Pence's moves toward a campaign have been cautious relative to other 2016 prospects. Mike Pence's Koch advantage

If Mike Pence decides to run for president, he could enter the race with a big advantage from a very important place: Koch World.

The Indiana governor is getting a closer look as a potential 2016 presidential candidate, and there’s a growing sense among GOP operatives that he has a leg up over other contenders when it comes to winning the favor of the political network fronted by the billionaire conservative megadonors Charles and David Koch.


A number of Pence’s former staffers from his days in Congress have assumed major roles in the brothers’ corporate and political spheres. And Americans for Prosperity, the Kochs’ top political group, has been holding up Pence’s work in Indiana as emblematic of a conservative reform agenda they’re trying to take nationwide.

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Pence will have an opportunity to make an impression Friday, when he addresses a national summit of Americans for Prosperity activists in Dallas. The AFP event runs through Saturday and will also feature appearances by GOP potential White House hopefuls Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas.

Pence, whose office did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday, has had preliminary discussions about exploring a presidential run. But his moves towards a campaign have been cautious relative to other prospective candidates who are further along in their preparations, and who are courting the Kochs’ deep-pocketed political operation ahead of an election in which billions will be spent trying to influence the outcome.

An alignment between the Kochs and Pence could be of great benefit to both headed into 2016. It dovetails with a concerted move by the Kochs’ allies to mold the brothers’ political vision into a strategy intended to win elections and policy debates, rather than merely wage quixotic campaigns at the margins of wonky debates.

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Pence may just be among the best — or, at least, the more electable — messengers for this new Koch brand in a field of prospective candidates who fit some portions of the brothers’ political bent but not others.

For Pence, Koch World offers entrée and credibility with major donors whose views on social issues skew less conservative than his own, and who don’t know him as well as they know some of the other potential hopefuls. It would be a huge psychic boost if he were perceived to have even unofficial support from a vast network of advocacy groups and companies that spent more than $400 million in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election and is among the most robust forces in politics today.

“Indiana is one big free market, [and] much like Koch Industries, Mike Pence … picks the right fights,” said Kellyanne Conway, a Republican strategist who has polled for Pence and at least one Koch-backed group. “He doesn’t pick a fight for fighting’s sake, but he engages on the front lines when it’s a matter of principle or when something of great consequence is on the line,” said Conway, who also has appeared at Americans for Prosperity events.

A former talk show host who led a crusade to defund Planned Parenthood in the House, Pence has worked to spotlight the fiscal issues that animate the Kochs’ political giving. People close to the brothers say he first earned their network’s admiration during the George W. Bush years, when he opposed what he deemed Big Government policies backed by his own party, including No Child Left Behind and a Medicare expansion, and repeatedly warned that the GOP was veering off course.

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“There’s ideological alignment between those two universes,” said Matt Mackowiak, a Texas GOP consultant who was hired years ago to work as press secretary for former Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) by Marc Short, who was then her chief of staff. Short went on to become Pence’s chief of staff in late 2008 and now runs the Kochs’ political umbrella group Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce. “They wouldn’t have plucked Marc out of that world if they didn’t have confidence in not only Marc, but also Pence, who occupies a unique place in conservative politics right now,” said Mackowiak, who considers Short a mentor and still talks to him.

Corporate spokesmen for the Koch brothers declined to comment for this story. The Kochs and the donors in their network have relationships with a number of prospective 2016 GOP contenders, including, most notably, Paul and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the 2012 vice presidential nominee for the Republicans, has also had a relationship with the Kochs. And David Koch invited New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to one of the brothers’ secretive donor seminars in 2011, introducing him there as “ a true political hero,” and teasing “someday we might see him on a larger stage where, God knows, he is desperately needed.”

Conway stressed that a number of Republicans in the loosely formed 2016 field could be good fits with Koch World, and that Pence is one of many. The Koch brothers also are not always equally enamored of the same candidates. While David Koch urged Christie to run in 2012, Charles Koch is said to have bonded with Rand Paul over a shared leeriness of military intervention abroad — making any discernible clues about the organization’s leanings all the more noteworthy.

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The Kochs and their donors could play a key role in sorting through the GOP field and should expect to be courted heavily during the early jockeying, asserted Minnesota media billionaire Stan Hubbard, who attends the Koch donor summits and contributes to AFP.

“The Kochs, of course they’d be important,” he said. “If I were running, I’d love to have the Kochs’ backing. Wouldn’t you?”

While in Congress, Pence was invited to address at least one of the seminars the Kochs hold twice a year for elite megadonors. And, as governor, he endeared himself even more to Koch allies by successfully pushing for aggressive tax cuts even after initial objections from fellow Republicans in the state Legislature. His willingness to jet to Dallas for only a few hours to talk to AFP activists in a breakout panel about his tax-slashing record in Indiana hints at the clout of the Koch operation.

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“The unique quality Pence would bring to the race is ability to unify the various factions in the party including libertarians, social conservatives, congressional leaders and his former colleagues in Congress, tea party supporters and GOP establishment people,” said Republican strategist Keith Appell, long a Pence advocate. “Everybody likes Mike.”

Pence, Mackowiak said, “is palatable to the establishment, but he’s also credible to the conservatives, and that makes him a potentially very attractive 2016 candidate.”

But in a cycle with a deeply unsettled Republican field, the perception that Pence has an edge in Koch World has already started to take hold.

“The whole Koch operation has become the shadow headquarters of Pence for President,” asserted a strategist with close ties to GOP congressional leadership and to Koch organizations.

The Kochs’ allies reject this characterization, suggesting instead that they’re merely fans of Pence, as they are of other fiscally conservative politicians, because of his support for the type of small-government and free-enterprise policies they see as key to prosperity.

Freedom Partners spokesman James Davis said, “Many governors, including Gov. Pence, have shown strong support for free-market policies that improve peoples’ lives, and we could use more of that type of principled leadership to drive common sense solutions in Washington.”

But there are few other Republican politicians with as many highly placed allies working in key positions in the Kochs’ political network. That’s at least partly because the Koch universe in some ways sees itself as distinct from traditional partisan politics and until recently did much of its hiring from the advocacy or think tank sectors.

Short’s significance in Koch World cannot be overstated. In late 2008, he left Hutchison’s office to become chief of staff to Pence when the congressman was taking control of the House Republican Conference, and Short burnished his reputation on the Hill as a behind-the-scenes powerhouse and a fierce advocate for Pence.

In 2011, after Pence decided to run for Indiana governor, Short was brought on to run a new umbrella group in Koch World, which ultimately became Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce.

It was tasked initially with disseminating the cash raised at the Koch donor seminars among the many disparate groups in the vast Koch political network and — more significantly — building a tighter and more coordinated structure for them. But in the 2014 cycle, it’s become the hub of much Koch political activity, airing ads attacking Democrats and defending Republicans, and even forming a super PAC.

Sources say the increasing centrality of Freedom Partners under Short’s stewardship has made him among the most powerful players in Koch World. And he’s brought in several lieutenants who worked under him in Pence’s leadership office.

Emily Seidel, who was director of operations at the GOP conference under Short, is listed on federal ad buy documents as Freedom Partners’ chief operating officer. She helped lead a panel discussion for donors at the Kochs’ June donor seminar on “utilizing data to target, persuade and get-out-the-vote,” according to a draft agenda. Andy Koenig, who was a policy adviser to the conference, is the budget and spending project director at Freedom Partners.

The Pence influence extends to the Washington office of the brothers’ multinational industrial conglomerate Koch Industries. This summer, it snatched up Matt Lloyd, a longtime Pence spokesman who had gone on to work as chief of staff for fellow Indiana Republican Rep. Marlin Stutzman.

The Koch machine has gotten behind Pence’s governorship, and Pence headlined a June fundraiser for the New York state Republican Party sponsored by David Koch. He and his brother Charles gave Pence $200,000 for his 2012 governor’s race.

And, once he was in office and began pushing a major income tax cut, Americans for Prosperity rallied support for it and privately took credit for helping pass it into law.

“Throughout the four-month legislative session, AFP launched a series of ads at key inflection points to draw public attention to GOP efforts to block Gov. Pence’s tax cut,” read a March briefing memo to major AFP donors, which was obtained by POLITICO. “Each blitz included targeted TV, radio, and web banner ads in key districts, with an emphasis in the Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, and Lafayette markets,” continued the memo, which focused on the group’s work on behalf of Pence in Indiana as a case study of its “transformational Model States Program.”

It included a quote from Pence calling AFP “the nation’s most effective grassroots organization of citizens that works to promote the ideals of limited government and economic freedom.”

AFP president Tim Phillips this month returned the favor during an episode of C-SPAN’s Newsmakers, when he called Pence “one of our favorite governors” and included him among a crop of prospective 2016 GOP presidential candidates that he assessed as “every bit as good as the 1980 class that had Reagan and Bush and Connally and Crane.”

In an interview, Phillips praised Pence but brushed aside the suggestion that the confluence of Pence, his allies and the Koch network gave the Indiana governor any kind of leg up in 2016.

“Gov. Pence has a sterling record in Congress, where he was genuinely a free market champion during some really tough years, and as governor, where he passed one of the truly historic tax cuts for the state of Indiana,” Phillips said. “At the same time, we hold him accountable when we disagree with him. We disagree with his hybrid Medicaid expansion. And we’ve made that clear both within the state to our activist base and to the governor.”