by Jane Mayer
It was not a coincidence that Braley, Etheridge, Perriello, and other Democrats were all ambushed that year by unidentified videographers. In 2010, Americans for Prosperity and several other conservative groups encouraged members to provoke Democratic candidates into on-camera outbursts. Some gave instructions on how to do it. In time, the practice spread to liberal groups too. The Internet had exponentially increased the power of viral videos, particularly those capturing compromising behavior.
Aiding the effort, several of the wealthiest members of the Koch network launched media ventures during this period, widening the exposure for partisan attacks. Foster Friess, the Wyoming mutual fund magnate, for instance, committed to spend $3 million to found The Daily Caller in 2010 after a single luncheon conversation about it with Tucker Carlson, its prospective editor in chief. The online news venture described itself as a conservative version of The Huffington Post. In fact, it functioned more as an outlet for opposition research paid for by the donor class. Charles Koch’s foundation would later also back the news site. (After The New Yorker published my investigative article on the Kochs, “Covert Operations,” that August, The Daily Caller was the chosen receptacle for the retaliatory opposition research on me, although, after it proved false, the Web site decided not to run it.)
Only in 2011 did it surface that in New York, at least, the “Ground Zero mosque” controversy had been stirred up for political gain in part by money from Robert Mercer, the co-CEO of the $15 billion Long Island hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. To aid a conservative candidate in New York, Mercer gave $1 million to help pay for ads attacking supporters of the “Ground Zero mosque.” A former computer programmer who had a reputation as a brilliant mathematician and an eccentric loner, Mercer was a relative newcomer to the Koch summits. But he was immediately impressed by the organization. He had long held the government in low regard and shared the Kochs’ antipathy toward government regulations. In addition to fanning flames around the “mosque” issue, in 2010 Mercer reportedly gave over $300,000 to a super PAC trying to defeat a Democratic congressman from Oregon, Pete DeFazio, who had proposed taxing stock trades. Renaissance, a so-called quant fund, traded stocks in accordance with computer algorithms at enormously high frequencies and volumes, so the proposed tax would have bitten into the firm’s legendary profits. Someone familiar with Mercer’s thinking maintained that the proposed tax on stock trades was not behind his involvement in the race; rather, Mercer shared deep skepticism about global warming with the Republican candidate, Arthur Robinson. Instead of openly debating these issues, though, Mercer, who declined to speak about his motivations, paid for ads that manipulated voters’ fears about terrorism and Medicare.
As the congressional races grew nasty, Gillespie’s Republican State Leadership Committee began to channel dark money into one local state legislature race after another. There were furtive, well-coordinated projects to take over the statehouses in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and elsewhere. North Carolina in particular was living up to its promise as a perfect testing ground for the REDMAP strategy. Art Pope’s outsized role there, meanwhile, was also providing an instructive demonstration of how much influence one extraordinarily wealthy activist could have over a single state in the post–Citizens United era.
Many of the details remained shrouded from public view. But that fall, in the remote western corner of North Carolina, John Snow, a retired Democratic judge who had represented the district in the state senate for three terms, found himself subjected to one political attack after another. Snow, who often voted with the Republicans, was considered one of the most conservative Democrats in the general assembly, and his record reflected the views of his constituents. His Republican opponent, Jim Davis—an orthodontist loosely allied with the Tea Party—had minimal political experience, and Snow, a former college football star, was expected to be reelected easily. Yet somehow Davis seemed to have almost unlimited money with which to assail Snow.
Snow recalls, “I voted to help build a pier with an aquarium on the coast, as did every other member of the North Carolina House and Senate who voted.” But a television attack ad presented the “luxury pier” as Snow’s wasteful scheme. “We’ve lost jobs,” an actress said in the ad. “John Snow’s solution for our economy? ‘Go fish!’ ” A mass mailing, decorated with a cartoon pig, denounced the pier as one of Snow’s “pork projects.”
In all, Snow says, he was the target of two dozen mass mailings, one of them reminiscent of the Willie Horton ad. It featured a photograph of a menacing-looking African-American convict who, it said, “thanks to arrogant state senator John Snow,” could “soon be let off death row.” Snow, in fact, supported the death penalty and had prosecuted murder cases. But in 2009, Snow had helped pass a new state law, the Racial Justice Act, that enabled judges to reconsider a death sentence if a convict could prove that the jury’s verdict had been tainted by racism. The law was an attempt to address the overwhelming racial disparity in capital sentences.
“The attacks just went on and on,” Snow later recalled. “My opponents used fear tactics. I’m a moderate, but they tried to make me look liberal.” On election night, he lost by an agonizingly slim margin—fewer than two hundred votes.
After the election, the North Carolina Free Enterprise Foundation, a nonpartisan, pro-business organization, revealed that two seemingly independent outside political groups had spent several hundred thousand dollars on ads against Snow—a huge amount for a local race in a poor, backwoods district. Pope was instrumental in funding both groups, Civitas Action and Real Jobs NC. In fact, Pope gave $200,000 in seed money in 2010 to start Real Jobs NC, which was responsible for the “Go fish!” ad and the mass mailing that attacked Snow’s “pork projects.”
Real Jobs NC was also the recipient of a whopping $1.25 million from Ed Gillespie’s Republican State Leadership Committee. But as the investigative news outfit ProPublica explained, Gillespie’s group distributed its contributions in a way designed to hide its involvement from voters. Instead of putting its own name on the ads, it created new, local-sounding nonprofit groups that lacked the word “Republican.” As a social welfare organization, it claimed to be nonpolitical, yet its funds were used to attack twenty different Democrats around the state and no Republicans.
Bob Phillips, the head of the North Carolina chapter of Common Cause, an organization that promotes stricter controls on political money, watched the unfolding drama closely and concluded that the Citizens United decision was an even bigger “game changer” at the local level than at the national. He said it enabled a single donor, particularly one with access to major corporate funds like Pope or the Kochs, to play a significant and even decisive role. “We didn’t have that before 2010,” Phillips says. “Citizens United opened up the door. Now a candidate can literally be outspent by independent groups. We saw it in North Carolina, and a lot of the money was traced back to Art Pope.”
In fact, misleading attack ads sponsored by the same unknown outside groups popped up in local races all over the state. In Fayetteville, Margaret Dickson, a sixty-one-year-old pro-business Democrat who was seeking reelection to the North Carolina state senate, was depicted as a clone of Nancy Pelosi, even though her record was considerably more conservative. Another ad, funded by her opponent, made her look like “a hooker,” she said, showing a doppelgänger applying lipstick and taking piles of greenbacks and suggesting she was prostituting her state job for money. Pope later said he was appalled by the ad, but Americans for Prosperity, on whose board he sat, promoted her opponent. “Those ads hurt me,” she said later. “I’ve been through this four times before, but the tone of this campaign was much uglier, and much more personal, than anything I’ve seen.” On election night, Dickson fell about a thousand votes short of victory in her district, which has a population of more than 150,000.
Chris Heagarty, a Democratic lawyer who ran for a legislative seat that fall in Raleigh, had previously directed an election-reform group and was not naive a
bout political money. Yet even he was caught off guard by the intensity of the effort marshaled against him. Real Jobs NC and Civitas Action spent some $70,000 on ads portraying him as fiscally profligate, while Americans for Prosperity spent heavily on behalf of his opponent. One ad accused him of having voted “to raise taxes over a billion dollars,” even though he had not yet served in the legislature. He said, “If you put all of the Pope groups together, they and the North Carolina GOP spent more to defeat me than the guy who actually won.” He fell silent, then added, “For an individual to have so much power is frightening. The government of North Carolina is for sale.”
Pope, who regarded himself as an underdog in a historically Democratic state and an honest reformer, took umbrage at such talk. “People throw around terms like ‘so-and-so tried to buy the election,’ ” he said in an interview. But in his view, that evoked bribery, and “that’s illegal, corrupt, and something I’ve fought hard against in North Carolina.” He said the money he spent simply helped “educate” citizens so that they could “make informed decisions. It’s the core of the First Amendment!” Asked whether those with more cash might drown out less wealthy voices, he said, “I really have more faith in North Carolina voters than that.” Martin Nesbitt Jr., the Democratic leader in the North Carolina Senate, wasn’t convinced. Of Pope’s 2010 spending, he said, “It wasn’t an education; it was an onslaught. What he’s doing is buying elections.”
Other critics accused Pope of using tax-deductible philanthropic pursuits to promote aggressively pro-business, antitax policies that helped his company. Scholars who worked at a think tank funded by his family foundations, for instance, opposed any raise in the minimum wage, and in fact any minimum wage laws at all. At the same time, many employees at Pope’s discount stores were paid the minimum wage. “I am careful to comply with the law,” Pope argued, “and I keep my personal activities separate from my philanthropic, public-policy, grassroots and independent expenditure efforts.”
He protested caricatures that portrayed him as greedy and self-serving, saying he deeply cared about the people of North Carolina but believed they were better served by private enterprise than government social programs. He therefore believed in cutting personal and corporate income taxes, abolishing estate taxes, and cutting state spending. Friends explained that Pope believed it was the role of charities, to which he contributed, not the government, to look after the poor and disadvantaged.
The Pope fortune was highly dependent on low-income patrons. In 1930, Pope’s grandfather established five small dime stores in North Carolina that he sold to the next generation. Pope’s father was a tough and thrifty merchant who expanded the family business into an empire spanning thirteen states. Pope then worked his way up in the company, becoming CEO. Variety Wholesalers owned several chains, including Roses, Maxway, Super 10, and Bargain Town. The company favored a specific demographic: neighborhoods with median incomes of less than $40,000 a year, and populations that were at least 25 percent African-American.
Despite the controversy it stirred, the triumph of Pope and “outside” money in North Carolina in 2010 was sweeping. Of twenty-two local legislative races targeted by Pope, his family, and their organizations, the Republicans won eighteen. As Gillespie and he had hoped, this placed both chambers of the general assembly firmly under Republican majorities for the first time since 1870.
According to the Institute for Southern Studies, three-quarters of the spending by independent groups in North Carolina’s 2010 state races came from accounts linked to Pope. The total amount that Pope and his family and groups backed by him spent—$2.2 million—was not that much by national standards but was enough to exert crucial influence within the confines of one state.
The pattern did in fact repeat itself all across the nation. “The Obama team has done some amazing things, those guys are really something, but the Democrats plain got skunked on the state houses,” the former Republican congressman Tom Reynolds, the chairman of REDMAP, later told Politico. Gillespie’s deputy, Chris Jankowski, later admitted, “At first I was a little panicked, they weren’t out there really competing. I thought I was going to get hit by a sucker punch.” But then, he said, “I realized what was happening and it was like, how much can we run up the score?”
In the final month before the midterm elections, Obama’s political advisers realized there was almost nothing they could do to prevent disaster. “We lost all hope in October,” one White House aide later admitted. “We didn’t feel much of anything. We just had to let the ship hit the iceberg.”
In a last-ditch effort, Obama tried to warn voters that Republicans were trying to steal the elections with secret, special-interest cash. He began speaking out on the campaign about how Citizens United had allowed “a flood of deceptive attack ads sponsored by special interests using front groups with misleading names.” He even made a barely veiled reference to the Kochs, suggesting that big companies were hiding behind “groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity.” Obama said, “They don’t have to say who, exactly, Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation”—or even, he added, “a big oil company.”
In the final days before the election, the Democratic Party aired a national ad accusing “Bush cronies,” Ed Gillespie and Karl Rove, and “shills for big business” of “stealing our democracy.” The spot depicted an old woman getting mugged. The image, though, was hackneyed, and the message simplistic. It was almost impossible to explain to the public in sound bites the connections between the sea of dark money, the donors’ financial interests, the assault on Obama’s policies, and their lives. The conventional wisdom among professional political consultants was that Americans either didn’t get it or just didn’t care.
It’s likely given historical trends and an unemployment rate topping 9.5 percent that a Republican wave in 2010 was inevitable, but the unmatched money from a handful of ultrarich conservatives helped turn the likely win into a rout. Noble had made so much progress that by the final weeks in the campaign he was aiming beyond his third-tier candidates at congressmen no one had ever believed were vulnerable. After noticing how little money Jim Oberstar, a Democratic congressman from Duluth, Minnesota, had raised, Noble bought local television time and aired an ad thrown together by McCarthy casting Oberstar as a disco-era relic who cared more about himself than about his constituents. Oberstar, to almost everyone’s surprise, became another notch on Noble’s belt.
On November 2, 2010, the Democrats suffered massive defeats, losing control of the House of Representatives. Just two short years after he soared to power amid predictions of a lasting realignment, Obama’s party, and his hopes of prevailing on any ambitious legislation, were crushed. Republicans gained sixty-three seats in the House, putting them firmly in control of the lower body. It was the largest such turnover since 1948. Pelosi, the first female Speaker and Luntz’s favorite target, was exiled to minority status after only four years. The Ohio Republican John Boehner, the new Speaker, now had a caucus bursting with Tea Party enthusiasts who had ridden to power by attacking government in general and Obama in particular. Several had won primaries against moderates. Many owed their victories to donors expecting radically conservative change. Compromise wasn’t in their interest.
The Democrats’ setbacks were huge at almost every level. Republicans picked up half a dozen Senate seats. At the state level, the Democratic losses were even more staggering. Across the country, Republicans gained 675 legislative seats. They won control of both the legislature and the governor’s office in twenty-one states; the Democrats had similar one-party rule in only eleven. The map looked red, with small islands of blue.
As a consequence of their gains, Republicans now had four times as many districts to gerrymander as the Democrats. By creating reliably safe seats, they could build a firewall protecting the Republican control of Congress for the next decade.
Clearly, REDMAP’s payoff for a relatively
modest investment was impressive. For the Republicans, as Glenn Thrush of Politico observed, it became “the gift that keeps on giving.” Newly Republican states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina soon became breeding grounds for attacks on Obama’s core agenda. They undermined his policies on health care, abortion, gay rights, voting rights, immigration, the environment, guns, and labor.
“It feels bad,” Obama admitted at a press conference the day after the election. What hurt especially, he said, was having to make condolence calls to Democrats who had gone out on a limb to defend him and his policies, such as Ohio’s governor, Ted Strickland. “The toughest thing in the last couple of days is seeing really terrific public servants not being able to serve more,” he said. “There’s not only sadness about seeing them go, but there’s also a lot of questioning on my part in terms of could I have done something differently, or something more.”
Waxing professorial, he suggested, “This is something that I think every president needs to go through,” but then he paused and joked wanly, “Now, I’m not suggesting for every future president that they take a shellacking like I did last night.”
One of the biggest, though least-known, winners of the evening was Sean Noble. When he had worked as a congressional aide on Capitol Hill, he had earned a salary of $87,000 a year. In contrast, by 2011 he was wealthy enough to make two major real estate purchases in addition to the two houses that he and his wife owned in Phoenix. He spent $665,000 on a Capitol Hill row house and an undisclosed amount on “a 5,700-square-foot, eight-bedroom house in Hurricane, Utah,” Bloomberg News reported. And best of all, the record spending on the 2012 election was just around the corner.