It is important, VERY IMPORTANT, to remember the Club for Growth (CfG) is the Ron DeSantis career financial vehicle. Ever since his first steps into congress, CfG has been the primary financial sponsor for the now Florida Governor. There is no moment in the political career of DeSantis where CfG does not exist.
While the DeSantis SuperPAC Never Back Down is the mechanics of the DeSantis election strategy, CfG is the well invested advising side and David McIntosh has been the source of DeSantis career guidance for a decade. That’s how intrinsically connected Club for Growth is to Ron and Casey DeSantis.
CfG has also opposed Donald Trump for his “America First” economic plan from the moment they realized Trump was serious about economic nationalism, control over immigration, a renewal of the American manufacturing sector, balanced trade and reciprocal tariffs. All of these policy points are against the interests of McIntosh and larger Club for Growth agenda. The CfG has been working against Trump since 2016.
That is the appropriate context for a memo written by David McIntosh to those who fund Club for Growth as reported by the New York Times. McIntosh writes a brutally honest letter to the professionally republican donor class saying all of their efforts against Trump have been futile, and there is no effective strategy that will break the bond the American middle-class voter has with President Donald Trump.
(New York Times) – A well-funded group of anti-Trump conservatives has sent its donors a remarkably candid memo that reveals how resilient former President Donald J. Trump has been against millions of dollars of negative ads the group deployed against him in two early-voting states.
The political action committee, called Win It Back, has close ties to the influential fiscally conservative group Club for Growth. It has already spent more than $4 million trying to lower Mr. Trump’s support among Republican voters in Iowa and nearly $2 million more trying to damage him in South Carolina.
But in the memo — dated Thursday and obtained by The New York Times — the head of Win It Back PAC, David McIntosh, acknowledges to donors that after extensive testing of more than 40 anti-Trump television ads, “all attempts to undermine his conservative credentials on specific issues were ineffective.”
[…] “Even when you show video to Republican primary voters — with complete context — of President Trump saying something otherwise objectionable to primary voters, they find a way to rationalize and dismiss it,” Mr. McIntosh states in the “key learnings” section of the memo.
“Every traditional postproduction ad attacking President Trump either backfired or produced no impact on his ballot support and favorability,” Mr. McIntosh adds. “This includes ads that primarily feature video of him saying liberal or stupid comments from his own mouth.”
[…] The memo says this of Win It Back’s most promising pandemic-themed ad: “This ad was our best creative on the pandemic and vaccines that we tested in focus group settings, but it still produced a backlash in our online randomized controlled experiment — improving President Trump’s ballot support by four points and net favorability by 11 points.”
Win It Back did not bother running ads focused on Mr. Trump as an instigator of political violence or as a threat to democracy. The group tested in a focus group and online panel an ad called “Risk,” narrated by former Representative Liz Cheney, that focused on Mr. Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021. But the group found that the Cheney ad helped Mr. Trump with the Republican voters, according to Mr. McIntosh. (read more)
