The New York Times over the weekend published an in-depth report on the coordinated campaign that delivered unprecedented control to Republicans in state governments around the country in 2010. Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard was one of the focuses of the report, which touted the Alabama Republican Party’s success during Hubbard’s tenure as state party chairman.
By his third year as chairman of the Alabama Republican organization, Mike Hubbard believed his party had just about everything it needed to win control of the State Legislature.
He had a plan: an 88-page playbook for the 2010 campaign, with detailed, district-by-district budgets and precise voter turnout targets. He had candidates: doctors, lawyers and small-business owners, most of them political novices recruited with an eye toward the anti-establishment fervor roiling the country.
What Mr. Hubbard did not have was enough money. Alabama law barred corporations, deep-pocketed natural allies for state Republicans, from giving more than $500 to candidates and parties — a limit that did not apply to the state’s unions.
So began a nationwide quest for cash that would take Mr. Hubbard, plan in hand, to the Republican Parties in states like Florida and Ohio, to a wealthy Texan who was one of the country’s biggest Republican givers and to a Washington organization that would provide checks from dozens of out-of-state corporations, among them Exxon Mobil, Google, Facebook and Altria.
Exploiting a loophole in the state law and a network of political action committees in Alabama and Washington, Mr. Hubbard shuffled hundreds of thousands of out-of-state dollars into the Republican organization in Alabama, vastly outraising the state Democratic Party. On Election Day, Republicans won majorities in both the State Senate and House of Representatives for the first time since Reconstruction — and Alabama joined the rapidly growing fraternity of states where government is controlled by a single political party, now the largest it has been in more than half a century.
Alabama’s transformation was the product, in part, of a sophisticated political apparatus designed to channel political money from around the country into states where conditions were ripe for Republican takeover. In 2010, the effort achieved striking success, moving a dozen states to sole Republican control, including presidential swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania.
In the wake of the 2010 elections, twenty-three states were solely controlled by Republicans, compared to 13 solely controlled by Democrats. This development would prove to be particularly important because the Party in power of each state’s legislature was in charge of drawing the new congressional district lines after the 2010 census. The Times believes Republicans’ success in 2010 potentially ensured “their party’s control of the United States House of Representatives for the rest of the decade.”
In early 2010, a little-known group called the Republican State Leadership Committee hatched a plan to topple Democratic majorities in state legislatures around the country. They brought in Republican heavyweight Ed Gillespie to head up their fundraising efforts. They didn’t want to just takeover a few state houses, they wanted to secure Republican control of the redistricting process in numerous states. They hoped their efforts would build a “firewall” in the U.S. House of Representatives thanks to favorably drawn district lines. They ultimately raised $30 million over two years and laid siege to Democrat lawmakers in 19 states in a carefully planned attack coordinated alongside the Republican Governors Association.
One of the most criticized parts of the RSLC’s program was that it shielded the original sources of the funds. While public disclosures showed where SELC’s money was coming from, it was difficult to tell where the money was being funneled to. In other words, if an organization who could be toxic to a Republican candidate donated to the RSLC, the RSLC could then donate that money to candidates without them having to worry about the potential political backlash.
The New York Times explains:
The leadership committee’s nationwide base of donors lent candidates distance from the source of the money benefiting them, and allowed the committee to maneuver around varying rules that apply to campaign spending in different states. Instead of spending money where it was raised, the Republican State Leadership Committee could allocate checks to affiliates in other states. Other checks could be pooled into a central fund in Washington and then distributed in large chunks to state Republican Parties, to candidates or to campaigns by independent groups.
Alabama was an obvious target. Long after its voters had become overwhelmingly Republican, Alabama retained Democratic majorities in the Legislature. Mr. Hubbard, himself a state representative, and officials at the leadership committee believed just one well-organized push would send the Democrats into permanent minority status.
Yet state law prohibited corporations from giving more than $500. And other potential donors were unwilling to give to the party at all, in case the takeover effort failed. “There were a lot of people and companies who didn’t want to give to us directly because they feared the Democrats,” Mr. Hubbard said.
Many of those donors were willing, however, to give to a Republican group in Washington. After meeting with leadership committee officials, Mr. Hubbard, along with his finance chairman, State Senator Del Marsh, began raising money for the group. If they did well enough, Mr. Hubbard believed, the leadership committee would make a similar investment in Alabama.
“We had to become players for them,” said Mr. Hubbard. “Their job is to flip legislatures, and we wanted them to help us flip Alabama.”
During the 2010 cycle, the leadership committee took in close to a million dollars from Alabama donors. And over the same period, the group directed about $1.4 million into an Alabama-registered political action committee, all of it from out-of-state corporations. Because the state allowed unlimited transfers between political action committees and parties — a loophole long exploited by Democrats and Republicans alike — the leadership committee could shuffle all of that money to the state party and a pair of committees controlled by Mr. Hubbard and his team.
The arrangement also offered donors a way to help Mr. Hubbard without their checks showing up on the Alabama party’s public filings. One such supporter was the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, which operates several large casinos on tribal land in Alabama.
The tribe was wary of the rapid expansion of non-Indian gambling in the state, particularly the proliferation of small bingo parlors competing with their resort casinos, and stood to benefit if antigambling Republicans took control of the Legislature. But precisely because they opposed gambling, few Republican state lawmakers or candidates would accept the tribe’s contributions.
After meeting with Mr. Marsh and other Republicans, said Robert R. McGhee, director of government affairs for the tribe, the tribe chose a different approach: It donated $350,000 to the leadership committee. When the contributions were later disclosed, critics accused Mr. Hubbard of using the Washington group to launder the money by exchanging it with other contributions.
A spokesman for the leadership committee said that the Poarch Creek contributions had been allocated to the group’s administrative account, to pay for overhead and other expenses, and that the staff members involved in arranging the checks no longer worked at the organization. Mr. Hubbard said there had been no agreement to directly swap cash.
“The conversation was, ‘I’ve got some people in Alabama who are very interested in giving money to help elect Republicans to state legislatures, and I would hope that if we help raise money for you, you will help us win in Alabama,’ ” Mr. Hubbard said.
The plan paid off big time. Republicans in Alabama now boast supermajorities in both houses of the legislature. In total, the larger nationwide effort led to Republicans controlling 29 governorships, up from 23. They also now control 25 legislatures, up from 14, including important swing states like North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
But it hasn’t been without scrutiny. The New York Times noted that the Alabama Republican Party’s records have since then been subpoenaed by Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange, “though the scope of his office’s inquiry is unclear, and Mr. Hubbard has denied any wrongdoing.”
“But the impact of Republican governance in Alabama has been undeniable,” The Times concluded. “In the party’s first year in control, the Legislature passed — and the governor signed — more than 30 major pieces of legislation, including new tax breaks for businesses, ethics overhauls and restrictions on abortion and union organizing.
And Hubbard’s fundraising prowess continues to play a major role in Alabama politics. He raised an eye-popping $250,000 at a single fundraiser held ahead of the legislature’s 2014 session last week.
Follow Cliff on Twitter @Cliff_Sims
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