2016 GOP hopefuls gear up for 'Koch' primary

Fredreka Schouten | USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Billionaire Charles Koch and his growing political empire have yet to align behind a single candidate in the Republican nomination fight, but the free-market views he and his conservative allies support already are helping to shape the primary.

For instance, the Koch network’s fierce opposition to the Export-Import Bank, an 81-year-old federal agency that helps U.S. companies sell their goods abroad, quickly emerged as a litmus test for the GOP field. Despite the bank’s popularity with major business groups, most of the major White House candidates have endorsed shuttering the bank, including former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Rick Perry, a former governor of Texas who had warned Congress just a year ago that failing to reauthorize the bank’s charter would hurt American companies and cost U.S. jobs.

Now, Bush and four other GOP candidates are headed to California to tout their conservative credentials in person before Charles Koch, his younger brother David Koch and the hundreds of wealthy donors who share their political leanings.

Bush, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina will participate in question-and-answer sessions during the gathering of about 450 contributors who have pledged to spend nearly $900 million ahead of the 2016 election.

“You’ve got a lot of rich people in one place, and candidates have the chance to spend a lot of time with them, rather than flying around the country to woo them one by one,” said Viveca Novak of the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks money in politics.

The three-day event is hosted by the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the non-profit group at the center of the Kochs’ expansive network that includes a large grass-roots mobilization arm, groups focused on veteran and Latino outreach and a private and rapidly growing data firm, i360. The meeting, just days before the first televised debate of the GOP primary on Aug. 6, comes as the Koch brothers weigh entering the primary on behalf of one or more candidates.

At the meeting, parts of which will be open to journalists for the first time, the donors will meet with candidates, review polling and other research and weigh the contenders’ responses to a 25-question Freedom Partners survey that gauged their positions on everything from criminal justice changes and the Export-Import Bank to their criteria for U.S. military intervention overseas and whether they support reducing Social Security benefits for wealthy retirees.

This year, leading Koch groups have made clear that killing off the bank, stopping gas tax increases at the federal and state level and halting efforts to expand Medicaid coverage as part of the 2010 health care law were among their top political priorities.

Congress let the bank’s charter expire at the end of June amid complaints by Koch-backed groups and other conservative organizations that the agency doles out corporate welfare that interferes with free markets. Lawmakers now are locked in a bitter showdown over whether to resuscitate the bank.

“We’re happy to see that a lot of these candidates are on the right side on this issue,” Levi Russell, a spokesman for Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, said of the Export-Import Bank debate.

“We set out a package of free-market principles earlier in this process,” he said. “We are asking the folks who want the support of our activists to be champions on these issues.”

Americans for Prosperity is one of the largest groups in the network. It recently opened offices in Utah, Kentucky, Mississippi and South Dakota, boasts 35 state chapters and claims more 2.5 million volunteers. It's growing fast with 500 paid staff, up from about 150 in 2011 — the year before the last presidential election.

By the end of this year, the group's leaders plan to have 750 people on its payroll.

Bush, Walker and Rubio all have appeared recently at Americans for Prosperity events.

The biggest gathering comes later this month when five of the 2016 contenders — Rubio, Bush, Cruz, Perry and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal — are set to speak at Americans For Prosperity's national “Defending the American Dream” summit Aug. 21-22 in Ohio. (Some notable figures won’t be at the event, including Gov. John Kasich, the governor of the state hosting the gathering, and Donald Trump, the billionaire real-estate developer who has surged in early polling. Kasich’s decision to expand Medicaid coverage in Ohio and Trump’s relentless focus on immigration have put them out of step with many of the Koch network’s top issues.)

The Freedom Partners' meeting, which opens Saturday, will be markedly different from the AFP gathering at a massive convention center of Columbus. Candidates, donors and policymakers will mingle at a luxury beach hotel in southern California.

Freedom Partners’ spokesman James Davis said the annual summer “seminar,” as the gatherings are known, gives business and philanthropic leaders the chance “to discuss how to advance a free society to help all Americans, particularly those who are most disadvantaged.”

Charles Koch and his allies maintain that too much government intervention, whether in the form of environmental regulations or stiff prison terms for minor drug offenses, hampers upward mobility.

Heading into the meeting, it does not appear the group’s donors have coalesced around a single contender in a GOP field that now includes 16 candidates.

In an interview earlier this year with USA TODAY, Charles Koch said he was considering entering the primary for the first time to back one or more of five leading figures in the race — Bush, Rubio, Walker, Cruz and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul — and would spend about $300 million of the network's nearly $900 million, two-year budget on electoral politics.

Paul, who has invited to this weekend’s event, has not committed to attending.

Paul told The Washington Post this week during a campaign stop that he is scheduled to be in Iowa instead. “You can’t be everywhere,” he said.

Some members of the network already are making their choices known.

Stanley Hubbard, the billionaire founder of a Minnesota-based broadcasting company, is backing Walker. But he told USA TODAY this week he’s committed to financially supporting the network, particularly the operations of Americans for Prosperity.

“They don’t think of themselves as kingmakers and neither do I,” Hubbard said of the Kochs. “We may agree on a candidate or we may not.”

Doug Deason, a Dallas-based businessman active in the Koch network, recently declared his support for Perry. His father, IT billionaire Darwin Deason, already has donated $5 million to a super PAC advancing Perry's bid.

“The Koch primary is still ongoing,” Novak said, “and it’s turning out to be a marathon, rather than a sprint.”