After spending more than $31 million on Nikki Haley’s unsuccessful bid for the GOP presidential nomination, billionaire industrialist Charles Koch’s super PAC is now backing 26 Republican candidates running for the U.S. House and Senate this year.
Almost half of these candidates have served in the military, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) finds. Although this is a factor Republican voters tend to favor, according to the Pew Research Center, only 21% of candidates who ran for governor or Congress in 2022 had any military experience and only 82 of the 435 current members of the House are veterans. In the 1970s, roughly 75% of U.S. Senators and Representatives had military backgrounds.
Launched just months before the 2018 midterms, Koch’s Americans for Prosperity Action (AFP Action) is registered as a “hybrid” PAC with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), which means that it can operate as a traditional PAC by contributing to candidates directly or as a super PAC that collects unlimited funds for “independent expenditures.” This gives Koch and its affiliated advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a “tool to build broad policy coalitions in Congress to help advance AFP’s vision,” as CNN reported.
By the end of December, AFP Action had raised $96 million for the 2023–24 election cycle, according to its year-end FEC filing. Koch Industries and Koch’s Stand Together Chamber of Commerce contributed $50 million of that, with $15 million coming from the Waltons, whose fortune from Walmart makes them the richest family in the U.S. and the second wealthiest in the world.
In recent federal elections, AFP Action spent more than $140 million in 2020 and 2022 combined, and last year it spent almost $56 million backing far-right Republicans. This $196-million investment over just five years makes the super PAC one the GOP’s biggest supporters.
Preference for Military Experience
In 2022, AFP Action helped elect several congressional candidates with military backgrounds. Backing from Koch’s PAC helped Rep. John James (R) of Michigan’s 10th Congressional District win his House seat (by under 2,000 votes) after previously losing in the general elections for Senate in 2018 and 2020. The super PAC also helped Rep. Zach Nunn (R) of Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District to win a hotly contested seat previously held by a Democrat. In fact, AFP Action — which gets most of its funding from Koch, the Walton siblings, and a handful of other wealthy donors — played a significant role in helping the GOP gain its razor thin majority in the House in 2022.
According to OpenSecrets, AFP Action spent more than any other group outside these states on the 2022 races, contributing $322,000 to help James pull off his win in Michigan and $835,000 to put Nunn ahead in Iowa. In both races, AFP Action bankrolled its usual mix of strategies for winning House races: digital advertising, direct mail appeals, and canvassing. The super PAC has endorsed both candidates again in this year’s congressional contest.
AFP Action is also backing other U.S. House challengers with military backgrounds, including Tom Barrett (MI-7), Rob Bresnahan (PA-8), Jeff Crank (CO-5), Gabe Evans (CO-8), Pat Harrigan (NC-10), Rob Mercuri (PA-17), and Orlando Sonza (OH-1). All still face primary challenges (except for Harrigan, the GOP nominee in North Carolina) and are relying on AFP Action for the most out-of-state funding in their respective primaries.
In this year’s Senate races, AFP Action is backing three Republican challengers with military experience: Sam Brown in Nevada, Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania, and Tim Sheehy in Montana.
In 2022, Brown and McCormick both lost in their state’s Senate primaries, but Sheehy has never run for public office and last year “emerged… from relative obscurity as a top recruit of the National Republican Senatorial Committee,” according to the Montana Free Press. All three are leading other Republican candidates in the polls, with the Pennsylvania primary coming up in April and the other two in June.
In addition to the mail, digital ads, and canvassing AFP Action undertakes in House races, it will also buy television ads for the Senate contests.
Most of these GOP congressional candidates were deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan, and three of them — Harrigan, James, and Brown — are graduates of West Point. Most also highlight their military service as an asset in their campaigns.
In Montana, Sheehy often talks about his background as a Navy SEAL in his race against longtime Senator John Tester (D), who never served in the military himself but chairs the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee and is held in high regard by veterans for his work on their behalf. Sheehy owns Bridger Aerospace, an aerial firefighting company, and has railed against the federal government for purported overreach while simultaneously getting rich off government contracts.
In North Carolina, Harrigan points to his military education and combat experience as evidence of his suitability for Congress, noting on his campaign site that as a 23-year-old deployed in Afghanistan he was “in charge of roughly 350 Americans, Afghans, and expatriates, and responsible for nearly $100 million worth of infrastructure and equipment.” The former Green Beret also touts the successful small arms business he and his wife launched while he was still on active duty.
James of Michigan ran ads in his previous race that identified him as an “Army Ranger, Captain.” But as The Washington Post explains, that claim is misleading since attending Ranger school isn’t the same as actually serving as a Ranger. In other words, based on his experience “James cannot say he is an Army Ranger, only that he is ‘Ranger qualified,’” the Post points out.
Americans for Prosperity and AFP Action also maintain a veterans front group, Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) and its electoral arm, CVA Action, to advocate on issues of interest to veterans and attack Democrats for failing to support the Veterans Administration.
The Koch network’s continued support of candidates with military backgrounds appears to be based on the belief that they enjoy an advantage at the polls. But as The Hill reports, that isn’t necessarily true:
Invoking military service credentials is a campaign strategy as old as our republic. However, our research and that of others suggests [that] support for veteran candidates is influenced by partisan preferences and ideological stereotyping. Voters perceive veteran candidates as more conservative, and accordingly, liberal voters tend to view these candidates less favorably.
What is clear is that the Koch network is spending millions to help candidates with military experience win. Since some of these candidates are running in districts or states with roughly equal numbers of Republican and Democratic voters, even a small edge can help determine which party takes control of Congress on Jan. 3, 2025.
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