The America Rising committee monitors everything the candidates do, hoping the large field will work in Trump’s favor

Democrats are more than a year away from selecting their presidential nominee. Nonetheless, Republicans are already taking aim at the leading contenders.

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Even as the field swells to nearly two dozen, the other party is monitoring public appearances, requesting court records and dissecting past utterances. This is not an effort that involves dirty tricks or elaborate snooping. Instead, it involves a lot of young people watching a lot of C-Span.

Mike Czin, a Democratic operative who worked on Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, said opposition research was “one of the most misunderstood things on campaigns”.

“It’s publicly available information that’s just well collated and tells a story about an opponent,” he said, citing as an example stories about Obama’s 2012 opponent, Mitt Romney, remodeling his office or installing a car elevator at one of his homes.

This, he said, was not “digging through garbage cans and dumpsters”.

The locus of the Republican effort to define the Democratic field in advance of 2020 is America Rising, a political action committee that has become a clearinghouse for GOP opposition research.

Despite Democrats' best efforts to present a sanitized narrative, our team is exposing their radical positions Steve Guest, RNC

Sarah Dolan, its executive director, told the Guardian the group’s goal was to “hold Democrats accountable”. America Rising already has a war room team monitoring everything Democratic candidates do on social media, full-time trackers in early states following candidates from event to event, and an aggressive field research effort using Freedom Of Information Act (Foia) requests and primary documents.

Dolan said her group would not play favorites. Instead, she said: “Our mantra this cycle is really just to cause chaos, especially with how big the field is.”

In a change from past election cycles, she said, criticisms of Democratic candidates are not just coming from the right, painting candidates as out of touch with moderate voters. From the left come attempts to paint senators, representatives or governors as out of touch with the primary electorate.

Dolan pointed to a recent success: a New York Times article partially prompted by the group’s use of a Foia request to discover that the former vice-president Joe Biden charged $200,000 for a single private speech.

In 2016, America Rising used similar discoveries to launch attacks on Hillary Clinton. Criticisms of the former secretary of state’s paid speeches became staples not just of Republican rhetoric but of attacks from her chief rival in the Democratic primary, the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.

In 2019, such work is being done in conjunction with the Republican National Committee. Steve Guest, a spokesman, focused on the rise of progressive policies and politicians touting them when he told the Guardian: “What used to be extreme ideas on the fringe of the Democrat party just a few years ago have now become mainstream orthodoxy of the 2020 Democrat candidates.

“Despite their best efforts to present a sanitized narrative, our team is exposing their radical positions so voters know that the rhetoric does not match the reality.”

Another RNC staffer said the Democrats’ drift left had made their job easier. The aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that when a candidate says something controversial, the RNC “blasts it out, reporters ask other candidates about it and usually they all agree”. The resulting coverage, said the aide, shows voters “just how far left” the Democrats are moving.

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Whoever emerges as the Democratic nominee will probably have been wounded not just by Republicans but also by attacks from competitors in the primary. In past campaigns, some of the most bruising hits have come from intra-party foes.

In the 2012 Republican primary, for example, Romney was first savaged over his business record at Bain Capital by Newt Gingrich and groups allied with the former House speaker. Such attacks then became a mainstay of Obama’s general election campaign.

Survive the primary, of course, and the Democratic nominee will have to face off against Trump. Czin said the president was “an oppo guy’s dream in a lot of ways”, but one who has somehow still proved invulnerable.

“He has a paper trail that’s a mile long, been involved in hundreds of lawsuits, there’s really so much to show how irresponsible and unqualified,” Czin said.

And yet, Trump “proved to be Teflon”.