How the Presidential Primary Is a Proxy War Between the Kochs and the Republican Establishment

[applegrove]

How the Presidential Primary Is a Proxy War Between the Kochs and the Republican Establishment

by Adele M. Stan at the American Prospect

http://prospect.org/article/how-presidential-primary-proxy-war-between-kochs-and-republican-establishment#.VYSqsH9FTZE.reddit

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As reported by Jon Ward for Yahoo! News, at issue is control of the voter database compiled by the Republican National Committee, and campaigns’ use of competing voter-targeting systems: the i360 system bankrolled by billionaire neo-libertarians Charles and David Koch, and the RNC’s own Data Center and Beacon platforms. Why this matters to the RNC is that data collected in the field is critical to building its own master file of Republican voters. If entities outside of the party are doing that work, than the RNC has no claim on the data collected by them. With the i360 system growing in popularity with GOP candidates, the data will be held by the entities collectively known to political junkies as Koch World. (These include Americans for Prosperity, Generation Opportunity, 60 Plus, and others.)

RNC chair Reince Priebus appears to view the Kochs’ data enterprise as a threat to the viability of the Republican Party itself. And not without reason: According to a report by Politico’s Kenneth Vogel and Mike Allen, the Koch brothers “are continuing to amass all of the campaign tools the Republican National Committee and other party arms use to elect a president.”

Or, as an unnamed source said to be “close to the RNC” told Ward, “It’s pretty clear that they don’t want to work with the party but want to supplant it.”

The Kochs doubtless have no intention of creating their own party—at least not in the official sense. It’s far more advantageous for them, in the post-Citizens United age, to use their constellation of nonprofit groups, insulated from revealing their funding sources, to act as a party while remaining beyond the purview of Federal Election Commission regulations. And that’s where the threat to democracy comes in.



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