(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Can Koch Network's $ End Trump? Digital Ads Are Flaccid & Ineffective Says Former GOP Strategist [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-07-03 While a few Republican Party politicians are being openly critical of Donald Trump, most are choosing their words very carefully when asked about the former president’s multiple indictments, including the New York indictment alleging he falsified business records and multiple federal charges over classified documents. Some have indicated that if elected, they would likely pardon Trump if he is convicted of multiple felonies. Billionaire industrialist Charles Koch’s vast right-wing political network is taking a different tack, funding digital advertisements maintaining that Trump is unelectable. Given that the GOP base still loves Trump, is the Koch family’s anti-Trump strategy a wining strategy, or will it be more a case of the billionaire’s money being pissed away? According to the Center for Media Democracy’s Exposed by CMD project, Koch’s political enterprises are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertisements – starting with digital attack ads -- against Trump. Koch’s “political operation, Americans for Prosperity Action (AFP Action), had spent $347,022 in May to discredit his presidential bid in 2024,” Don Wiener reported. “The group joins Club for Growth as the first right-wing super PACs to openly oppose Trump’s candidacy, according to The Washington Post.” Wiener pointed out that “One 15-second spot (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6cWWRHfYx4) claims that the only way Biden can win is if Trump is the nominee, and claims that 60% of voters oppose the ex-president running again. A second AFP Action ad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIv-a9X264) uses the same 60% statistic and claims that Trump ‘has done a lot of good things,’ but that he can’t win in 2024 since swing voters won’t support him. The 15-second ads on YouTube are straightforward, making use of still photos and graphics.” Drew Klein, an adviser to AFP Action’s Iowa operation, told the Des Moines Register that the group is “getting involved earlier than ever in the presidential primary process,” and the ads as evidence of their “commitment to support a candidate in the Republican presidential primary who can… win.” Over the years, Americans for Prosperity has grown into a powerful political operation. Wiener noted that “AFP claims more than 4 million members and announced last month that it now plans to expand its presence from its current 36 states to all 50 in order to “reignite the American dream.” AFP CEO Emily Seidel said that during the midterms AFP and AFP Action “engaged in a record-breaking 457” state and federal races, knocking on more than 7 million “highly targeted” doors, delivering over 100 million pieces of mail, and reaching millions more voters through phone and email. Will these ads, and evidently more to come, move the needle and persuade Republican Party primary voters to leave Trump? Not likely writes Time Miller of The Bulwark. In an article at The Bulwark headlined “The Koch Network’s Anti-Trump Ads Are Atrocious” (https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/the-koch-brothers-anti-trump-ads-are-atrocious), Miller, writer-at-large for The Bulwark, and an American political consultant and writer who was a communications director for the Jeb Bush 2016 presidential campaign, wrote that the Koch-funded ads have “several blindingly obvious problems ... that render them completely ineffective and possibly even counterproductive.” Miller, a fervent anti-Trumper, pointed out that stylistically while these ads might work in down ballot races, “But that’s not the kind of campaign we’re in! When you are dealing with the second most famous person of the last century (congrats, Hitler!) people tune out boilerplate garbage like this. And for Trump voters who do register it, being exposed to an ad that smells like the Old Guard GOP attacking their avatar only makes them want to come to Trump’s defense.” The ads maintain that Trump can’t win a national election. Miller writes: “Republican voters already heard that argument from self-proclaimed political experts and rejected it. You know why I’m sure that this doesn’t work? I am one of the dumbasses who tried it already! “We ran these same ads about Trump being unelectable in 2016. It didn’t move the needle. And when Trump won, his voters gleefully rubbed our predictions about Trump’s impending defeat in our faces. In fact, I am featured in several video mashups on the MAGA web where they mock the political experts they owned.” Finally, Miller asserts that the ads are targeting the wrong audience. “The audience that needs to be reached are the Trump-aligned voters who might be willing to move off their candidate. A DeSantis super PAC strategist recently said he thinks it’s the most conservative voterswho are the swing group in this primary fight. That is partially right. The other swing group is soft MAGA voters who like Trump but aren’t in the cult, hate the political establishment, aren’t consistently ideological, and want someone who they can count on to own their cultural enemies.” Harry J. Kazianis, who serves as President and CEO of Rogue States Project, a bipartisan national security think tank, and had held senior positions at the Center for the National Interest, the Heritage Foundation, the Potomac Foundation, has a warning for Team Koch. The challenge for the Koch Brothers is Donald Trump brought in so many new voters into the GOP that those voters are uniquely tied to him. Even if Koch could sway the 2024 GOP primary and somehow hand the election to, say, Mike or Nikki Haley or someone else we all know [Florida governor Ron DeSantis], MAGA voters would be enraged. It could even be enough to get Donald Trump to go Teddy Roosevelt and form his own version of a Bull Moose Party and run as a third-party candidate.” [END] --- [1] Url: https://dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/3/2179052/-Can-Koch-Network-s-End-Trump-Digital-Ads-Are-Flaccid-Ineffective-Says-Former-GOP-Strategist Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/