Last week, Marc Short, who had played a key role in the politically active billionaire Koch brothers’ organization Freedom Partners, moved to a senior role in Republican Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential primary campaign. The New York Times reported that political advisers to the Koch brothers have been briefing people that Donald Trump is completely unacceptable as the GOP nominee. But behind the question of which candidate the Koch brothers prefer lies a more complicated story about the transformation of the Republican Party.
Alex Hertel-Fernandez, an incoming assistant professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University, and Theda Skocpol, the Victor S. Thomas professor of government and sociology at Harvard University, have been researching how Koch brothers-funded organizations have been changing the Republican Party in less immediately visible ways (here’s their paper). I interviewed them via email about their work (the interview has been lightly edited).
Henry Farrell: Political operatives connected to the Koch brothers and their political network keep popping up in the 2016 Republican presidential campaigns – like Corey Lewandowski, who heads Donald Trump’s campaign, and Marc Short from Freedom Partners, who just moved over to play a leading role in Marco Rubio’s campaign. Your research argues that today’s Koch network is a much bigger player in conservative and Republican Party politics than other well-known groups pushing conservative economic policies, such as the Club for Growth and Americans for Tax Reform (ATR). What is new here?
Hertel-Fernandez and Skocpol: You are right that Koch-connected operatives and alumni of Koch political organizations are ubiquitous in today’s Republican politics – not just in campaigns, even campaigns fighting one another as the Trump and Rubio campaigns are currently doing, but also sprinkled through GOP legislative and executive staff offices in Washington, D.C., and dozens of state capitols.
Simply put, the Koch network is a GOP-aligned political effort like nothing we have seen, including operations such as the Club for Growth and Americans for Tax Reform that also aspire to sharply reduce taxes, government spending and regulations. Compared to those groups, the Koch network now operates on a much vaster scale and is able to penetrate and reshape much of what Republicans do in elections and government.
Read the full piece at The Washington Post.
- Publication Type:Other Writing
- Publication Date:02/29/2016