By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
Republicans fed up with Donald Trump are using Political Action Committees (PACs) to campaign against the re-election of the United States president, accusing him of divisiveness and incompetence in the face of national crises.
By law, a PAC or Super PAC must not communicate with a political party or raise funds for it. But it can raise tons of dollars of its own war chest to support a candidate or party, through campaigns to influence voters up and down the ballot.
Trump has garnered for himself a plethora of grouses with, among others, his incendiary comments, racist views, a tanking economy, high unemployment, failing to deal with Russia for paying the Taliban to kill American troops in Afghanistan.
He is also blamed for the spread of coronavirus, and still refusing to do nothing about it even as the pandemic now kills 1,000 Americans a day – with a total 132,672 deaths and 3,000,961 cases, the highest in the world in both categories.
Congressional Democrats complain that the Trump administration is sitting on nearly $14 billion allocated to help state and local governments improve coronavirus testing and contact tracing.
In a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Senate Health Committee ranking member Patty Murray (D-Wash.) asked the administration to “immediately” distribute the funding, as reported by TheHill.com
But Trump has downplayed the need for testing, and pulled federal funding for testing locations, in order to reduce the number of cases and boost his re-election chances.
Public reaction shows in a slump in Trump’s approval rating at 40 per cent, Joe Biden the Democratic presidential candidate leading him by 10 points nationally, and with nearly the same margin in most swing states.
The latest prominent Republican anti-Trump organisation, called ‘43 Alumni for Biden’, emerged last week with aims to rally alumni of George W. Bush’s administration to support Biden.
The Guardian (UK) reports that the new Super PAC was co-founded by Kristopher Purcell, a former Bush administration official; John Farner, who worked in the commerce department during the Bush administration; and Karen Kirksey, another longtime Republican operative.
Kirksey is the Super PAC’s director.
“We’re truly a grassroots organisation. Our goal is to do whatever we can to elect Joe Biden as president,” Farner told The Guardian.
Trump years of chaos
“After seeing three and a half years of chaos and incompetence and division, a lot of people have just been pushed to say, ‘We have got to do something else,” Purcell said.
“We may not be fully on board with the Democratic agenda, but this is a one-issue election. ‘Are you for Donald Trump, or are you for America.’”
43 Alumni for Biden is new compared with two other larger anti-Trump Republican groups.
The best-known is the Lincoln Project, a PAC founded in 2019 by Republican strategists who have long been critical of Trump.
The Lincoln Project has made a name for itself for its creative anti-Trump ads. It has also brought on veteran Republican strategists like Stu Stevens, a top adviser for now-Utah senator Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.
George Conway, the husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, is also a co-founder of the group.
Then there is Republican Voters Against Trump, a group led by Bill Kristol, a well-known neoconservative and former chief of staff to then vice-president Dan Quayle, and Republican consultants Sarah Longwell and Tim Miller.
That group is focused on organising anti-Trump Republicans.
“Lincoln is doing two things really well. One is narrative-setting, and just beating Trump over the head with hard-hitting attacks,” Miller said.
“And they’re also working on Senate races, which we’re not doing. I think that, frankly, they’re bringing the sledgehammer and working on Senate races, and we are elevating these peer voices in a way to persuade voters.”
A set of Republican national security officials has also emerged in opposition to Trump.
That group has not given itself a name yet, and includes the former Bush homeland security adviser Ken Wainstein, and John Bellinger III, who served in the state department.
The group is looking to rally national security officials away from Trump – either by supporting Biden or writing in someone else.
Even with all the organising by these groups, there is still the persistent fact that swaths of former Republican officials and operatives methodically endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016, and since then Trump has enjoyed sky-high approval ratings among the Republican party electorate, according to The Guardian.
But, it adds, these groups say that was a result of Americans having not yet experienced a Trump presidency. They also say that the reason elected officials are not coming out to support Biden is because they are worried about the blowback.
Colleen Graffy, part of the national security group of Republicans opposing Trump, said the reason some elected Republican officials are not coming out to oppose Trump publicly is because they’re scared.
“They’re worried they’re going to be primaried,” Graffy said. “They’re worried they’re going to be tweeted, if that can be a weaponized verb.”
Asked what his big fear is now, Farner said it’s that Republicans won’t come out to vote at all.
“My fear is that they will not come out and vote. And we’re here to say that it’s OK. We’re putting ourselves out here too,” Farner said. “It’s OK.”
Undistributed coronavirus fund
TheHill.com reports that Congress in April provided more than $25 billion to increase testing and contact tracing capacity, as well as $2 billion to provide free COVID-19 testing for the uninsured by paying providers’ claims for tests and other services associated with getting a test, like an office or emergency room visit.
But according to Schumer and Murray, the administration has no plans for how to distribute more than $8 billion out of the $25 billion, leaving communities without needed resources.
“The United States is at a critical juncture in its fight against COVID-19, and now is the time for an aggressive and fast response.
“This administration will put our country at grave risk if it tries to declare an early victory, leave lifesaving work undone, and leave resources our communities desperately need sitting untouched,” the lawmakers wrote.
They said the administration should disburse the $8 billion “immediately,” with an emphasis on addressing contact tracing and collecting data on COVID-19 racial and ethnic disparities.
Leading public health groups say state and local governments need $7.6 billion to quickly scale up contact tracing, including $4.8 billion to hire at least 100,000 contact tracers.
Still other experts believe the country needs closer to 300,000 contact tracers.
Like much of the federal response to the pandemic, states have been left to establish their own contact tracing metrics, and many are even lagging behind the metrics they set for themselves.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not released a national contact tracing strategy to help localities evaluate their efforts and has not awarded nearly $4 billion for surveillance and contact tracing at the state and local levels and tribal territories, the Democrats said.
The administration has also distributed very little of the $2 billion meant to pay for the costs of testing.
“We call on you to immediately disburse the remainder of the $25 billion in funds to ramp up testing and contact tracing capacity, as well as to make sure providers are aware of and able to easily access the $2 billion that Congress appropriated to provide testing for the uninsured,” Schumer and Murray said.
Coronavirus changes election dynamics
The Guardian recalls that just two months ago, Trump was warning against “bailouts” for Democratic-run states that were grappling with the financial fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.
“It’s not fair to the Republicans because all the states that need help – they’re run by Democrats in every case,” Trump said at the time, as hard-hit states such as New York and California sought federal financial relief from the impact of the virus.
Two months later, the U.S. map of new coronavirus outbreaks looks entirely different.
States that reopened quickly, as Trump advised, are now seeing a surge in cases and rising hospitalisations and that is impacting the Republican heartland.
States that Trump won in 2016 account for about 75 per cent of the new cases, according to the Associated Press.
A few of those are key swing states that Trump will almost certainly need to win again to secure a second term.
And as the devastation of the pandemic spreads across the country, other states long considered to be reliably Republican also appear increasingly up for grabs.
Trump Vs Biden in the polls
Recent polls have shown Trump trailing Biden in battleground states like Florida and Arizona.
A set of Fox News polls taken late last month also found Trump and Biden virtually tied in Texas and Georgia, two states that have long been considered Republican strongholds.
All four states have reported record-high levels of new coronavirus cases in the past two weeks.
Trump has dismissed his disappointing polling numbers as “fake”, but his re-election campaign is clearly aware of his growing unpopularity as he avoids confronting the latest surge in new cases.
The Trump campaign placed its first television ads in Georgia late last month, and several voter registration events were held in Texas over the Fourth of July holiday weekend.
“The pandemic really has clarified and highlighted both Republican failures in leadership and the need for so many of the different policy reforms that Democrats have been fighting for years,” said Royce Brooks, the executive director of Annie’s List, which works to elect progressive women in the state.
“Texas is certainly up for grabs,” Royce adds.
Most election experts say Trump still has the advantage in Texas, which he won by nine points in 2016, but his sinking popularity could help down-ballot Democrats secure historic victories in the state.
“We may or may not see Texas deliver a statewide win for the Democratic Senate candidate or for the presidential race, but we are absolutely on track to flip the statehouse to Democratic control in November,” Royce told The Guardian.
The situation is even worse for down-ballot Republicans in traditional swing states like Florida, where Trump has been losing ground to Biden.
A Fox News poll taken late last month showed Biden leading by nine points in Florida, up from a three-point advantage in April.
“We can tell from our polling and we can tell just anecdotally that independents are being turned off, so that is a growing concern,” said Alex Patton, a Republican strategist based in Gainesville, Florida. “Down-ballot, people are suffering a lot.”
Those hurdles could have profound implications for the U.S. Senate, as Democrats fight to regain control of the chamber. Texas, Georgia and Arizona are all holding Senate races this fall, and Trump’s controversial comments about the coronavirus pandemic have put Republican senators in difficult positions as they prepare for their November elections.
An Arizona poll taken last month showed Biden ahead by seven points, even though Democrats have only won the state once since 1952.