Reid is not a Koch fan. | Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman from a Getty Images Behind Reid's war against the Kochs

At first, it seemed like just another example of Harry Reid being Harry Reid.

The Senate majority leader, whose unscripted attacks can veer into bellicosity and take liberties with facts, spoke on the Senate floor last October and appeared to blame billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch for the government shutdown.


“By shutting down the government,” Reid said, “we’re satisfying the Koch brothers and Ed Meese, but millions of people in America are suffering.” In January, he went further, accusing the Kochs of “ actually trying to buy the country.”

His staff affectionately refers to such ad libs as Reid “getting out ahead of his skis,” but the professional left, which had spent years agitating for a high-level Democratic campaign against the Kochs, cheered and urged him on.

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The result has been a highly unusual election-year campaign against a couple of relatively unknown private citizens whom Reid and his Democrats are seeking to make into caricatures of a Republican Party that, on issue after issue, caters to the very rich at the expense of everyone else.

After Reid’s ad-libbed comments, his office developed a strategy for a coordinated campaign that’s expected to resume this month and carry clear through Election Day and beyond. It’s been shaped and reinforced by Reid’s staff, including former operatives of the liberal Center for American Progress, which had pioneered Koch-bashing politics years earlier. An eclectic cast of characters was also involved, including Reid’s wife, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a top Democratic pollster, two brothers who wrote a business-management book and various liberal super PACs and nonprofits.

This story, drawn from more than a dozen interviews with people involved in various phases of the effort — most of whom requested anonymity to discuss ongoing political deliberations — reveals for the first time the key players and considerations behind Harry Reid’s War on the Kochs, the risky strategy on which Democrats are hinging their midterm election hopes.

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The Nevada Democrat had been closely following the Kochs’ growing political footprint for years, say those close to him. They say his wife, Landra Gould, also had developed something of a fascination with the brothers. After the shutdown, the couple discussed a seminal 2010 New Yorker story on the brothers’ political activity, which utilized research from CAP. And it was Gould who first suggested that her husband accuse Republicans of being “ addicted to Koch.”

Faiz Shakir and Adam Jentleson — Reid’s senior digital strategist and communications director, respectively — helped craft the Koch strategy and had previously worked at the Center for American Progress when it first started working to elevate the profile of the Kochs, who were almost completely unknown even in political circles before 2009.

Shakir ran CAP’s blog ThinkProgress from 2007 through 2012 and deputized one of his bloggers to participate in an ad hoc coalition of liberal groups that sought to make boogeymen of the Kochs. Shakir also sought to enlist members of President Barack Obama’s recently sworn-in administration in CAP’s fledgling battle, with minimal success. Still, the Koch operation aggressively pushed back against CAP’s scrutiny, and Shakir suggested Reid could expect the same if he joined the battle. “My experience with them was that when we escalated they escalated, so we should think about whether we want to take this on,” Shakir told the majority leader after his unscripted salvos from the floor, according to someone familiar with the conversation.

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In a year during which little of consequence is being done in the Senate, hardly a week goes by in which Reid doesn’t take to the floor to attack the Kochs’ influence in politics. Since late January, Reid has mentioned the Kochs in 22 separate floor speeches, calling them out about 250 times, either by name (including referring to them as “ Charlie and Dave”) or allusion (“ two power-drunk billionaires”), and blaming them for all manner of ills including holding up aid to Ukraine.

Those familiar with his thinking expect him to pick up the drumbeat this month. Possible fresh fodder includes last month’s Supreme Court ruling against labor unions, in which the anti-union plaintiff was represented by an arm of the National Right to Work Committee, which has received support from Koch-linked foundations and nonprofits. And Reid is planning this month to bring up a constitutional amendment intended to reduce campaign spending — an effort he’s pushed by citing the Kochs as the poster children for big-money political spending.

In a statement to POLITICO, Reid suggested that his spotlighting the Kochs was unrelated to them personally or even their 2014 election spending. “The flood of dark money into our political system has tilted the playing field away from the middle class and towards billionaires like the Kochs. But if the Koch brothers pack up their tent and get out of politics tomorrow, someone else will fill the gap,” he said. “This is a fundamental problem that requires a dramatic solution and that is why I will keep pushing for a constitutional amendment to get this dark money out of our political system.”

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Still, Reid’s attacks have drawn cries of McCarthyism from around the political world, including MSNBC host Joe Scarborough and Mother Jones editor Daniel Schulman. And they’ve even created discomfort among liberal big-money donors and operatives, who worry the argument might expose them to charges of hypocrisy, while they also question the effectiveness of running against donors who won’t appear on any ballots.

Koch Industries, the brothers’ multinational industrial conglomerate, has launched an uncharacteristic PR effort to highlight the brothers’ philanthropic efforts. But — true to Shakir’s warnings — the Kochs also have hit back frequently, plaintively and aggressively against Reid’s salvos, branding him “ malicious” and “ desperate,” and asserting that his Koch effort is a “very disturbing and troubling” tactic from Saul Alinsky’s playbook intended to “ intimidate” critics through “ character assassination.”

In a written statement, Koch Industries executive Philip Ellender cited the company’s employment of 60,000 Americans and chided Reid for “waging war on private citizens and seeking to curtail their First Amendment rights of free speech, association, and assembly.” Ellender called it “unfortunate that rather than focusing on the many issues facing our country, Sen. Reid has decided instead to attack Charles Koch and David Koch, who are proud and patriotic Americans that have devoted their lives to advancing tolerance and freedom in America.”

At times, it seems Reid can barely contain his glee in getting a rise out of the brothers.

“After the 14th statement adverse to me issued by a spokesman for the Koch brothers, it seems abundantly clear I have gotten under their skin,” Reid goaded from the Senate floor in March. “I am not afraid of the Koch brothers. None of us should be afraid of the Koch brothers.”

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After the Kochs’ response to Reid’s January broadside — in which Ellender called Reid’s remarks “disrespectful and beneath the office he holds” — Reid and his staff convened a series of Koch strategy sessions. They gathered reams of research on the brothers’ political activities and background from liberal groups, analyzed polling and studied how the Kochs reacted to earlier, lower-level scrutiny.

Coincidentally, in the midst of that early strategizing, Senate Democrats huddled for their annual retreat at Nationals Park, where they heard a presentation from business-messaging gurus Chip and Dan Heath, who touched on the effectiveness of identifying foils.

Their breakout book, “ Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die,” asserts that in order to gain traction for ideas, it’s helpful to replicate some facets of urban legends and conspiracy theories. They encourage readers to make their ideas about people, rather than abstractions and to tap into emotions such as “fear, disgust, suspicion.”

The Heath brothers didn’t respond to a request for comment.

But an operative who has worked with Reid said the presentation “had some impact. In some ways, it affirmed what we were considering with the Kochs.”

Sanders prodded Reid as well, providing the majority leader with a copy of the Libertarian Party platform from 1980, when David Koch was its vice presidential nominee and primary campaign funder. The platform called for dismantling Social Security, welfare, the Federal Reserve Board, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Securities and Exchange Commission, not to mention the Federal Election Commission and its campaign contribution limits.

“He thought it was very interesting,” said Sanders. “If you read it and you understand that platform, then you understand how enormously successful the Koch brothers have been in the last 35 years, because the ideas that David Koch ran on in 1980 at that point were considered kooky, crazy ideas. Today, you go down that list, and many of the ideas that were thought to be really outside of the mainstream are now part of mainstream Republican thinking.”

Reid’s focus seems at least partly based in sheer politics, born out of fear that his vulnerable members would be crushed under the deluge of attack ads from Koch-backed nonprofits, including Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners, that are expected to spend $290 million before Election Day.

When Reid first started focusing on the Kochs, AFP was refining its anti-Obamacare messaging in North Carolina ads targeting that state’s Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan, and Democrats were growing increasingly desperate as the botched Obamacare rollout got worse and worse. It was drastically diminishing electoral prospects that had seemed so promising only a few months earlier during the GOP-led federal government shutdown.

“We needed something to gravitate to, and he’s good at figuring out how to get back to our strongest ground when things are going badly,” said a Democrat who’s talked to Reid about the Koch push. “He saw the Kochs as a compelling way to draw a contrast.”

Reid had already developed a knack for vilification-as-political-strategy as an early and enthusiastic adopter of Democratic efforts to caricature Mitt Romney as an out-of-touch elitist during his 2012 presidential campaign.

Independent polls suggest the Kochs don’t resonate with most voters in the same way the Romney attacks did.

But Democratic pollster Geoff Garin, who has consulted with Reid’s team on its Koch push, says that it’s starting to pay off. “I’ve told them that I think that Sen. Reid has had a significant impact and that he has struck a responsive chord in terms of creating real responses and reactions from voters,” said Garin, whose firm polls for multiple Democratic super PACs, candidates and party committees.

“The Koch brothers have become central enough that we ask about them in every poll, regardless of who we’re polling for,” Garin said. On average, nearly 60 percent of respondents recognize the Koch brothers’ names, he said, adding that their negatives “are in the high 30s and moving towards the 40s, depending on the state.”

Invoking the brothers’ names also “helps to negate some of the impact of some of their negative advertisements,” Garin said. “Once people understand that the Koch brothers are behind these ads, people discount what they’re hearing in the ads.”

With Reid out front, the institutional left embraced the attacks in a much more concerted way than ever before. Groups with ties to Reid have brought major resources to bear. Senate Majority PAC, the super PAC run by former Reid chief of staff Susan McCue, and its counterpart House Majority PAC have aired ads attacking GOP congressional candidates for support they’d received from Koch-backed groups. Patriot Majority, a nondisclosing nonprofit group run by Reid ally Craig Varoga, continued its own Koch attack ads. And American Bridge, the super PAC run by David Brock, which counts McCue as a board member, morphed into a central hub of anti-Koch activity, providing research to the other groups and digging through the Libertarian Party archives for dirt on the brothers.

None of that would have happened without Reid taking to the floor to repeatedly bash the Kochs, Brock suggested at a private, closed-press meeting of major liberal donors and operatives last month in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

“I don’t know about you, but I loved watching him do it,” said Brock, according to someone who was present for the meeting. Brock has worked to assuage liberal donors’ concerns about the Koch attacks, and at the Santa Fe meeting, he pointed to Reid’s efforts to cast the brothers as self-interested political investors, as a turning point. “And ever since, it seems, Reid has single-handedly stiffened Democratic spines,” Brock said.

Brock acknowledged to the donors in Santa Fe that he himself had wondered whether attacking the Kochs was “a fool’s errand,” but said his group was given access to private focus group findings that suggested the strategy could work.

Out of 46 people in the focus groups, only two had a positive or mixed reaction to the Kochs’ agenda, Brock said, while the rest had a negative perception. Respondents reacted most strongly not to criticism of the Kochs themselves but to characterizations of the Kochs’ positions on education, health care, wages and jobs.

“The key connection Democrats need to make: The Kochs are out to hurt the middle class,” Brock told the donors. “So that’s the strategy we’re pursuing. Relentlessly.”

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