to support election campaigns constitutes an illegal in-kind campaign contribution by ALEC whether or not ALEC members ultimately used it for their campaigns,” the complaint alleges.

“ALEC’s disclaimers and transparent repackaging of a powerful campaign tool as “constituent communications” do nothing to reduce its campaign value.”

The IRS complaint identifies the whistleblower as “a current legislative member of ALEC,” identified in the document as “Legislator,” calling this person “a classic insider” appalled at what ALEC was doing.

The software log-in page states that the tools can’t be used for a political campaigns, but “many of its features can have no other plausible use,” the document says.

“The software came preloaded with individual-level voting information, including voter history and political party ideology; views on ‘hot button’ electoral issues like taxation and gun control; income and donor status; metrics like ‘Turnout Score’ and Republican National Committee voter identification numbers; and numerous other data points exceedingly helpful for a re-election campaign but largely irrelevant to ‘constituent service,’” the complaint says.

“Moreover, Legislator noted that CARE’s analytical and dashboard tools were also primarily campaign related and not particularly useful for constituent service, tracking elements like ‘Identified Supporters,’ ‘Door Knocks,’ ‘Walklist Stats,’ and ‘Phone Bank Stats,’” it says.

“ALEC CARE is a brazen scheme to help ALEC’s overwhelmingly Republican members win reelection,” Arn Pearson, CMD’s executive director, said in a written statement.

“The fact that ALEC’s constituent management program typically costs ‘thousands of dollars,’ but it is being provided free of charge to selected legislators, would constitute a contribution to the legislator,” Marcus Owens, former director of the Exempt Organizations Division of the Internal Revenue Service, told CMD.

“The fact that there may well be sub rosa links, meaning secret, between databases created by the management program and organizations engaged in partisan political activity suggests another potential electioneering event,” Owens said.

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1020

BILL MOYERS: –said the Council for National Policy's executive committee president, Bill Walton.Ralph Reed, chairman of the nonprofit, Faith and Freedom Coalition told the CNP audience that conservatives are going to be harvesting ballots in churches. “We're going to be specifically going in, not only to white evangelical churches, but into Hispanic and Asian churches and collecting those ballots.'"And then, here's the one that really stands out. At that meeting, J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department official and the president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a charity, described mail-in voting as the number one left-wing agenda. He urged the activists not to worry about the criticism that might come their way. Quote, “Be not afraid of the accusations that you're a voter suppressor." Any of that surprise you?

ANNE NELSON: Not in the least. On the contrary, you'll find the footprints of those statements in my book. One of the techniques that this movement has used is using data profiles and directing information to voters to either get them to vote for Republicans or to suppress the vote if they're not likely to. The Koch brothers brought state-of-the-art political data operations to the table with an organization called i360. And that was harnessed to organizations that were run by CNP members.

So, for example, one of them was the Susan B. Anthony List, which is anti-abortion. One of them was the NRA. They also combined data from churches and from political data and consumer data. So that allowed canvassers for these organizations to do their door-to-door canvassing having a huge amount of information about each individual voter, and a tailored individual script for them. So, for example, if you are canvassing in Springfield, Missouri, and you're working for the Susan B. Anthony List, you know that at such-and-such an address, there's a Catholic housewife with six kids there who watched an anti-abortion film on Netflix and ordered LIVES OF THE SAINTS from Amazon. You have all of that in your cell phone, and you also have a script that's been prepared and tailored for that voter, right? But you're going to have a totally different script based on the data for the next-door neighbor who's a gun owner who's all about the second amendment.

And the Democrats have lagged behind, not in terms of the data they have, but the way they've networked data across state lines and to organizations that are doing their political groundwork. So that's been a factor.The use of data has been very important in the last few campaigns, and not always well-understood. But there's also a really important matter of how data is used to suppress votes. And that's where I would direct people to a news story done by Channel Four in Britain. The Council for National Policy partners and the Koch brothers' data platform i360 used data from Cambridge Analyticawith several hundred million voters, with some2,000 data points for every voter. So that includes you and me, Bill, okay? They know a lot about us, and so what they did in this story documenting what happened with African Americans in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was find that if voters were not likely to vote for Republicans. If they leaned Democratic, they would target them with misinformation that would disincline them to vote at all. And in other cases, such as what's been documented in Michigan, some 90,000 African American voters were persuaded not to vote for the top of the ticket for Hillary Clinton by these methods. So, in these states, they always go by very, very narrow margins. So, I would argue that a lot of these data operations, some of them of questionable legality, have actually changed the course of electoral history.

BILL MOYERS: What do you think they're doing for this election in two weeks?

ANNE NELSON: Well, we know that the Trump 2020 app has highly questionable practices, in terms of its privacy and the way it accesses people's cell phone directories, all of their contacts, friends and family, and then sends messages out to them, often without the user knowing that they're doing it. They also combine that with consumer data. So, for example, if you downloaded their app on one phone that was a different account, they could trace your credit card records back to your own account. They also use geolocation, so once you download the app, they figure out where you are and what kind of messaging would appeal to you and leverage you to attract other voters. And they use this through beacons that are placed around areas like political rallies and churches, right, to locate the people with the apps and then engage them for political purpose. It has been recently revealed that thesebeacons had even been implanted in Trump yard signs. So, they're really, I would say, on the cutting edge of political technology. And it's in this very murky area of law where there are abusive practices involving privacy, but there's no clear legal framework to govern it.

BILL MOYERS: And what stuns me is their ability to connect this very sophisticated information gained by very up-to-date, modern technology to a lot of poor pastors in East Texas and Southern Alabama who are concerned about the state of the world. And here, they've been led into, one of the most sophisticated political campaigns that really has not their interest at heart. And they become soldiers in the crusade–

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nyt

no lnx

The Quiet Hand of Conservative Groups in the Anti-Lockdown Protests

Groups in a loose coalition have tapped their networks to drive up turnout at recent rallies in state capitals and financed lawsuits, polling and research to combat the stay-at-home orders.

Kenneth P. Vogel Jim Rutenberg Lisa Lerer

By Kenneth P. Vogel, Jim Rutenberg and Lisa Lerer

April 21, 2020

WASHINGTON — An informal coalition of influential conservative leaders and groups, some with close connections to the White House, has been quietly working to nurture protests and apply political and legal pressure to overturn state and local orders intended to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

The groups have tapped their networks to drive up turnout at recent rallies in state capitals, dispatched their lawyers to file lawsuits, and paid for polling and research to undercut the arguments behind restrictions that have closed businesses and limited the movement of most Americans.

Among those fighting the orders are FreedomWorks and Tea Party Patriots, which played pivotal roles in the beginning of Tea Party protests starting more than a decade ago. Also involved are a law firm led partly by former Trump White House officials,a network of state-based conservative policy groups, and an ad hoc coalition of conservative leaders known as Save Our Country that has advised the White House on strategies for a tiered reopening of the economy.

The effort picked up some influential support on Tuesday, when Attorney General William P. Barr expressed concerns about state-level restrictions potentially infringing on constitutional rights, and suggested that, if that occurred, the Justice Department might weigh in, including by supporting legal challenges by others. Separately, in Wisconsin, Republicans in the state legislature sued to block the Democratic governor’s order extending stay-at-home rules through May 26.

Those helping orchestrate the fight against restrictions predict the effort could energize the right in the same way the Tea Party movement did in 2009 and 2010,and potentially be helpful to President Trump as he campaigns for re-election. But the cause has yet to demonstrate that kind of traction.

Polls show a majority of Americans are more concerned about reopening the country too quickly than they are about the damage to the economy. And coronavirus protests have drawn smaller crowds ranging from a few dozen to several thousand at a rally in Michigan last week.

Conditions are hardly ideal for a protest movement related to the virus. In addition to the health risks, demonstrators potentially face legal exposure for violating the very measures they are protesting. Plus, some key Republican leaders have embraced the types of restrictions being targeted, while powerful grass-roots mobilizing groups, including those spearheaded by the billionaire activist Charles Koch, have so far not embraced the protests.BUT FREEDOMS WORKS HAS?!]

Still, the fight has emerged as a galvanizing cause for a vocal element of Mr. Trump’s base and others on the political right. Organizers see it as unifying social conservatives, who view the orders as targeting religious groups; fiscal conservatives who chafe at the economic devastation wrought by the restrictions on businesses; and civil libertarians who contend that the restrictions infringe on constitutional rights.

“Groups are united in purpose on this,” said Noah Wall, advocacy director for FreedomWorks, which in 2009 organized a Tea Party protest that drew tens of thousands of people or more to Washington. He described the current efforts as appealing to a “much broader” group. “This is about people who want to get back to work and leave their homes,” he said.....

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PPP rww 720

Perry Joins Capitol Ministries Project to ‘Disciple’ Local Officials to Right-Wing ‘Biblical Worldview’

Former Texas Gov. and U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry is partnering with a religious-right effort to “disciple” 500,000 local officials into a conservative Christian “worldview” and shape public policies in 40,000 U.S. localities. Perry’s undertaking was announced in a June letter to supporters of Capitol Ministries from the organization’s president Ralph Drollinger, whose weekly Bible studies teach members of Trump’s Cabinet and the U.S. Congress that the Bible instructs public officials to support right-wing social, economic, environmental, and criminal justice policies.

“I am passionate about Capitol Ministries’ efforts to reach today’s 500,000 elected local government leaders with the Gospel of Jesus Christ and disciple them with the Word of God, so they may form a Christian worldview in their hearts,” Perry is quoted in the Drollinger letter. “I see this effort as critically important. America’s ideological future hangs in the balance.”

Drollinger and Capitol Ministries have aggressive expansion plans in multiple directions. Drollinger has previously announced Capitol Ministries’ goal of establishing “discipleship” ministries in 200 nations, all 50 states, and all 40,000 localities in the U.S. With help from Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Capitol Ministries is expanding its presence among high-level officials in foreign capitals. Perry has become the group’s “spokesman for Local Government Ministries.”

As part of the partnership, Perry has begun emailing local officials offering to send them a weekly Bible study taken from Drollinger’s“Oaks in Office,” a guidebook for conservative Christian public officials.

“This is a critical time for our nation,” Perry declared in an invitation included with Drollinger’s letter. “Spreading secularism is threatening to smother the very values that our founding fathers based out country upon—values that you and I hold very dear.”

Perry wrote that Capitol Ministries’ Bible studies that he participated in as a cabinet member were “in-depth, theologically sound and they drilled deep in Scripture.” He added, “They helped us all understand more about God, biblical truths, and what God expects of us as leaders.”

Drollinger’s letter affirmed that the studies being sent to local officials who respond to Perry’s emails “examine crucial policy issues through the timeless lens of God’s Word”—meaning scripture as interpreted by Drollinger.

Drollinger is not humble about his approach to the Bible, dismissing those who interpret scripture and its demands differently than he does. He has demonstrated contempt for liberal Christians and the “social gospel,” and he has described the Catholic Church as “one of the primary false religions in the world.” He teaches that legislators who do not share his worldview cannot be counted on to do the right thing because, he has written, “the longer a person rejects Christ, the greater his depravity becomes.”

Drollinger’s Bible studies, which are available online, instruct public officials that the government’s job is to “quell evil” and punish sin; that “as a lawmaker it is incumbent on you to stand for the death penalty”; that entitlement programs lack “any basis of biblical authority”; that**“radical environmentalism” is a “false religion.**:{”}: Drollinger recruits only men to run Capitol Ministries Bible studies, because he believes women are not permitted to teach men about the Bible.

In March, Drollinger complained about “evil pork” in coronavirus relief legislation, fretting that unemployment benefits in the bill might be an “impetus to slothfulness” and “antithetical to free-market capitalism.”

Drollinger, who insists that he is not a Christian nationalist, tells Christian public officials that they should refuse to participate in interfaith “syncretistic” prayer breakfasts; syncretism refers to the blending of belief systems. According to Drollinger, “God only hears the prayers of leaders and citizens who are upright, who live righteously through faith in Jesus Christ.”

When Perry was a member of Trump’s cabinet and participating in Drollinger’s weekly Bible studies, other cabinet members called Perry the “teacher’s pet,” Drollinger told Intercessors for America’s prayer warriors in 2018. Perry was among the featured speakers at Capitol Ministries’ global training session for ministry leaders that was held at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. in December.

Drollinger asked IFA’s intercessors to pray that cabinet officials would use their platforms to fulfill the “Great Commission”—the biblical command by Jesus to his followers to “make disciples of all nations.” U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue and Trump-appointed NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine have both raised money for Capitol Ministries.

Drollinger’s letter asks for financial contributions to support the “massive effort” which, he wrote, “will impact not only the eternal souls of local political leaders but the very future of the United States.”

Perry’s ill-fated bid for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination was unofficially launched with a prayer rally backed by religious-right leaders and many of the “apostles” and “prophets” who are now among Trump’s strongest supporters.

Tags: Ralph Drollinger Rick Perry Christian Nation Church-State Capitol Ministries

620 an raw story

Donald Trump is losing support from his evangelical base as he lurches from one crisis into another.

Numerous polls show that religious Americans, like most other Americans, disapprove of the president’s performance, and that could imperil his re-election chances, reported the New York Times.

Nearly 80 percent of white evangelicals — a group that’s already shrinking as a share of the electorate — approved of Trump’s performance in March, but his handling of the coronavirus pandemic has bled 15 points from their support, according to a new poll from Public Religion Research Institute.

“He had an opportunity in March when people were looking to him,” said Robert Jones, the institute’s chief executive, “and then within four weeks he squandered it.”

Those losses could be offset by efforts from activist group’s such as Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition, which plans to spend tens of millions of dollars to identify and register new religious conservative voters and rallying right-wing Christians.

And another PRRI poll from last year found that 31 percent of white evangelical voters said there was almost nothing Trump could do to lose their support.

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aha: abortion turned xian anti-gubmint; in 80's RR grifter televangelists had TV programs/stations; Rove courted (organized) for Bush 43; nowdrollinger cabinet and GOTV network (AI/digital tracking?); scary overlap with militias?! patriot prayer ~ stay at home order , boogaloo

old ppl and xian vote in primaries, thus leverage, flank, enforcer

putin cozied up to? thus US xians gave him pass on collusion, plus if true delegitimatizes trump, who delivers anti-abortion judge and SCOTUS w/ mcconnell

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/why-religious-freedom-stokes-coronavirus-protests-in-the-u-s/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/rise-of-a-shadow-political-party-how-christian-nationalists-worship-power-and-why-they-love-trump/

no lnx

Rise of a ‘shadow political party’: How Christian nationalists worship power — and why they love Trump

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon March 4, 2020

It’s one of the most enduring conundrums of the Donald Trump era: How is it that the Christian right, the self-appointed monitors of American morality, have come to so enthusiastically back a thrice-married chronic adulterer who lies as easily as he breathes?

Author Katherine Stewart has the answer: Because the true god these folks worship is power. In her book, “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism,” Stewart details how she traveled around the country, getting to know the various Christian conservative figures that are whipping support for Trump and his agenda. She deems the “Christian nationalists” and demonstrates how their supposedly Christian values always come second to their endless quest for power.

Stewart spoke with Salon about her new book. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

In the intro of the book you write that most Americans view the Christian right as a “cultural movement centered on a set of social issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage.” But in fact, it’s a political movement and its ultimate goal is power. What do you mean by that?

I think when we think of the religious right, we’re often thinking of a cultural movement or social movement that works from the bottom up, expressing the anxieties and reactions of a particular group in American society to change social realities, focused on issues like reproductive rights or same-sex marriage.But Christian nationalism really works from the top down. It actively shapes and manipulates its target population, and it often shifts its target.

When movement leaders are talking to the congregants or to pastors who speak to congregants, it’s all abortion all the time. The foot soldiers may even believe that they’re fighting for things like a ban on abortion or same-sex marriage, but the leaders have actually consciously reframed these issues in such a way that they can control the vote of a large subsection of the American public. They use that to solidify and maintain political power for themselves and their allies, to increase the flow of public and private money in their direction, and to enact economic policies that are favorable to their funders.

When you dig a little deeper into what the movement leaders talk about when they talk with one another, they actually advocate for a very wide range of policy issues that don’t just have to do with abortion or same-sex marriage. A lot of it has to do with economic policy. A lot of it has to do with foreign policy, social policy. It’s important to look at the movement in this broader fashion as a political movement that wants power.

Tell me more about that. How does someone argue that there’s something Christian about, say, low tax and low regulation?

They say that the Bible favors minimal government or no government. The Bible is against regulation, against the social safety net. Unless the social safety net is managed by the church.

Someone like Ralph Drollinger — who targets political leaders at the top levels of government — he’s got this Bible study group in the Capitol that’s been attended by at least 11 members of Trump’s cabinet, including Mike Pence. He also has Bible study groups targeting the Senate and House of Representatives, and they’re very well-attended. So he’s arguably one of the most politically influential pastors in America.

He argues that social welfare programs have no basis in Scripture. He says that the government should not directly fund needs for the poor. He says the responsibility to meet the needs of the poor lies first with a husband and a marriage, second with a family if the husband is absent, and third with the church. He says nowhere does God command the institutions of government or commerce to fully support those with genuine needs.

These policies are incredibly favorable to the plutocratic fortunes that are funding the movement. The movement wouldn’t be what it is without some subsection of very wealthy individuals and extended families that are supporting the movement financially. I’m thinking of like theDeVos, Prince families, the Green family, and so many others that I described in my book.

These families, in turn, benefit from a deregulation of lack of environmental control regulation, low taxation, and minimal workers’ rights. Drollinger himself derived a lot of his early funding from agribusiness kings, people who own large agribusiness conglomerates in Central Valley,California, and the San Joaquin Valley. So it’s a kind of economic policy that actually is favorable to many of the big-picture funders of the movement.

We also have to recognize that the role of public money is absolutely huge. A lot of the calls for “religious freedom” that characterize much of the activism of the movement today are often seen, rightly so, as a demand that conservative Christians should be able to discriminate against LGBT Americans, nonreligious women and members of the religious minority groups. But even more than that, activists have their eye on a vast potential flow of public funds in the future. This is one of the reasons why the calls for religious freedom are just like this ever-louder drum beat that we’re hearing in so many places.

This agenda has been made really explicit in the field of public educationwhere activists are determined to expand access to public funds in the form of vouchers. They’ve actually placed a key voucher case before the Supreme Court, which they hope will allow a greater funnel of funds in their direction.

The United States spends something like $700 billion a year on K-12. So Christian nationalists realize that, if they can get their hands on a small portion of that in the name of religious liberty, the money will flow without end. So when you look at the larger demands of the movement, it’s not just about these culture war issues, it’s about public policy, foreign policy, and it’s about money.

You call it a Christian nationalist movement, not a white nationalist movement, not the Christian right even. Why do you call it a Christian nationalist movement?

Christian nationalism is a political ideology. It says that what makes the United States distinctive is not our democratic system of government, or our Constitution, or our history of assimilating diverse people in a pluralist society. Instead, it insists that the foundation of legitimate government is bound up inextricably with the reactionary understanding of a particular religion. It basically says that the U.S. was founded on the Bible, and can only succeed if it stays true to that foundation.

It’s also not just an ideology, but a device for mobilizing and often manipulating large segments of the population and for concentrating power in the hands of this new elite. Vladimir Putin in Russia, or Viktor Orban in Hungary, or Erdogan in Turkey tie themselves closely to religious conservatives in their countries, to consolidate an authoritarian form of power. We’re seeing this today with Trump’s alliances, with our own religious conservatives.

You write that America’s conservative churches have been converted into “loyal cells of a shadow political party.” What do you mean by that?

Leaders of the movement have figured out that pastors drive votes, and so they organize pastors into these networks, to get them on the same page politically.They give themtools through networks of conservative churchesin order to do that, to help them turn out votes for hyper-conservative candidates.

Recently, I found myself at a small church in rural North Carolina, with dozens of evangelical pastors from the area. I was at an event sponsored by an organization called Watchmen on the Wall, which is an initiative of the Family Research Council, which is one of the largest and most powerful policy groups of the Christian right.

Watchmen on the Wall claims to have over 25,000 pastor members. They get all these pastors networked together, and they have these presentations where they tell them what issues matter and how to turn out the vote on these “biblical issues.” There wasn’t a slightest doubt about which way these pastors were expected to tell their congregations to vote.

They were instructed to form what they call culture impact teamswithin their churches. They have to figure out which members of their congregation are politically active, well-connected with other members, and motivated to get them to vote according to “biblical values.” They gave these pastors these booklets, 200 pages of material that help them form these culture impact teams.

They actually give them tools to get them out to vote. They give them tens of thousands of voter guides, and pastors were encouraged to take as many as they could use and hand out.

Your chapter on the anti-abortion movement in the book is titled “Inventing Abortion.” You write that it’s a myth that the movement was a reaction to a sincere belief in protecting fetal life. Tell me more. What is this Christian right obsession with abortion? Where does it come from? What is it actually about?

When Roe v. Wade was passed, the liberalization of abortion laws was something that many, if not most, Republican partisans supported. The early battles over abortion tended to be between Catholics and Protestants, with Protestants largely on the side of liberalization of abortion laws. Even though Catholic hierarchy is opposed to abortion, many Catholic individuals supported some form of liberalization based on sort of lived experience.

At that time that Roe v. Wade passed, the abortion law reform really conformed with the Republican party’s support for Protestant values, birth control. Billy Graham in 1968 said, “In general, I would disagree with the Catholic stance. I believe in Planned Parenthood.”

The most liberal abortion law in the country was signed in 1967 by California’s Republican governor, Ronald Reagan. Barry Goldwater, who is this great conservative hero, supported abortion law liberalization early in his career. His wife, Peggy, was a co-founder of Planned Parenthood in Arizona.

When Roe v. Wade passed, in fact, there was a wire service run by the Southern Baptist Convention. The bureau chief of the Baptist Press wrote a piece saying that religious liberty, human equality, and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court decision.

This was not an issue that united the Republican party at all, until activists from the new right got involved and were really searching for an issue that could unite the party.

At the time, they’d come together out of concern that institutions like Bob Jones University would be deprived of their lucrative tax advantage. But they knew that preserving tax advantages for racially segregated academies is not going to be an issue that could really unite the party. So they kind of looked around for an issue that could unite conservative Catholics and conservative Protestants.

Bit by bit, they settled on abortion and sort of purged the Republican party of its pro-choice representatives. They needed a single issue that they could get people to vote on, and abortion became that issue.

Let’s talk about Donald Trump. He’s obviously not a religious man. He knows little of Christian theology. He can’t even get the terminology right. He can’t really even be bothered to pretend otherwise. So how is a man like that such a hero to the Christian nationalists?

First, the movement realizes that much of their agenda is advanced through the courts and he’s delivering them everything that he promised.

I was at a Road To Majority conference, that’s Ralph Reed’s conference, right before the election. Trump held up a list of justices and he said, “I’m going to choose Supreme Court justices from this list,” and every single one of them was pro-life. Of course, the issue wasn’t just abortion, but abortion becomes code for the entire agenda.

There’s that transactional side of it. But I think that there’s another side too. Trump’s anti-democratic attributes are a vital part of his attraction for this movement.

This movement doesn’t really believe in modern representative democracy. At bottom, they sound as though they prefer autocrats. In fact, what they really want is a king. Paula White is always calling Trump a king. Ralph Drollinger is always talking about kinging and kings. Trump has been referred to as King Cyrus.

The thing about kings like Cyrus is that they don’t have to follow the rules. They are the law. Trump understands this longing for the hard hand of the despot. That is what has made him such an attractive leader to this movement.

===

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/christian-nationalist-david-lane-seeks-22-million-to-win-2020-battleground-states-and-eradicate-secularism

Christian nationalist political operative David Lane is seeking $22 million for a campaign to boost conservative Christian turnout in 10 battleground states—Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Iowa—this year. In a column published by Charisma, Lane claims that his American Renewal Project increased “Christian turnout” by 5 to 7 percent in half a dozen key states in 2016.

Lane has a much bigger vision than just helping put President Donald Trump back in the White House. Lane views politics as spiritual warfare necessary to defeat secularists and pagans and make America the Christian nation he says it was founded to be. He teaches that the U.S. has a national mandate to promote the Christian faith and calls the separation of church and state a lie.

In recent years, Lane has recruitedconservative pastors to run for office and mobilize their congregations as election volunteers. In his new column in Charisma, he imagines hundreds of conservative evangelical pastors running for office in the next few election cycles, “triggering a third great awakening” and “bringing about a full-impact collision between the two rival religions in America of Christianity and secularism.”

“Since each worldview is expansive and evangelistic, there will be no reconciliation of opposites with God; one will ultimately end in the eradication of the other,” Lane adds.

As Right Wing Watch has noted repeatedly over the years, Lane’s divisive Christian nationalist extremism hasn’t prevented Republican officials at all levels from embracing him and supporting his work. They don’t seem to be bothered by his anti-LGBTQ extremism either; he once urged conservative Christians to prepare for martyrdom in their fight to “save the nation from the pagan onslaught” of marriage equality and legal abortion. As a presidential candidate in 2016, Donald Trump attended one of Lane’s organizing events in Florida.

Here’s some more background on Lane from Right Wing Watch reporting in 2018, when Lane teamed up with California-based dominionists to try to “turn California around”:...

11/14 nb nudge your friends to vote is way diff than dark post micro-target psychometrics

After the 2012 election, President Barack Obama's digital campaign director Teddy Goff told Time magazine that a tool allowing Obama for America to access the Facebook friends of its supporters "will wind up being the most groundbreaking piece of technology developed for this campaign." This is the final election year that technology will be available.

At its F8 Developers Conference in April, Facebook introduced updates to the feature allowing people to login to other websites using Facebook credentials. With those changes came the end of a tool that made it easy for political groups -- and any other app developer -- to tap into supporters' Facebook Friends lists.

The feature was used famously by the 2012 Obama campaign to help supporters readily connect with and contact their Facebook friends to remind them to vote. This election season the Republican National Committee, Democratic National Committee and the conservative Koch Brothers-affiliated group, Americans for Prosperity are using it to enable get-out-the-vote apps.

"It gets rid of one kind of grassroots outreach tool and one that was pretty handy to reach certain types of voters," said Colin Delany, a digital strategy consultant serving advocacy and political clients on the left. "It was good for reaching people on your voter list that you were having trouble finding through any other means, particularly people who are under 30, who move around a lot and have mobile phones."

"We made this change because we heard from people that they want more control over the information they give to apps," said a Facebook spokeswoman. "Previously, when people logged into apps with Facebook, the app received their friend list by default. With the new version of login, which we announced at F8 this April, people have the choice whether an app gets their friend list."

Now, apps can only access information associated with an app user's friends if those friends have also explicitly agreed to share it with the same app. Apps that access friend lists according to Facebook's old rules will need to upgrade permissions by May 1, 2015.

"Congratulations -- you have 4 friends in the top 10 Senate battleground states!" reads the DNC's Impact app after accessing a user's list of Facebook friends. Before downloading the app, people must approve collection of friend lists, in addition to their own Facebook profile data such as hometown and birthdate.

The Americans for Prosperity app notifies users of progress as it filters through their Facebook friends and applies scores to each, intended to rate that person's likelihood to "support economic freedom" -- or vote Republican.

The GOP's Voter to Voter app asks for permission to gather a supporter's public profile, email address, birthday, likes, friend list and friends' birthdays. "Thank you for pledging to vote in this year's elections! It looks like some of your friends would vote Republican. Select up to three friends that you will challenge to vote this year. Then share that you pledged to vote and your challenge to friends on Facebook now."

When it comes to determining who among someone's Facebook friends is likely to vote one way or another, these systems have varying degrees of success.

"It is a little creepy, but it's certainly data that people like me are interested in especially for [Get Out The Vote]," said Steve Olson, senior strategist at progressive digital shop Trilogy Interactive, regarding the Facebook technology. The agency has built tools for Facebook that access friend lists. Facebook has "been hit so much over the last few years on privacy," he said, suggesting Facebook's decision to kill the feature is understandable.

American Crossroads, the conservative advocacy group backed by Karl Rove, no longer needs to tap Facebook friend data to enable its GOTV app, which was built by Targeted Victory, the consulting and ad tech firm that ran digital operations for Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign. Rather than asking to retrieve Facebook friend lists, the system connects with voter data supplied by Data Trust, the firm that partners with the RNC to manage its data operations.

Kelly Nallen, digital director for American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, said Crossroads doesn't focus on list-building, so connecting to friend lists is not as important as having better integration with actual voter data through Data Trust. "It was certainly a great tool that Facebook had, and I'm sure a lot of people will be sad to see it go," she said.

"We're just using [Data Trust's] base voter file to try to speed up the process for people," said Michael Beach, co-founder of Targeted Victory.

NGP VAN, which operates the most pervasive tech platforms used by Democrats, has developed new tools that should help political groups on the left circumvent the Facebook fallout. The firm's Recruiter technology, for instance, uses Democratic voter data to help organizations including Ready for Hillary make connections among supporters and predict their likelihood to donate or take other actions.

"Because we've developed all these other features of the Action Center like Recruiter and Social Fundraising, the Facebook API change won't impact NGP VAN or our clients in any critical way," said Stu Trevelyan, CEO and president of NGP VAN.

===

yikes

...Reelecting A ‘Christian’ President

While the Christian right has, since Ronald Reagan’s presidential run in 1980, rallied around GOP nominees, the tenor and nature of the mobilization for Trump’s reelection is markedly new. While many of the expressed fears — that a Democratic president would nominate pro-Roe v. Wade judges or take away Christians’ religious freedom — are familiar, the motivation now is not just to avert liberal judges and policies. It is much more deliberately an imperative to reelect a singularly “Christian” president. As Ralph Reed reportedly will argue in a book to be published this spring, evangelicals “have a moral obligation to enthusiastically back” Trump in 2020.

With Trump’s reelection once again hinging on slim margins in a few key states, a multifaceted get-out-the-vote operation is getting underway. Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition is aiming to raise $42.7 million for its 2020 Project, aimed at bolstering its “unparalleled values-voter database, supporting field offices, and coordinating volunteers and staff to get out the vote.” It will be, Reed promised supporters, the “largest Christian Get Out The Vote (GOTV) effort in history,” necessary because “the left is already turning the re-election of Donald Trump into a three-ring circus, aimed at impeaching our president and reversing all progress for voters of faith.”

Reed’s organization is not alone. United In Purpose, an organization that provides polling and voter data to Christian right organizations, helped organize a pivotal 2016 meeting between a thousand evangelical leaders and Trump, during which he sealed an alliance by promising to nominate judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade and eliminate the Johnson Amendment,which prohibits churches from using tax-exempt resources to endorse political candidates. Although his organization is “still in the planning stages” for the 2020 election cycle, UIP’s president, Bill Dallas, said in an interview that the conservative Christian get-out-the-vote operation ? as well as its opposition’s ? will exceed 2016 in terms of “the sophistication, not just the data mining, using every technique to get the votes out.”

Maximizing white evangelical turnout for Trump will be key in Michigan and Wisconsin, two states he won in 2016 by narrow margins. White evangelicals made up 27% and 28% of the electorate in those states, respectively, according to exit polling data. Other closely watched states with high percentages of white evangelical turnout in 2016 include North Carolina (38%), Iowa (34%) and Ohio (33%).

According to Dallas, the views driving Trump’s support among the Christian voters that United in Purpose targets have already begun to solidify. “The reason why Trump has such a strong support base is because he did what he said he would do,” said Dallas. “I don’t see that [impeachment] turning off Christian voters. What would turn off Christian voters is if he didn’t fulfill his promises and commitments that he said he would do if he was elected.”

For the 2020 cycle, My Faith Votes, an organization that boasts Huckabee as its honorary national chairman, has also been organizing voter registration drives. “As Christians,” Jason Yates, the group’s CEO claims, “we must always look to elect leaders who defend our values and believe that God is the ultimate authority in this nation.” (Yates did not respond to interview requests.) In an email to My Faith Votes supporters, Huckabee described the group’s efforts in more detail. Over the course of the year, he wrote, “TV and radio PSAs will be running around the country reaching millions; millennials and Generation Z will be reached on Christian campuses; hundreds of thousands of Christians will be mobilized using peer-to-peer texting and door-to-door outreach, all in an effort to motivate and equip Christians with everything they need to take action.”

In November, Yates announced a partnership with Intercessors for America, an organization based in Purcellville, Virginia, that hosts weekly prayer calls and enlists supporters to engage in prayer against supposed deep-state and George Soros-led schemes against Trump and his allies. In a webcast, Yates and Dave Kubal, Intercessors for America’s president, announced they were developing a phone app to identify Christian voters with a “low propensity” to vote. But apps and microtargeting of voters are not the only way to keep evangelical voters in the Trump camp. The next day, Kubal was on a conference call with Paula White, her chief of staff, Todd Lamphere, and the evangelists Jon and Jolene Hamill announcing the launch of the One Voice Prayer Movement, carrying out, according to Kubal, White’s “vision to see the church of Jesus Christ come together, and pray for this administration and pray for our country.” (Kubal did not respond to an interview request. The Hamills, who are hosting a “Revolution” conference on New Year’s Eve at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, also did not respond to interview requests.)

On the call, White prayed for 10 minutes, during which she asked God to protect Trump and deliver him from his enemies. “Lord, we ask you to deliver our president from any snare, any trap, any setup of the enemy according to Ephesians 6:12,” a verse in the Bible that forms the core of the “spiritual warfare” that Trump’s prayer warriors say they are engaged in on his behalf. (“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”)

But White has a plan to protect Trump from those dark forces, vanquish his enemies, and to defend the “biblical” government that has elevated Christian right personnel and policy priorities. And she left no doubt that the multiple roles she plays — presidential personal pastor, White House employee and defender of Trump against his enemies — have merged into a single message of God’s wrath against anyone who dares criticize him. “Any persons, entities, that are aligned against the president,” she said on the One Voice Prayer Movement launch call, “will be exposed and dealt with and overturned by the superior blood of Jesus.”

Sarah Posner is a reporting fellow with Type Investigations.

ABOUT THE REPORTER

SARAH POSNER

Sarah Posner is a reporting fellow with Type Investigations and author of God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters

https://www.alternet.org/under-assault-trumps-gop-and-supreme-court-unions-lead-massive-get-out-vote-effort-midterms-we-vote

In the face of a coordinated, corporate-funded assault on their very existence by President Donald Trump, Republicans at the federal and state level, and the right-wing Supreme Court, labor unions nationwide have mobilized massive numbers of struggling workersto turn out for Tuesday's critical midterms with the goal of defeating anti-union candidatesand electing politicians willing to fight for progressive policies that benefit the working class like Medicare for All, a higher minimum wage, and the fundamental right to organize.

"The Culinary Workers Union registered 10,300 voters for the midterms. This union really gets it done. Still impressed by what I saw reporting on them in Vegas."

—David Jamieson, Huffington Post

"We don't know any other way," said Geoconda Arguello-Kline, the Secretary-Treasurer for the Culinary Workers Union in Las Vegas, which has registered over 10,300 new voters ahead of Tuesday's midterm elections to defeat Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.). "For us, it's a very natural way to survive here in Las Vegas: organize, organize."

With the rallying cry, "We vote, we win!" the union has provided resources for workers to learn about the candidates on the ballot, spread the word about the issues at stake in the midterms, and find the closest polling site. The Culinary Union's get-out-the-vote efforts have been replicated throughout the nation, including in so-called "right-to-work states," where Republican legislatures have barred unions from collecting dues from all workers they represent in collective bargaining efforts to raise wages and improve working conditions.

"Things aren't changing for the better like they thought would happen. Real wages are not keeping pace with inflation. We haven't replaced the well-paying manufacturing jobs that we lost."

—Tim Burga, Ohio AFL-CIO

In Southern states like North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, and Georgia, the Communications Workers of America (CWA)—which represents 700,000 workers nationwide—say it organized canvassing, mail, and phone bank operations that resulted in over four million door knocks."

In the Midwest, where workers have suffered from decades of deindustrialization, corporate outsourcing, and neglect from politicians who so often claim to care about their plight, the AFL-CIO says it has convinced thousands of union workers who backed Donald Trump in 2016 to turn out for progressive Democrats on Tuesday.

"About half of union households that voted for Trump said they are planning to vote for Democrats in two key statewide races," Vox reported on Monday, citing figures from the Ohio AFL-CIO. "That includes 51.4 percent of Trump voters who plan to cast a ballot for progressive Democrat Richard Cordray for governor and 49.9 percent of Trump voters who favor incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown—the only Democrat currently holding statewide office."

Tim Burga, president of the Ohio AFL-CIO, said many union workers who initially backed Trump have realized after two years of plutocratic policies and stagnant wages that the president and his billionaire-filled cabinet are not on their side, and never were.

"Things aren't changing for the better like they thought would happen," Burga said. "Real wages are not keeping pace with inflation. We haven't replaced the well-paying manufacturing jobs that we lost."

With a historic number of House Democratic candidates backing Medicare for All, National Nurses United (NNU)—the largest organization of registered nurses in the U.S.—has also been tirelessly canvassing and phone banking in Maryland, Florida, and the many other states where candidates are standing up to America's disastrous for-profit healthcare industry.

See NNU's full list of all 225 House Democratic candidates running on Medicare for All here.

...

For decades, the Kochs had pursued their goals by sinking tens of millions of dollars into wonky research and advocacy groups. It was only during George W. Bush’s presidency that the brothers and their allies began to question whether the power of their ideas alone could carry the day. A movement that started with 15 rich conservatives gathering in Chicago and a single main group — Americans for Prosperity — by 2008 became a congregation of roughly 100 major donors backing a handful of think tanks, grass-roots advocacy networks and political organizations.

In 2012, the newly created Freedom Partners — the umbrella group for the Kochs’ political operation — raised and spent roughly $250 million. Headed by Marc Short, a former top staffer in the House and Senate, Freedom Partners dispenses funds and expertise to myriad affiliate groups in the network. This year, it began wading into political and policy fights on its own — spinning off a super PAC that spent at least $24 million boosting Republican Senate candidates.

Heading into 2016, the Koch network — under the auspices of Freedom Partners — has in many ways surpassed the reach and resources of the RNC. And, unlike the party, it isn’t bound by rules requiring it to maintain neutrality in primaries. Though the network has yet to engage in primaries, that could be the next logical step in its progression from apolitical think tank consortium to aggressive privatized political machine.

With good data, we can target them with the right message at the right moment.

The Kochs and their donors and operatives have been sought out by most of the leading 2016 GOP prospects – from Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky to Govs. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Rick Perry of Texas. Their allies are acutely aware of the potential for the Koch groups and their donors to sway the primaries — even if they don’t formally back a candidate.

A key adviser to one of the top GOP presidential prospects said: “If I could have Karl Rove or Marc Short to run a presidential campaign today, I’d take Marc Short. He understands all the technical tools available to a modern campaign and how to apply them to the nominating process. He also has a deep understanding of the political dynamics of the GOP base vote.”

Short’s connection to another potential GOP presidential candidate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, is among the biggest reasons that the Kochs are considering whether going all-in on a presidential campaign would be a good investment. Short was chief of staff to the House Republican Conference when then-Rep. Pence was the chairman, and Short remains a close adviser to Pence.

Veterans of GOP presidential campaigns say that while the Kochs could not, by themselves, provide the credibility necessary to create a candidate for president, their weapons could make a decisive difference for someone who was already running a viable campaign for the nomination — someone like Pence, whose record could make him a bridge between the GOP’s evangelical and establishment wings.

A candidate favored by the Kochs and their allies could potentially benefit from the full range activities of groups in the Koch network. The biggest presence is AFP, which spent $130 million in the midterms, with 550 paid staff, including 50 in Florida alone.

The LIBRE Initiative, a network-backed group aimed at Hispanics, has 40 staff at its Arlington, Virginia, headquarters and 40 field staff(25 of them part-time) in seven states. Generation Opportunity, the Kochs’ outreach arm for 18- to 34-year-olds, has 30 full-time, paid grass-roots staffers running boots-on-the-ground activism in 10 states. Concerned Veterans for America, another Koch-backed group based in Arlington, has 60 paid staff in 14 states.

Pete Hegseth, an infantry captain in the Army National Guard who is the group’s CEO, says veterans are “reflexively conservative, and they know how to organize.”

“With good data, we can target them with the right message at the right moment,” Hegseth said. “They could be much more powerful than they are. There’s no reason veterans can’t be the unions of the right.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/koch-brothers-rnc-113359

polotico 2105

Permanent ground army

Charles and David Koch first dipped into their fortunes to influence American public policy in the 1970s, mostly pumping money into libertarian think tanks like the Cato Institute and George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.

They began getting more politically involved in response to what they saw as a reckless government expansion led by Bush and his GOP congressional majorities, including a costly Medicare expansion, the Iraq war and risky lending policies blamed for causing a housing bubble.

In 2004, not long after Charles Koch convened the Chicago donors’ meeting, the brothers provided seed funding for the group that would become the network’s most muscular political arm, Americans for Prosperity, which joined a pre-existing foundation arm that was spun off from another group the previous year. In 2004, AFP and AFP’s foundation had chapters in three states and a combined $2 million budget, according to tax filings. By last year, the main and foundation arms had morphed into the right’s most powerful nonparty group, with chapters in more than 30 states, a combined $104 million budget and a staff of 948 ? by far the network’s biggest footprint.

Internal network plans call for AFP to expand into several more states by the end of next year, sources tell POLITICO, leaving only Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington without an outpost. While the group’s stated mission is to advocate small-government policies, its evolution has been strategically tailored for maximum political impact. In recent years, the network has channeled more spending into red states where it can influence GOP governing majorities rather than fighting for swing votes. That strategy was shaped by Charles Koch’s longtime right-hand man, Rich Fink, who is considered the network’s “grand strategist” and who had privately advocated “owning” conservative states, according to network sources. Indeed, AFP has taken credit for major policy victories — including enacting tax cuts, fighting Obamacare and restricting union power ? in Republican-controlled states where it has a major presence, such as Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, North Carolina and Wisconsin. Likewise, it has shuttered chapters in deep blue states such as Connecticut, Oregon and Washington, where conservative reforms seem unlikely.

There’s also been a buildup in key swing states like Colorado, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia ? suggesting that the network has its eye not just on policy but also on political impact.

In Florida, for example, the Koch network’s core groups employ 77 full-time staffers, including AFP’s field staff of 50. Concerned Veterans for America, which courts veterans with fiscally conservative messaging, has 15 Florida staffers, while the LIBRE Initiative, which appeals to Latino voters, has nine. Generation Opportunity, a young voter outreach group, has three. Freedom Partners-backed outfits that aren’t considered core network groups ? the senior-focused 60 Plus Association, Concerned Women for America ? are courting other Florida voting blocs.

The network’s Sunshine State staffing rivals that of the Florida Republican Party and its local and legislative affiliates, according to sources familiar with Florida GOP politics, though the Republican Party presence in Florida and other key states will surge as the RNC ramps up its joint victory program with state party committees. RNC officials said that, by Election Day, they aim to have more than 4,500 paid staff on the ground across the country through the victory program, along with roughly 2,000 volunteer “fellows” trained through a program launched last year called the Republican Leadership Initiative. Those figures don’t include additional staff provided or subsidized by the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee. And the party committees, unlike Koch network groups, are able to coordinate with candidates’ campaigns to mobilize volunteers and get out the vote.

“The Kochs’ efforts are helpful to the overall conservative movement, but they can never do the core functions that the party does,” said RNC chief strategist Sean Spicer. He argued that questions about whether the RNC is ceding influence to the Koch network prove “that POLITICO fundamentally lacks a basic understanding of how the political system and parties work.” But the committee’s own post-mortem analysis of the 2012 election openly acknowledged that changes in campaign finance and the rise of outside groups have led to “a troubling diminishment of the role of political parties and even candidates themselves in our democracy.” They “no longer have the loudest voices in campaigns or even the ability to determine the issues debated in campaigns. Outside groups now play an expanded role affecting federal races and, in some ways, overshadow state parties in primary and general elections,” the report says. It concluded that the situation “has caused a splintered Congress with little party cohesion so that gridlock and polarization grow as the political parties lose their ability to rally their elected officeholders around a set of coherent governing policies.”

Not only is the official GOP barred from accepting the unlimited and often undisclosed checks that fuel most of the Kochs’ groups, it’s also more thinly spread. That’s because the party’s mission is to try to win every election, even if that means backing less conservative nominees. Outside players like the Kochs, on the other hand, can focus more selectively on groups, races or states that fit their agenda.

In the 2014 election run-up, AFP quietly launched an initiative to add sympathetic voters to the rolls in 14 key states,according to sources familiar with the project. That’s a function that has mostly been the GOP’s domain.But Koch operatives concluded after the 2012 election that “the left outmaneuvered the right by … expanding the universe of voters,” according to network documents obtained by POLITICO.

The network also stepped up to fill what its operatives see as a void in data analytics on the right? itsFreedom Partners-owned data shop i360 has eclipsed the RNC data operation as the choice for many GOP candidates and committees. Last year, the network also invested heavily in what its officials privately call a “leadership factory” that they see as rivaling training programs of both the Republican Party and competing conservative groups, according to sources familiar with it. The Grassroots Leadership Academy, as it is now known, was absorbed into AFP’s foundation arm in 2014 and sources say it boasted a 2014 budget of more than $2 million, which it used to provide training to all network groups.

A newly created Freedom Partners division ? headed by an operative named Nathan Nascimento — works to coordinate ground initiatives run by the different network groups in the states.This effort, like many in the network, stemmed partly from shortcomings identified in corporate-style efficiency audits, which have raised concerns about duplicative spending and poor coordination, POLITICO has learned.

Audits also flagged insufficient understanding of fiscal conservatism by AFP field staff, an issue deemed “critically important to correct,” according to sources familiar with the findings. Another assessment found an “overwhelming” percentage of the 2 million members claimed by the group were not actually involved and “do not self-identify as being volunteers.” Findings about weak volunteer engagement were taken very seriously, sources tell POLITICO, because they undermined AFP’s positioning as a grass-roots army of millions.

“They’re the most effective”

The network’s corporate-style efficiency measures are central to the donor pitches delivered by Koch operatives, who argue that they use cash more efficiently than rival conservative groups or the Republican Party.

While the super PACs devoted to various 2016 GOP presidential aspirants raised huge sums from ultrarich conservatives this year, AFP president Tim Phillips this month predicted in an interview “a lot of donors are going to give a second thought to the super PAC investments. They’re short-term strictly — no long-term value creation, A, and, B, you cannot hold them accountable as a donor. I mean, with an institution like us or some other (c)(4) that has boards and such, you can hold them accountable for how they spend your money over the long-term to actually do something.”...

===

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/10/17/1583590/-Koch-organizations-picking-up-ground-game-slack-from-Trump

Koch brothers have created a ground game where Donald Trump has failed, not to elect Trump but to elect all those Republican senators who won't dump him. See, they're too pure to sully their hands with him, but not so to elect his enablers.

FAIRLESS HILLS, Pa. (AP) — To the Republicans in the red "Can't Afford Katie" T-shirts, it's as if Donald Trump doesn't even exist.

These activists have been sprinting through Pennsylvania neighborhoods, talking to people about how bad Democrat Katie McGinty would be as a U.S. senator. Here to help save Republican Sen. Pat Toomey — and, more broadly, the party's control of the Senate — are employees and volunteers for Americans for Prosperity, the best-known group financed by conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch.

Similar scenes are playing out in North Carolina, Florida and Ohio. […]

Four years after spending heavily in a futile effort to prevent President Barack Obama's second term, the Kochs have pushed all of their resources down ballot. And their resources are ample: They're on track to spend about $250 million on policy and politics in the two years leading to Election Day.

They've spent about $42 million of that on TV, and are now pulling all ads to focus their money on door-to-door voter contact, something the Trump campaign isn't doing. They've got about 1,200 employees across 36 states doing the grunt work to make sure the Senate majority remains Koch-friendly. They're using their massive voter database, which has long-since eclipsed the GOP's, to target some 5 million solid Republican voters who might be tempted to sit this election out because of Trump.

That would be disaster for the Kochs. They need their bought Senate, as much as ever

https://www.publicintegrity.org/news/NRA%E2%80%99s-Freedom-Action-Foundation

apr 2012 GOTV

...

These outside allied drives are intended to complement voter mobilization operations by the national party committees and the presidential campaigns where Obama and the Democrats have an early money and infrastructure edge.

Plainly, both sides are aiming for a big turnout this fall.

“This election is going to be won on the ground,” saidChris Cox, the top lobbyist for NRA which has recently launched what appears to be its biggest registration drive ever with a multimillion-dollar price tag. “There are millions of gun owners who aren’t registered,” Cox said, noting that about 100 million Americans own guns.

“We’ll go door to door to do voter registration, education and outreach,” said Cox in describing how the NRA is mounting its “Trigger the Vote” drive. The NRA, whose vaunted grassroots clout is based on its 4 million members, has hired about two dozen “campaign field representatives” who are helping coordinate drives in over a dozen battleground states including Florida, Ohio and Virginia, Cox said.

The NRA registration drive will “work gun shows and retailers” and includes a six-figure television advertising blitz that it launched in February, Cox added. “Voter registration is a very expensive and difficult undertaking.”

Most of the voter registration funding comes from the NRA’s Freedom Action Foundation, a nonprofit arm that doesn’t have to disclose its donors,Cox said. The Center has reported that one prominent foundation donor is Texas energy magnate Clayton Williams, who last year boasted at a Houston luncheon that drew top NRA officials, that he gave $1 million to the foundation in 2010 and intended to do so again in 2012.

Three GOP lobbyists familiar with the expanded NRA registration and mobilization operations this year say that some sizable funds are expected to come from other conservative groups — or possibly major donors such as the billionaire Koch brothers — which are trying to share their largesse with allies with effective grassroots operations.

Cox declined to comment about funding for the NRA foundation, except to say that it mainly comes from small donors.

Likewise, other conservative stalwarts are trying to recoup their political fortunes from the 2008 elections.

Ralph Reed, who is trying to emerge from the cloud he was under because of his close ties to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, said that his Faith and Freedom Coalition has chapters in 30 states and boasts some 500,000 members — of which 185,000 have made donations.

Reed said coalition chapters in key states such as Florida, Virginia and Wisconsin have begun registration efforts. The coalition will also buy ads and and focus on “earned media” in about 20 states where there are important multiple contests—presidential, congressional and gubernatorial — Reed said.

The conservative coalition, which reported in tax forms that it raised more than $5 million in 2010, hopes to spend about twice that amount this year with the bulk targeted for registration and get out the vote drives, Reed said.

To facilitate various conservative get-out-the-vote drives, two multimillion dollar data banks (one of which is reportedly bankrolled by the Kochs) filled with voter information have been assembled.

The more robust spending on voter mobilization work by the right is generating buzz among GOP operatives, some of whom attend periodic meetings hosted by American Crossroads. Crossroads and many other super PACs, both conservative and liberal, were spawned by court rulings in 2010 that gave the green light for corporations, unions and individuals to write unlimited checks for ads and other electoral drives that directly back or oppose candidates.

Crossroads President Steven Law has told the Center that it spent about $10 million in 2010 on voter mobilization operations. Some GOP consultants expect it will do more this cycle given that the super PAC and its nonprofit affiliate are aiming to raise $300 million — more than quadruple the $71 million that the two groups corralled in 2010. Jonathan Collegio, a Crossroads spokesman, said the groups “will be engaged” again in voter mobilization, but that it won’t be a “core function.”

Meanwhile, it’s expected that labor’s ground operations which have been energized this year by big battles in Ohio and Wisconsin against GOP led attempts to curtail public unions, could be more formidable.

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