Ralph Reed's group is one of several involved in the planning. Social conservatives' money plans

On a recent snowy day in the Washington suburb of Tysons Corner in Northern Virginia, some of the religious right’s wealthiest backers and top operatives gathered at the Ritz-Carlton to plot their entry into the conservative civil war.

Their plan: take a page out of the playbooks of Karl Rove and the Koch brothers by raising millions of dollars, coordinating their political spending and assiduously courting megadonors.


Plans in the works range from aggressive super PAC spending in primaries against Republicans deemed squishy on social issues, to holding a donor conference in Normandy, France, tied to the 70th anniversary of the D-Day invasion.

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It’s all geared toward elevating the place of social issues like abortion and gay marriage in conservative politics. They’ve been largely relegated to the sidelines as the business wing of the GOP establishment wages a bitter and expensive struggle against the tea party for the soul of the Republican Party. The focus has been on fiscal issues such as Obamacare and the budget, while both sides have steered away from social issues they deem too divisive.

The Republican National Committee even issued a post-2012 autopsy report declaring: “When it comes to social issues, the Party must in fact and deed be inclusive and welcoming,” lest it turn off young voters and women.

That analysis reflects the perspective of the Republican megadonor class, but not the GOP’s base, argued Frank Cannon, who participated in the Ritz summit and runs an outfit called American Principles Project.

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“The Manhattan and California zip codes where large numbers of these donors come from don’t behave politically or have the same views as Western Ohio,” Cannon said in an interview. “So there is a distortion of the political views by the donor class and by the consultant class.”

The Ritz summit was intended to help change that. It was organized by the Conservative Action Project, an initiative funded by the secretive Council on National Policy and chaired by former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese that brings together conservative leaders and donors to try to shape the movement.

The event was by invitation only and was closed to reporters. But POLITICO reviewed an agenda and guest list and staked out an adjacent lobby where participants held informal breakout meetings and munched on a lunch spread featuring soups, salads, and roast turkey sliders with brie, arugula, vine-ripened tomatoes and spicy mustard on pretzel roll buns.

The recent backlash against the tea party in Congress and the public could provide an opening for religious conservative leaders. They believe that, with a few tactical adjustments, they can capitalize on donor dissatisfaction with establishment outfits like Rove’s Crossroads and fiscally conservative operations like the one connected to the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers. Between them, the Rove and Koch networks combined to raise an unprecedented $750 million for their 2012 efforts.

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Socially conservative groups, meanwhile, mostly missed the boat on the explosion in unlimited outside group spending in the post- Citizens United world.

The roughly 25 socially conservative groups represented at the Ritz — including Cannon’s, as well as Gary Bauer’s American Values outfit, the James Dobson-founded Focus on the Family, Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, Americans United for Life, the Family Research Council and the National Organization for Marriage — combined to pull in at least $280 million in 2011 and 2012, according to publicly available tax and campaign filings. While that’s hardly chump change, a majority of it went to groups focused on providing services and “issue education” to like-minded conservatives — including Focus on the Family, which raised $166 million — rather than to more overtly political activities.

“There are enough people out there that are pro-life and pro-family that have the resources to fund political efforts on those issues, and for a variety of reasons they just haven’t stepped up and so we have to do a better job of getting them to step up,” said Bauer, who’s been working with Cannon and others to increase coordination among socially conservative groups. Their leaders, according to Bauer, are increasingly concluding “that we’ve been behind the curve and that we need to do a better job of strategic fundraising and working together in order to get more traction on these issues.”

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That was the subject of an informal strategy session on the sidelines of the Ritz summit including Bauer, South Dakota businessman Bob Fischer, Tennessee donor Joe Gregory, operative Pam Pryor, fundraiser Richard Norman and others. Among the topics discussed was coaxing support from megadonors aligned with the Koch and Rove networks, partly by highlighting the paltry 2012 rate of return of the groups in those networks.

Other ideas included the retreats, which are in some ways patterned off the twice-a-year seminars organized by the Kochs, as well as identifying a handful of key 2014 races where they could have a major impact, which would allow them to raise more in 2016 to back a socially conservative presidential candidate to take on presumed Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

The side session was convened by Fischer, who has been meeting with donors and operatives around Washington pitching planned retreats at the Reagan Ranch in California and in Normandy. Fischer has spoken with several high-ranking retired military officers, including an Army general, about helping to draft a campaign spending strategy that borrows from military tactics, according to sources familiar with the plan, which is still in its formative stages.

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Fischer referred questions about his effort to Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, who did not respond to POLITICO’s inquiry. But Fischer in his private conversations has singled out the possibility of a long-shot Perkins 2014 Senate candidacy in Louisiana as just the sort of campaign that the new effort could support.

A Perkins campaign would make an interesting test case, since he would be pitted against Rep. Bill Cassidy, who has been singled out as a rising star by Rove’s Crossroads groups and is the GOP establishment’s choice to take on Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu.

Rove has counseled Republicans to approach cultural issues cautiously, and he attributed social conservative Ken Cuccinelli’s recent loss in the Virginia governors’ race partly to the “ polarizing language and an acerbic tone” he used in addressing those issues. Rove has faced backlash himself from social conservatives for a Crossroads initiative intended to defeat fringe candidates in GOP primaries, and for suggesting that a Republican who favors gay marriage could win the party’s 2016 presidential nomination.

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And, while there was no love lost for Rove among the crew gathered at the Ritz, there were representatives from several fiscally conservative groups that have at times worked to minimize social issues. Yet, there was ample talk of finding common ground in an effort to avert damaging intraparty fighting headed into November. “Certainly, I would think anybody who is trying to crush any element of the Republican coalition is wrong,” Meese said in a brief interview outside the ballroom hosting the summit.

Attendees included Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots, and operatives from various groups in the Kochs’ fiscally conservative network, including the Themis voter data project, and the nonprofits 60 Plus Association, American Commitment and Americans for Limited Government.

Jim DeMint and Arthur Brooks — presidents of The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, respectively — sat on a panel entitled “Why conservative leaders and organizations must unite and work together to achieve shared goals,” while megadonor Todd Ricketts called for an end to big money conservative infighting between the tea party and the establishment.

“We can fight all we want inside the house, but once we leave the house, we’re family, and we have to stick together,” Ricketts said, quoting his mother, according to an attendee.

Ricketts, whose Ending Spending super PAC spent more than $175,000 boosting Cuccinelli’s failed gubernatorial bid, also bemoaned the lack of donor support for the socially conservative former attorney general.

Republican campaigns have long relied on social conservatives for grass-roots muscle in getting out the vote, but the GOP would benefit if their issues were highlighted more broadly, argued Cannon. He said he made a similar case during a panel at the Ritz called “Recapturing a Fusionist Conservative Movement.” And his 501(c)(4) operation, American Principles In Action, produced an entire white paper in October refuting the assertion in the RNC’s so-called autopsy report that the party “must change our tone — especially on certain social issues that are turning off young voters” and women.

American Principles In Action’s paper, issued in October, argued that such a tactic “would likely consign the GOP to a permanent minority status,” whereas emphasizing social issues will help rally the base and attract coveted demographics with which the GOP has struggled, including Hispanics and women.

”Social conservatives need to take things into their own hands and can’t rely on the establishment to make that case to donors or voters,” said Cannon, who managed Bauer’s long-shot 2000 presidential campaign. “We need to alert donors who care about social issues that, without financial support behind those issues themselves, you have a consulting class of the party that’s decided that those issues need to be jettisoned.”

His group this year started a super PAC, American Principles Fund, that spent $173,000 in October on ads attacking New Jersey Democratic Senate candidate Cory Booker as a “ pro-abortion extremist” and Liz Cheney as a gay rights supporter.

The super PAC’s biggest disclosed donor, a hedge funder named Fieler, who gave $54,000 when it first started, is actively recruiting other wealthy donors by arguing that groups like Crossroads and the pro-Romney Restore Our Future super PAC dropped the ball in 2012 by shying away from social issues.

“What we’re discovering and what the election of 2012 helped reveal is that this very narrow security and prosperity message doesn’t produce a winning coalition, certainly at a national level,” said Fieler, who actually donated $50,000 to Restore Our Future last year and is an emerging mid-tier megadonor.

He told POLITICO there’s a chance to reorder the conservative movement — and American politics as a whole — by revealing Democrats to be “their own worst enemy” on social issues like abortion and gay marriage.

“The rigidity and extremism they have around some of these issues is so out of step with the American electorate that there is enormous opportunity for Republicans. We have to pick some spots and win some elections and frame the debate in a way that’s favorable to us,” he said, predicting that a win or two in 2014 in purple states would yield big things in 2016. “Nothing breeds success like success. If we can show that integrated conservatism which embraces a middle class and a resonant economic message as well as a pro-family socially conservative message is the winning formula, then I think there will be a lot of money for that.”

American Principles works with the anti-abortion rights heavyweight Susan B. Anthony List and Bauer’s groups, said Cannon, “but nothing exists on the scale on the social issues side of the Koch operation or the Crossroads operation.”

Increasing coordination will be key to executing the social conservative resurgence in the big money era, the donor Gregory said in an interview at the Ritz after the sideline meeting.

“There are numerous groups that have their donor base, and they tend to operate monolithically and protect what they’ve got,” said Gregory, who made his fortune at the helm of a pharmaceutical company. “But I think there is an increased sense of the need to work together more that hasn’t existed in the past.”