PALM BEACH, Fla. — The Club for Growth couldn’t find a presidential candidate to love in 2008 and 2012. But 2016 may be different.

For the first time since forming in 1999, the right’s leading tax- and budget-cutting activist group could marshal their significant supply-sider cred and donor network behind a White House hopeful — if only it can pick a candidate.


In a sign of how the GOP has moved rightward in the post-George W. Bush era, even some of the establishment candidates line up relatively well with the Club, which became well known for bucking entrenched party interests and working to defeat incumbent Republicans.

Not every 2016 hopeful fits the group’s mold. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is a perennial target, and the group could wind up opposing someone like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie or former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum.

But most of the potential candidates see eye to eye with the Club on key issues like eliminating the Export-Import Bank, killing ethanol subsidies and continuing the ban on earmarks. Half a dozen of them — including two the Club helped propel into office in the first place, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio — traveled to The Breakers resort here this weekend to make their pitches to 200 of the group’s biggest donors.

“At this point, we’ll focus on bringing economic issues front and center,” Club for Growth president David McIntosh, a former Indiana congressman, said in an interview. “We’ll see how the race develops. To be honest, we’re ready to think about [an endorsement].”

Members of the group do not have one particular favorite at this stage. Frayda Levin, a big donor from New Jersey who sits on the Club’s board, supports Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, whom the Club backed after his primary win in 2010. McIntosh is personally close with Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, a fellow Hoosier who is keeping the door open to jumping into the presidential race in May. The group’s board also includes plugged-in donors like private-equity moguls Jackson Stephens Jr. and John Childs, as well as real estate investor Howie Rich.

But while the desire to play a greater role in presidential politics may be a sign of growing ambition for the Club, it’s not clear that its tactics can translate to a presidential race, where there’s plenty of other money sloshing around.

A lack of consensus may prevent the organization from coalescing behind anyone, staying focused instead on down-ballot races. But also under discussion during closed strategy sessions the past three days is the idea that the group could give its seal of support to multiple candidates. Or they could just run attack ads against the people they don’t like. They might also wait until the field has winnowed down to two or three finalists before throwing their full backing behind whoever they believe is most supportive of their free-market agenda.

“We’ve got maybe an embarrassment of riches here in that we’ve never been able to support somebody before, and now we may get overwhelmed with people we think are worthy of support,” said Chris Chocola, who just stepped down as the group’s president after five years in the job. “It will eventually get narrowed down to a few, and we’ll make a decision then. But since I’ve been around, we’ve always been searching for the one.”

A new role

The Club spent millions directly in 2014, but a big part of its value is as a bundler. They vet and validate congressional candidates for their members, who then donate to them directly. Last year, they gave the seal of approval to fewer candidates than in the past, eschewing many primary challengers who lined up with them ideologically but that they concluded could not win. Group leaders said they are still formulating spending goals for the next two years.

McIntosh said a top priority is reelecting the six incumbent senators that they backed in 2010 who are up in 2016 — a departure from election cycles past, when the group attacked incumbents instead of boosting them. The Club already plans to spend money to help Mike Lee win the GOP convention in Utah, where he toppled incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett five years ago and could now face a challenge from a more moderate Republican, as well as Pat Toomey, the former president of the Club who is seeking a second term in Pennsylvania.

“We’ve come of age,” said McIntosh.

Club officials are still seeking new pick-up opportunities. They are currently interviewing candidates in the special election to replace Mississippi Rep. Alan Nunnelee, who died last month of a brain tumor.

Researchers for the Club, who usually vet congressional candidates, are currently putting together detailed white papers on each of the presidential candidates, pulling together all the publicly available information about their record on fiscal issues. The Paul version will be rolled out soon, with a procession of others to follow.

The group ran attack ads against Huckabee when he got traction in the 2008 primaries, angry about what they saw as his fiscally liberal record in the Arkansas governor’s mansion. Club officials still love to trash Huckabee as “Tax Hike Mike” and would be happy to run more attack ads if necessary, but they dismiss his possible 2016 bid as an afterthought.

Christie’s economic record does not look good at first blush in the eyes of this crowd, but they want to examine it closer to ascertain for how much of New Jersey’s fiscal ills the governor is to blame.

When Santorum was in the Senate, rising to number three in GOP leadership, Club insiders remember him as an unapologetic earmarker. But his greatest sin was backing then-Republican Arlen Specter over Toomey in the 2004 Republican Senate primary, in which Toomey fell just short.

‘The owners’ meeting’

This weekend’s three-day Club confab coincided with the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Md., which drew about 11,000 grassroots activist types, many of them college students. The Club meeting was more intimate, with donors getting a chance to engage, often directly, with the candidates. In addition to the speeches, there were receptions that ran late into the night and private sit-downs in hotel suites all day long.

“CPAC was kind of the football game, with the fans coming out and cheering for their various teams,” Fox News correspondent John Roberts said during a live shot from the hotel on Saturday. “This is more like the owners’ meeting.”

Paul, who won the CPAC straw poll, spoke at last year’s Club retreat but had a scheduling conflict that prevented him from attending this time. Cruz was meeting with donors here when news broke that he finished third in the straw poll behind Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who addressed the group over breakfast Saturday.

In the post-Citizens United environment, the landscape is now littered with outside groups playing similar roles to the one the Club pioneered 15 years ago. The Koch brothers network, which plans to spend a billion dollars in the 2016 elections, has its own constellation of outside entities and donor conferences.

Not too long ago, the Club was seen by many as being on the far right of the party. But some younger groups now fault it for being too cautious. After endorsing some weak candidates in 2010 and 2012, they chalk this up to the wisdom that comes from experience.

Last year, the Club refused to support several primary challengers against incumbent Republicans who either did not pass their arduous vetting process or who they concluded had no realistic path to victory, including Matt Bevin (running against now-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell) and Milton Wolf (who took on Kansas’ Pat Roberts).

The Club went all-in for Chris McDaniel in the Mississippi GOP primary, where he was taking on the pro-earmark Sen. Thad Cochran. The ensuing runoff, which Cochran won narrowly, certainly pitted the Club against the party establishment. But the group also found itself on the same page as the National Republican Senatorial Committee in other cases during 2014, including backing two successful Senate candidates, one of whom faced a competitive primary: Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan. The Club helped propel conservative college president Ben Sasse to victory in Nebraska’s open Senate primary.

Kissing the ring

Each of six potential candidates who spoke this weekend pledged to eliminate the Export-Import Bank, a relatively small program but one that carries incredible symbolic significance for Club members. They see its loans to U.S. businesses as corporate welfare of the worst kind. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has kept Republicans from killing the program, but it is set to expire without congressional reauthorization.

“This is a room of courageous conservatives,” said Cruz. “I don’t think there’s any group in this nation making a bigger difference right now than the Club for Growth. I do know for a fact that I would not be in the United States Senate if it were not for the Club for Growth.”

Pence, who succeed Club president McIntosh in Congress in 2000, noted that he was one of a handful of candidates to receive the Club’s first round of endorsements that year, along with now Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake.

“Thank you for supporting the Republican wing of the Republican Party over this decade and a half,” Pence said, using a conservative variation of the late Paul Wellstone’s old line about progressives. “Feel good about that because we’re winning.”

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal also thanked the group for representing “the Republican wing of the Republican Party.” He blamed GOP moderates in his state legislature for killing his plan to get rid of the income tax last year.

“Instead of abandoning supply-side economics, why don’t we actually try to implement them for once?” Jindal asked in his Saturday speech to the group. “We’ve never seen them actually shrink the size of government or actually reduce spending.”

Jeb Bush, whose father famously dismissed Reagan’s tax plans — then novel, now GOP orthodoxy — as “voodoo economics” in the 1980 primaries, declared during his Thursday dinner speech that, “Supply side initiatives have been successful in the past.”

“You’re one of the reasons, by the way, we don’t have an income tax in our state,” Bush told the Club crowd.

Walker looked for common ground with the group. “I just saw my friend Arthur Laffer the other day,” he said, referring to the famous supply-sider. “I don’t think there’s enough talk about growth.”

Rubio recalled how few people thought he had any chance to win when the Club got behind his Senate primary challenge to then-sitting Gov. Charlie Crist in 2009. Crist’s approval rating was 70 percent when Rubio jumped in, and the senator joked that everyone thought he had “hypnotic-like power … the kind of guy who takes your watch off of you.”

“I’ll tell you unequivocally,” said Rubio. “There is no way I would have won that race — in fact, there’s no way I could have stayed in that race — if it hadn’t been for the Club for Growth’s support.”