H4a news Clips [April 11, 2015] Summary of Today’s news


Secret Money Group Tied to Marco Rubio Super PAC Has Been Researching Presidential Primary Voters [Scott Bland, National Journal, April 10, 2015]



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Secret Money Group Tied to Marco Rubio Super PAC Has Been Researching Presidential Primary Voters [Scott Bland, National Journal, April 10, 2015]
A secret-money group linked to Marco Rubio's new super PAC has existed for over a year, during which time it commissioned extensive research on early-state primary voters.
April 10, 2015  A secret-money group linked to Marco Rubio's new super PAC has existed for over a year, during which time it commissioned extensive research on early-state primary voters.
The nonprofit—whose existence has never been revealed and whose name matches the recently announced pro-Rubio super PAC—commissioned a minutely detailed, 270-page political research book on early-state primary voters last year, and the report was prepared by a firm on Rubio's own political payroll.
The research contains a trove of information on voter demographics and policy positions in states that, at the time of its publication, were expected to host the first five nominating contests of the 2016 Republican presidential primaries: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada, and Florida.
Political data this detailed is often expensive to produce, and closely guarded. But nonprofits and other outside groups are not allowed to coordinate with campaigns, and by posting the research publicly, the group has made its findings available free of charge to Rubio or anyone else who might want to use it.
The report was prepared for a nonprofit, called Conservative Solutions Project Inc., which was incorporated in Delaware in January 2014, according to state records. Just this week, Rubio allies publicized a super PAC that will support Rubio for president next year. It is called Conservative Solutions PAC. While the super PAC will have to disclose its donors and expenses regularly, nonprofits do not have to disclose donors.
"Absolutely, the two groups are related," Conservative Solutions PAC spokesman Jeff Sadosky told National Journal Friday. "But they are separate and distinct entities. One is focused on supporting Marco Rubio's potential presidential campaign, and one is focused on issue education."
Sadosky said the nonprofit was established by Warren Tompkins, who is also heading the super PAC, as well as fellow Republican operatives Joel McElhannon and Pat Shortridge. The research was published publicly, Sadosky said, to "make sure everyone's advocating and communicating, as effectively as possible, the conservative ideals Conservative Solutions Project wants to push forward."
According to the report cover, the research book was drafted by 0ptimus Consulting, a Republican data analytics firm that started working for Rubio's leadership PAC in 2013. Rubio's PAC paid 0ptimus $200,000 in 2013 and 2014 for data and analytics consulting, according to federal campaign finance disclosures. The report was published in December 2014 and is available on Conservative Solutions Project's website. It is also on the 0ptimus website, where a description says it was produced "in conjunction with the Conservative Solutions PAC," though the report itself is branded with the nonprofit's name.
Elements of the book seem tailor-made to aid a Rubio presidential campaign in particular (if, as expected, he announces Monday that he will run for the 2016 Republican nomination). In addition to exhaustive breakdowns of voter attributes and historical data in the five states, the research includes detailed findings about voters' views on issues like immigration reform—which Rubio championed in the Senate in 2013—as well a muscular, Rubio-style foreign policy.
The report goes into particular detail on how voters in Iowa, the first caucus state, view immigration reform. Rubio's sponsorship of bipartisan immigration reform legislation in the Senate two years ago damaged his standing with some conservatives. The research showed Iowans overall, but not Iowa Republicans, supporting immigration reform.
In Florida, the research found that Republican primary voters were supportive of the idea "the future success or failure of the party" depended on performance with Hispanic voters—an argument echoed by Rubio advisers like pollster Whit Ayres, who recently argued that Rubio could be "transformational" in expanding the GOP's appeal. The report showed Republican primary voters accepted the premise at about the same rate as the general population.
Forming nonprofit outside groups, which don't have to disclose donations, is a growing trend in presidential politics. The nonprofits, which often have similar names to affiliated super PACs, cannot spend all their money on political purposes, but they can work hand-in-hand with super PACs and other outside groups on things from policy research to airing their own "issue ads" on TV. Last month, the Washington Post reported an ally of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush established a nonprofit, Right to Rise Policy Solutions, to back a potential Bush campaign—along with Bush's Right to Rise PAC and Right to Rise Super PAC.
"The reality is there are now ways to fund activity that's very helpful to candidates and do so on a secret basis so no one knows who's funding it, no one knows it's happening until much later, and types of money can be used that could not otherwise be used in an election," said Campaign Legal Center President Trevor Potter, a former chair of the Federal Election Commission and Republican election attorney.
Alex Conant, a spokesman for Rubio, and Scott Tranter, a partner with 0ptimus, did not respond to questions about the nonprofit and its links to Rubio's political operation.
"In sum, the three sections of this report provide unique data, original insights, and wide-ranging analysis of the American electorate that should provide a valuable educational resource of interest to many," the report's introduction reads.
The only known donor to Conservative Solutions Project is a political group: Super PAC for America, an organization once led by Michael Reagan and Dick Morris that raised and spent millions of dollars in the 2010 and 2012 elections but spent down its remaining money last year. The super PAC's campaign finance reports include a $10,000 donation to Conservative Solutions Project in June 2014.
In late 2014, commenters on online forums made note of robocalls from a Las Vegas-based number asking respondents to complete a survey for "Conservative Solutions Project." A Nevada politics blogger wrote that in addition to the policy question, the call also asked for opinions about potential presidential candidates, including Rubio. The Conservative Solutions Project report does not include any findings about individual politicians.
Hedge-Fund Magnate Robert Mercer Emerges as a Generous Backer of Cruz [Eric Lichtblau & Alexandra Stevenson, NYT, April 10, 2015]
Hedge-fund titan Robert Mercer has emerged as a top donor and supporter of Ted Cruz.
WASHINGTON — The two men share a passion for unbridled markets, concerns about the Internal Revenue Service and a skeptical view of climate change.
Now the two — Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and Robert Mercer, a Wall Street hedge-fund magnate — share another bond that could link them through November 2016: Both want to see Mr. Cruz elected president.
Mr. Mercer, a reclusive Long Islander who started at I.B.M. and made his fortune using computer patterns to outsmart the stock market, emerged this week as a key early bankroller of Mr. Cruz’s surprisingly fast campaign start. He is believed to be the main donor behind a network of four “super PACs” supporting Mr. Cruz that reported raising $31 million just a few weeks into his campaign.
The emergence of rich and relatively low-profile donors like Mr. Mercer could single-handedly jump-start a presidential campaign, said Trevor Potter, a campaign finance lawyer who served as a Republican member of the Federal Election Commission.
“It just takes a random billionaire to change a race and maybe change the country,” Mr. Potter said. “That’s what’s so radically different now.”
Mr. Mercer does not have the name recognition of fellow Republican financiers like the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson, but he has spent more than $15 million since 2012 in support of conservative political campaigns and causes, donating to a number of candidates who had never even met him. Both moderate Republican candidates and Democrats in states like Iowa, New York and Oregon have found themselves in the cross hairs of expensive attack ads that he financed.
Mr. Mercer “is a very low-profile guy, but he’s becoming a bigger and bigger player,” said Bradley A. Smith, a campaign finance expert who was a Republican appointee on the Federal Election Commission. Mr. Mercer’s financial support for Mr. Cruz “sends the message to other donors that Cruz is a serious guy,” Mr. Smith said, “and that brings in other donors.”
Rep. Peter DeFazio, Democrat of Oregon, remembers with some bitterness Mr. Mercer’s opposition to his re-election campaign in 2014 when he spent about $650,000 on attack ads and other efforts in support of a conservative challenger.
“I don’t think the guy had ever even been to Oregon,” Mr. DeFazio said. He said he believed Mr. Mercer targeted him in part because of legislation Mr. DeFazio sponsored that threatened higher taxes for hedge funds like Mr. Mercer’s fund, Renaissance Technologies.
“He’s a patron for ultra-right-wing causes,” Mr. DeFazio said, “and in a Republican presidential race, being an ultra-right-wing millionaire from Wall Street isn’t going to hurt you.”
He is also an example of how wealthy donors have been empowered by the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in the landmark Citizens United case, which paved the way for super PACs. Unlike candidates, super PACs can accept unlimited amounts of money from individuals and corporations to support a candidate so long as they do not officially “coordinate” with the campaign. Many moneyed Wall Street veterans enjoy playing the political game, hosting fund-raisers and speaking publicly about the horse they are backing. Mr. Mercer is not one of them. A computer scientist by training, he is more at ease crunching numbers than pressing the flesh. Mr. Mercer declined to comment.
He prefers to stay quiet about most things. After receiving a lifetime achievement award from the Association for Computational Linguistics at an event last year, Mr. Mercer told the audience he was daunted by the prospect of speaking there for an hour, “which, by the way, is more than I typically talk in a month so it’s quite a challenge.”
Intensely private, he has been described as “an icy cold poker player” whose boss once jokingly called him “an automaton,” according to a description in “More Money Than God,” a book about the hedge fund industry by Sebastian Mallaby.
Before joining Renaissance Technologies, Mr. Mercer, 68, worked at I.B.M.’s research center, where he specialized in computerized translation of languages.
While little of his private life has been made public, some details have emerged in recent court cases. In 2013, a group of former workers at his house sued him for not paying overtime. They also accused him of deducting money from their semi-annual bonuses as a form of punishment for, among other things, failing to replace shampoos, close doors and change razor blades. “The matter has been resolved amicably,” Troy L. Kessler, a lawyer for the employees, said.
In 2009, Mr. Mercer sued RailDreams, a toy train manufacturer, and its president, Richard Taylor, for overcharging him $2 million for a contract to build and install a model train and railway set at his home.
Mr. Mercer has said nothing publicly about his financial backing for Mr. Cruz’s campaign or how he came to support him. But his daughter, Rebekah Mercer, who started a bakery in Manhattan called Ruby et Violette, has been more vocal. This week she held a fund-raiser for Mr. Cruz at her Manhattan apartment.
When James H. Simons, the billionaire founder of the Renaissance hedge fund, hired Mr. Mercer in 1993, the company was more university campus than Wall Street firm. Mr. Simons, a mathematician and former code-breaker for the National Security Agency, brought in astronomers and physicists to analyze reams of data, using computer programs to search for patterns that could be used to inform trading decisions. Mr. Simons has been a major political backer of Democrats, donating $8.3 million in 2014.
The hedge fund’s strategy has been tremendously successful. The firm’s flagship Medallion fund, which manages money only for employees today, has earned average annual returns of 35 percent for two decades. Over all, the firm manages $25 billion, much of it employees’ money.
Renaissance was also able to increase returns by borrowing large sums of money, but the practice eventually caught the attention of Washington and government agencies. Last year the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations accused Renaissance of using complex financial structures that allowed it to underestimate how much it owed the Internal Revenue Service by $6 billion.
Taxpayers “had to shoulder the tax burden these hedge funds shrugged off with the aid of the banks,” Senator Carl Levin of Michigan said at a hearing last summer.
The I.R.S. has been investigating Renaissance for at least six years. A spokesman for the firm said its tax practices were legal and appropriate.
Mr. Cruz’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment about Mr. Mercer’s support for his candidacy or his hedge fund’s $6 billion tax issue.
But the candidate, like his new Wall Street backer, has his own concerns about the I.R.S., which might have gotten Mr. Mercer’s attention. Last month, he called for the agency to be abolished altogether.
As Scott Walker addresses NRA, concealed carry shifts surface [Matthew DeFour, Wisconsin State Journal, April 10, 2015]
Gov. Scott Walker was for permitting concealed carry of handguns before he was against it -- until he was for it again.
Gov. Scott Walker was for permitting concealed carry of handguns before he was against it -- until he was for it again.
Walker's shifting position on the law he championed, but also voted against in 2002 as he ran for Milwaukee County executive, surfaced Friday as he was set to address a National Rifle Association convention in Nashville.
The likely 2016 presidential contender has come under fire for shifting his position on various issues, including immigration, right-to-work, abortion, ethanol subsidies and the Common Core education standards.
"Add concealed carry to the list of issues Walker has changed his position on just to benefit himself," said Jason Pitt, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee. "If we’ve learned anything from Scott Walker over the past few months it’s that his constant pandering on issues has defined him as one of the least trustworthy candidates among the 2016 GOP field."
A spokeswoman for Walker's political nonprofit did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In 1999, Walker cosponsored a concealed carry law as a member of the state Assembly. But in 2002, he voted against a similar bill that passed the Assembly. It died in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle, who was elected that same year, vetoed subsequent iterations of the bill.
Walker signed the law in 2011 after it won bipartisan support in the Republican-controlled Assembly and Senate.
His support for concealed carry has been a constant theme in his speeches to Republican activists across the country, starting at the Iowa Freedom Summit in late January.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference he told NRA News Network that he supports eliminating a 48-hour waiting period for handgun purchases.
"We've been the leader when it comes to freedom over the last four years," Walker told NRA News in highlighting the concealed carry law.
Walker is scheduled to speak at about 1:30 p.m. CDT. Also on the program are nine other potential presidential candidates, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who is running for president, and Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a Democrat who has been building a national profile in conservative circles as a stalwart second amendment supporter.
Liberal group One Wisconsin Now highlighted Walker's stands on concealed carry Friday.
"At that time he thought that concealed carry did not play well in Milwaukee County, so he voted against it for that short-term gain," Scot Ross, OWN's executive director, said of Walker's earlier opposition.
The Best Reason to Take Rand Paul Seriously Has Nothing to Do With His Politics [Jim Rutenberg, NYT Magazine, April 10, 2015]
It’s the boring details of the organization that Paul is building that provide the best reason to take him seriously. If Paul’s views are unusually idealistic, the ground game that his team is planning is pure realpolitik. His staff is focused on the delegate math and party rules that could determine the next Republican nominee — a game-theory style of presidential politics at which the Paul team is particularly adept.
Although Rand Paul — who declared his bid for the presidency on Tuesday — has spent several years now inching toward the Republican mainstream, there is still a tendency among the political classes to view him as a sideshow candidate. The crankiness of his announcement-week interviews certainly suggests that he’s still getting a handle on retail politics. And though his policy views — calls for more rational sentencing guidelines, a less intrusive national-security apparatus and a restrained foreign policy — give him potential appeal with young, minority and libertarian-leaning voters, they also make him an outlier in the field of declared or likely Republican contenders.
Paul’s (relative) unorthodoxy makes him that rare candidate whose policy views draw gobs of media attention: He’s teaming up with Democrats to scale back mandatory-minimum drug sentencing and likens the war on drugs to Jim Crow? (The same Rand Paul who once said he opposed parts of the Civil Rights Act?) He’s in the same party as Senator John McCain, and yet he opposed arming the Syrian rebels?
But in fact, it’s the boring details of the organization that Paul is building that provide the best reason to take him seriously. If Paul’s views are unusually idealistic, the ground game that his team is planning is pure realpolitik. His staff is focused on the delegate math and party rules that could determine the next Republican nominee — a game-theory style of presidential politics at which the Paul team is particularly adept.
The process by which presidential candidates are nominated is, at its most basic level, a race toward a magic number of party delegates — in the Republican Party’s case, 1,235 required to win — amassed state by state and, in some cases, congressional district by congressional district. Getting them depends not only on the speechifying, door-to-door vote-hunting and million-dollar ad buys we associate with campaigning, but also on a bewildering array of procedural minutia: obscure national bylaws that overlay a mind-bending patchwork of local rules that can vary drastically from state to state, some of which award delegates not based on votes received in primary elections but on back-room wrangling at local party conventions and meetings that take place weeks or even months after votes are cast.
You would think that mastering these arcana would be a priority for campaigns, given their importance. But even the best-funded, most-inevitable-seeming candidates mess them up all the time — and long-shot candidacies have been made, or at least sustained, by getting them right. Barack Obama’s Democratic primary victory in 2008 came in large part because his strategists understood the way delegates were being doled out state by state — even to the losing candidate, based on his or her share of the vote — better than Hillary Rodham Clinton’s team did.
In 2012, Rick Santorum employed a novel strategy of focusing his resources only on states where he stood to gain the most delegates. He left other states uncontested and later tried to steal delegates from Mitt Romney in states where delegates were awarded at the state and local conventions and caucuses. It wasn’t enough to take him to the general election, but it propelled a remarkable run as the primaries’ pre-eminent spoiler — he kept Romney fighting for the nomination until April — by a candidate whom few took seriously at first.
Santorum is expected to make another run in 2016 — but unfortunately for him, two of the main strategists who worked for him in 2012 are now working for Paul. One of them, Mike Biundo, was Santorum’s campaign manager and co-piloted his cross-country hopscotching strategy. The other strategist, Paul’s national political director, John Yob, was part of Santorum’s later-stage delegate-hunting efforts. (Santorum’s chief strategist, John Brabender, told me this week that if Santorum runs, he will be just fine without Biundo and Yob and will build a “more sophisticated” operation than the one he had four years ago). With Santorum, Biundo and Yob learned the rules and the ins and outs of the electoral map in a way few others had. Only one campaign knew them still better: Ron Paul’s.
The elder Paul’s team first showed that it knew its way around the primary rules in 2008, when it took McCain’s campaign by surprise by showing up in force at state conventions to push the election of Paul-friendly convention delegates long after McCain thought he had vanquished all of his Republican rivals. “We weren’t ready for the intensity and organization they put together,” Ryan Price, a McCain national deputy political director who helped run his delegate strategy that year, told me.
The McCain team — on which Yob served as a political director — was able to keep the damage from Paul’s efforts to a minimum. Mitt Romney had less luck in 2012, when the Paulites used the knowledge they had gained from 2008 to win a plurality of delegates in several states long after their primaries and caucuses — none of which Paul actually won — were over. “They were very sophisticated about the chess match,” says Katie Packer Gage, Romney’s 2012 deputy campaign manager. “They definitely caused a lot of headaches.” As I wrote last month, Paul’s success prompted party leaders to enact new rules to discourage candidates from repeating his insurrection, which Rand Paul’s team is scrutinizing now in hopes of figuring out how to work around them.
Ron Paul, of course, never came close to winning the nomination. But if his son can mount a bigger, more credible campaign than that of his father, as he is expected to do, he could use the same apparatus and approach to expertly navigate the rules and cause more than just headaches. “If they can bring all of that with them, then it would be very, very beneficial,” Gage told me. But she added a caveat: “I just wouldn’t make the assumption that his team is going to have it just because his dad’s team had it.”
The family legacy is mixed for Rand Paul. His team does have several veterans of the Ron Paul campaigns, starting with the candidate himself; Ron Paul’s Iowa vice chairman, A. J. Spiker; and Ron Paul’s former campaign manager — and grandson-in-law — Jesse Benton (though Benton is heading to a Paul-supporting “super PAC” and, once that happens, will have to cease direct contact with the official campaign under federal elections law). But as Paul seeks to build a broader base than his father had, he is alienating some of the hard-core, grass-roots Ron Paul loyalists — the same people who were so galvanized by his father’s candidacy that they mastered the minutiae of their state party rules and infiltrated local Republican committees on his behalf.
And all of the Paul team’s savvy at counting delegates and working state rules will only take him so far if another candidate — a Jeb Bush, say, or a Scott Walker — builds early momentum and wins a series of primaries out of the gate. A truly inevitable candidate does not need to worry about the small stuff or try to game the rules. Great victories bring great caches of delegates.
But in a close-fought, state-by-state contest between two or more competitive candidates, the campaign that best understands the intricacies of delegate allotment will have a real edge — and at this point, that campaign is almost certainly Paul’s. Like Obama in 2008, Paul is a first-term senator who, aware of his underdog status, is spending the campaign’s early days planning for all the scenarios it can envision.
When I asked Yob — a second-generation Michigan Republican who knows better than to show any kinship with Obama — about the parallels, he laughed off the question. “We are simultaneously building early-state organizations that are the strongest in the field while also preparing for the possibility of a nominating process that extends to the caucuses and state conventions, where convention delegates will ultimately be selected,” he told me. “It is safe to say, I like our chances in caucus systems and conventions across the country.”
Correction: April 10, 2015
An earlier version of this article misidentified the position Ryan Price held when he worked on John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. He was the national deputy political director, not deputy campaign manager.


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