PAC readies

Clinton super PAC readies early Trump strike

The group prepares to blitz the GOP front-runner — even before he becomes the nominee.

By Shane Goldmacher

Hillary Clinton’s biggest super PAC has already reserved $70 million in TV ads after this summer’s conventions in battleground states, but the group is preparing for an even earlier assault on Donald Trump — possibly while he is still busy battling his fellow Republicans to secure his party’s nomination.

Guy Cecil, chief strategist for the pro-Clinton super PAC, Priorities USA Action, said he watched for months as Republicans let Trump carve out his place within the Republican Party relatively unimpeded. He has no plans to allow for a general election repeat.

“We learned that you can’t wait until the last minute to go after Trump,” Cecil told POLITICO in a wide-ranging interview.

His group has already been testing lines of attack, in part by analyzing the effectiveness of the very ads that Republican groups like the Club for Growth, American Future Fund and Our Principles PAC have aired against Trump. Cecil foreshadowed a brutal fall campaign that would question Trump’s character, his temperament and a history of enriching himself at the expense of others.

“He treats entire segments of the population like second and third-class citizens,” Cecil said. “That may be funny for a reality show but it’s not entertaining when he’s president of the United States.”

Trump weathered $15 million in similar attacks from GOP groups in the final two weeks before the Florida GOP primary, and won in a blowout anyway. But Cecil said a general election matchup and audience would be dramatically different.

“What they spent is a drop in the bucket compared to what we’re going to spend, number one,” he said. “Number two, we’re going to spend it earlier.”

As of the end of February, Priorities had nearly $45 million cash-on-hand and touted another $49 million in commitments from donors. That is far more than the total summoned by all the anti-Trump Republicans in the last eight months, and more than the total the Democratic super PAC spent against Mitt Romney four years ago.

All that cash means the fall campaign could come as early as this spring.

“We anticipate going up before the convention, but I don’t have a date certain,” Cecil said, explaining that timing would depend on how the GOP primary unfolds. “Whether it’s August 1, July 1, June 1, May 1, our job is to be ready.”

The timing raises the frightening specter for Republicans that the GOP frontrunner soon could be sustaining simultaneous fire both from those within the GOP who hope to stop him at a contested convention — and from Democrats hoping to mortally wound him, should he emerge victorious.

The last three incumbent presidents running for reelection won in part by successfully defining their challengers early (Romney in 2012, John Kerry in 2004, and Bob Dole in 1996), essentially smothering them before they could gain their post-primary footing. With Clinton busily building the most formidable non-incumbent organization in decades, her allies hope to get the same kind of jump on Trump.

Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

For now, the pro-Clinton super PAC is holding its fire, as the Republican nomination battle rages. Ted Cruz trails badly Trump in the delegate race but he and John Kasich still have a path to force a contested convention. Cecil said it’s possible the super PAC could target Cruz and Trump in its early barrage of ads, or simply focus on pro-Clinton ads, depending on how the race evolves.

“We aren’t spending an enormous amount of time on John Kasich,” Cecil said. “We aren’t spending time on other crazy schemes of Republicans in some basement or Mexican restaurant who are plotting to take over a convention. It’s pretty unlikely.”

So far, Cecil’s group has made general election ad reservations in seven states — the battlegrounds of Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, and New Hampshire — but they are monitoring about twice that many states closely.

There has been much discussion among nervous Democrats about how Trump might reshape what, for two decades, has been a stable — and favorable — electoral college map. The fear is that the anti-trade and nationalistic Trump could potentially put Rust Belt states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin back into play for the GOP by mobilizing disaffected white working-class voters. Trump himself has boasted regularly of the record-setting primary turnouts he’s brought to the GOP.

Such talk is “premature,” said Cecil, who served as political director on Clinton’s 2008 campaign, and then ran the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm for two cycles. “I get sort of the fascination with what’s happening on the other side related to expanding the map. What’s unclear is whether or not these new voters who are participating in the primary are new voters, or are they just new primary voters?”

It was part of a mantra that Cecil would repeat more than once: “One of the lessons is not to overlearn lessons from the primary.”

He said it applied, in particular, to the charges that Trump has easily brushed aside among only Republican voters. Cecil pointed to a recent study by Ace Metrix, a TV analytics company, that showed some anti-Trump ads scored particularly highly among independent voters, with three testimonials from self-described “Trump University victims” among the top five most effective ads.

“Because something doesn’t work in the context of a Republican primary doesn’t mean it won’t work in the context of an undecided independent voter,” Cecil said. “And [it] doesn’t mean it won’t work to motivate Democrats to turn out.”

Cecil said Priorities would draw some issue contrasts with Trump, specifically naming immigration, foreign policy and the minimum wage. But he spoke more broadly about undermining the very concept of a President Trump. He disparaged how political insiders had tried for months to explain away Trump’s staying power with a series of “yeah, but” statements.

“I think if you treat everything as a, ‘Yeah, but,’ you’re not taking the challenge seriously,” Cecil said. “And so even things that most Americans would see as ridiculous and out of bounds and foolish, we have to treat seriously.”

“Yeah, he’s ahead in the polls now but look how he just performed in this debate,” he said. “Yeah, he’s doing okay with these voters but he just insulted John McCain. Yeah, he is doing really well right now in the primaries but he just called on us to ban Muslims, pull out of NATO, make Mexico pay for a wall, encourage violence at his rallies.

But Priorities isn’t too confident in taking on unpredictable Trump. Anne Caprara, the group’s executive director, said, “The one thing about Trump that keeps me up is that there are things that he’s said and done that in any conventional campaign would have derailed his campaign.”

That’s why she and Cecil said they were preparing for something entirely different.

“When you’re running against an unconventional candidate, you can’t run a conventional campaign,” he said. “And we’ll be prepared for that.”