Thread: Republican group readies immigration blitz

Republican group readies immigration blitz

By ALEXANDER BURNS and MAGGIE HABERMAN | 2/28/13 4:49 AM EST

While Republican leaders continue to talk – and talk – about how best to update the party’s hard-line image, one of the country’s most prominent conservative outside groups is ready to put real money into the effort.

The American Action Network is poised to launch a major advocacy campaign aimed at winning support for immigration reform on the right – the first significant effort within the Republican coalition to create an atmosphere in which it is safe for GOP lawmakers to support an immigration bill.

AAN officials described the campaign in detail to POLITICO, outlining how the organization aims to drum up support for both immigration legislation and Republican budget proposals in the coming months.

The nonprofit group and an affiliated super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund, spent a combined $55 million on advocacy and electioneering in 2011 and 2012, officials said. With $44 million of that total coming from AAN – a number that hasn’t previously been shared – the group can expect to have substantial resources for its policy messaging going forward.

The immigration effort will begin this weekend with a six-figure television buy featuring former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez urging voters to support fixing “a broken system.” It is branded as a message from the Hispanic Leadership Network, an arm of AAN that has spent several years reaching out to Hispanic voters from the right.

The campaign represents a political gamble, though one that could alter the current dynamic of immigration reform. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has been the party’s most outspoken advocate for an immigration proposal, but it remains to be seen how receptive the larger conservative community will be to enacting a compromise law.

The Gutierrez commercial will run nationally in both English and Spanish, on programs including ABC’s “This Week,” “Fox News Sunday” and the network Univision. There will also be a digital component to the advertising in targeted markets.

“America’s the only place where a little boy who couldn’t speak English can grow up to be a CEO and U.S. secretary of Commerce,” Gutierrez says in the ad. “Washington must pass immigration reform that grows the economy and respects the rule of law.”

In interviews, AAN leaders described the push for immigration reform as a long-term commitment on the part of the organization. AAN’s think-tank affiliate, the American Action Forum, plans to put out a study in March, authored by former Congressional Budget Office head Douglas Holtz-Eakin and emphasizing the potential economic benefits of immigration reform.

Strategists said that Gutierrez is only the first HLN supporter who will be featured in television ads; the group’s national advisory committee includes other Republicans as prominent as Jeb Bush and Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval. (Gutierrez recently resigned from a senior position at Citigroup to helm a super PAC focused on immigration.)

AAN president Brian Walsh said the focus on immigration reflects “our desire to see this problem solved and a real bill make it through the House and the Senate this year, or at least this Congress.”

“We will be tapping into our grassroots, we will be tapping into the leadership we’ve built over the last few years [for] what we believe is going to be a very difficult debate moving forward, but one that we feel strongly about,” Walsh said.

AAN advisers said that immigration represents a longstanding area of interest for the group, which plans to orient itself over the next year toward that issue and the ongoing fiscal battles on Capitol Hill. Dan Conston, AAN’s communications director, said they anticipate those will be “the defining issues of the next six to eight months, and probably past that.”

On fiscal and economic issues, AAN has been aligned closely with the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill. The group has played a front-line in past election cycles making the case against the Affordable Care Act, and for GOP proposals like the Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan.

AAN has already conducted polling on the next round of budget fights and plans to activate supporters around the next Ryan-authored deficit reduction plan.

Unlike other independent-spending groups on the right, which have been dedicated overwhelmingly to running television commercials, AAN has committed real resources to building up both policy resources and activist-oriented grassroots outreach. AAN officials estimate they now have a following of some 350,000 people who can be activated through email or social media.

In 2012, AAN spent heavily to create a “National Grassroots Network,” that ultimately included offices in eight states and engaged activists to knock on some half a million doors and contact over 2.1 million voters.

AAN’s leadership views those sympathetic voters as a possibly potent tool for applying pressure on Capitol Hill. Conservative groups have often struggled to mobilize voters to contact their members of Congress, as Democratic groups such as labor unions do routinely – and as the holdover organization of the Obama campaign, Organizing for America, has indicated it plans to do in 2013 and beyond.

“I don’t know who else in this town can say they’re a more House-focused organization with hundreds of thousands of people at their disposal to start working for them,” Walsh said. “The fiscal situation is going to cast a shadow on every single public policy debate that’s going to go on for the next two years … This is where the fight is going to be.”

The new AAN initiatives reflect both the group’s strength coming off the 2012 cycle, and the persistent weaknesses in the larger architecture of the Republican Party that center-right elites are eager to address. As a registered nonprofit, AAN does not have to disclose its donors; the CLF super PAC does disclose and received money in 2012 from pillars of the Republican donor community such as gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson, Texas homebuilder Bob Perry and the oil company Chevron.

Of the various conservative outside groups – American Crossroads, Americans for Prosperity and others – AAN may have had the best night on Nov. 6, when Republicans comfortably held onto the House of Representatives, where AAN and CLF trained their efforts.

In the months since then, the Republican Party has entered the early stages of a struggle to address the shortcomings that the 2012 campaign put on vivid display. Chief among those are the party’s grievously weak performance with nonwhite voters, and the failure of presidential nominee Mitt Romney and other GOP candidates to articulate an economic message that appeals to ordinary people.

AAN – and more specifically, HLN – took an early lead in that process by releasing a raft of polling showing that Hispanic voters view the GOP in intensely negative terms, and arguing that an immigration solution is a necessary first step toward building a more diverse voter base.

Longtime Republican fundraiser Fred Malek, who co-founded AAN with former Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman, said that the GOP is “increasingly viewed as intolerant and insensitive” to Hispanic voters.

“We haven’t addressed immigration reform in an intelligent and sensitive way, and until we do we can forget about the Hispanic vote,” Malek said.

Republican pollster Whit Ayres, the author of the HLN study on the party’s weakness among Hispanics, argued that there is an opening now to win popular support for immigration measures with voters who may have been more skeptical in the past.

“A lot of Republicans and center-right people have been persuaded that what we were doing in the past was not working and we need to do something different. What that different thing is remains to be seen,” Ayres said. “But there is real openness among people on the center-right proposals that they were not open to before the 6th of November.”

At least at this early stage, AAN’s advocacy isn’t touting specific provisions of immigration legislation or pushing for specific measures to be included or excluded from any bill. Instead, their goal is to make the argument that addressing the country’s immigration problems would be good for the economy and consistent with conservative principles – and to put a sympathetic face on arguments that more conservative voters rarely hear from their own side.

Informed strategists say AAN has realistic aspirations for bringing Hispanic voters into the GOP tent: moving immigration off the agenda may be a necessary step, but the party will have to wage a longer campaign to win over Hispanics even after immigration has been dealt with.

Whatever the time frame, Republicans say they are determined to tackle their party’s desperate underperformance with minorities, and do what it takes to avoid losing Hispanic voters by 44 points – as Romney did last year – in the future.

“We’ve got to be doing something about it, and that’s going to take a long, determined effort,” Walsh said. “We’ve got to start a conversation.”

Republican group readies immigration blitz - Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman - POLITICO.com

I renounce the republican Party for this. They are dumb enough to think the illegals will vote for them.

Originally Posted by Newmexican

I renounce the republican Party for this. They are dumb enough to think the illegals will vote for them.

http://www.alipac.us/f12/republicans...-obama-182899/ 3/25/2010