Koch group spent $129 million last year

WASHINGTON — Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the financial hub of the Koch brothers growing policy and political network, spent more than $129 million last year as it waged a successful fight to help Republicans seize control of the U.S. Senate, its newly released tax return shows.

The group’s spending rivaled the $128.9 million that the Republican Party’s Senate arm, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, pumped into races over the two-year election cycle and underscores the scope of the grassroots, data and political operation the libertarian-leaning brothers and their allies are seeking to build.

Freedom Partners is working to raise a staggering $889 million in the run-up to the 2016 presidential and congressional elections. Charles Koch, the billionaire industrialist who oversees the network with his brother, David Koch, has said about third of that sum will go to electoral politics at the federal, state and local levels.

Freedom Partners, organized as a non-profit trade association under the U.S. tax code, does not disclose the identities of the roughly 450 individuals who contribute to the network.

The new filings highlight the network’s efforts to build a political infrastructure and a standing ground force of activists to advance the Kochs’ brand of free-market conservatism in national and local political fights.

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Freedom Partners’ president Marc Short called 2014 “a very seminal year in the country, and we believe a lot of the groups we were trying to build were impactful.” He said donors are “highly motivated” to continue the organization’s work.

Short said Freedom Partners still has room to grow as it tries to build a field operation to counter Democrats’ technology-driven ground game that twice propelled President Obama into the White House.

“The extent to which the Obama campaign was invested in communities in battleground states was far more extensive than most people realize,” Short said Tuesday.  “You can’t parachute in an election year and expect to have a dramatic impact.”

Among the organization’s biggest investments last year: The $22 million that went to Americans for Prosperity, the network’s largest grass-roots arm with operations in 35 states. Information gathered by its door-knocking activists have helped enrich a massive voter database maintained by i360, a private firm funded by the Koch network. The firm also shares data with a company aligned with the Republican National Committee. Individual Republican candidates also use i360’s data.

In addition to building a ground operation, Americans for Prosperity also conducted an aggressive advertising campaign during the 2014 election. The organization bombarded vulnerable Democratic incumbents in the Senate with television ads that slammed them for their support of President Obama’s 2010 health-care law. It also has waded into battles in places such as Tennessee, where it successfully fought against plans to expand Medicaid coverage and Missouri, where the group failed to muster the votes needed to overturn Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto of a right-to-work measure.

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Another $6.5 million went to The LIBRE Initiative, which conducts grassroots organizing among Latinos in swing states such as Nevada, Florida and Colorado that are crucial to Republicans’ hopes to retaining the Senate and winning the White House.

The group, which employs 70 in nine states, will hand out Thanksgiving turkeys in Miami later this month and has conducted Spanish-language classes in Las Vegas to help Latinos pass the state’s driver’s test.

“For far too long, folks have ceded the Hispanic community to groups on the left,” Jorge Lima, LIBRE’s vice president for operations and policy, recently told USA TODAY. “We felt there was a real need among Hispanics to go out with this free-market message.”

Freedom Partners sent $15.7 million to a third group, Vets for Economic Freedom Trust, last year. The group, which also operates under the name Concerned Veterans for America, earlier this month ran digital ads in South Carolina and Florida, attacking Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton on veterans’ issues, the first major paid media campaign against Clinton by a Koch-affiliated group.

Freedom Partners also funded other well-established groups, giving nearly $4.9 million to National Rifle Association and $2 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last year. Short and Freedom Partners spokesman James Davis said their group found common cause with the NRA and the chamber on what they view as excessive government regulation.

The chamber and Koch-affiliated groups, however, have been on opposite sides of legislative fights this year, including a battle over the future of Export-Import Bank, a federal agency that helps underwrite exports. The chamber and other business groups support the bank; the Kochs denounce it as corporate welfare.

“The partnership has not been as close in 2015,” Short said of Freedom Partners’ dealings with the chamber.

Freedom Partners donated smaller amounts to other groups, including $1 million to the anti-tax Club for Growth and $400,000 to the little-known Tree of Liberty, which ran early ads to swing Iowa's Senate primary in favor of Republican Joni Ernst.  Last November, Ernst captured the open Senate seat, which had been long held by Democrat Tom Harkin.

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Regan Page, a spokeswoman for the Democratic-affiliated group American Bridge, called Freedom Partners' grantees a “laundry list of extreme, right-wing groups.”

“Power, money, influence, and functions of the Republican Party are defecting from the GOP's traditional infrastructure to shadowy groups backed by the Koch network,” she said in an email. “GOP candidates aren't built by, backed and beholden to the GOP anymore but to Charles and David Koch.”