In public, Republicans have denounced Democrats ambitious electoral-reform bill, the For the People Act, as an unpopular partisan ploy. In a contentious Senate committee hearing last week, Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, slammed the proposal, which aims to expand voting rights and curb the influence of money in politics, as a brazen and shameless power grab by Democrats. But behind closed doors Republicans speak differently about the legislation, which is also known as House Resolution 1 and Senate Bill 1. They admit the lesser-known provisions in the bill that limit secret campaign spending are overwhelmingly popular across the political spectrum. In private, they concede their own polling shows that no message they can devise effectively counters the argument that billionaires should be prevented from buying elections. A recording obtained by The New Yorker of a private conference call on January 8th, between a policy adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell and the leaders of several prominent conservative groupsincluding one run by the Koch brothers networkreveals the participants worry that the proposed election reforms garner wide support not just from liberals but from conservative voters, too. The speakers on the call expressed alarm at the broad popularity of the bills provision calling for more public disclosure about secret political donors. The participants conceded that the bill, which would stem the flow of dark money from such political donors as the billionaire oil magnate Charles Koch, was so popular that it wasnt worth trying to mount a public-advocacy campaign to shift opinion. Instead, a senior Koch operative said that opponents would be better off ignoring the will of American voters and trying to kill the bill in Congress.
Kyle McKenzie, the research director for the Koch-run advocacy group Stand Together, told fellow-conservatives and Republican congressional staffers on the call that he had a spoiler. When presented with a very neutral description of the bill, people were generally supportive, McKenzie said, adding that the most worrisome part . . . is that conservatives were actually as supportive as the general public was when they read the neutral description. In fact, he warned, theres a large, very large, chunk of conservatives who are supportive of these types of efforts. As a result, McKenzie conceded, the legislations opponents would likely have to rely on Republicans in the Senate, where the bill is now under debate, to use under-the-dome-type strategiesmeaning legislative maneuvers beneath Congresss roof, such as the filibusterto stop the bill, because turning public opinion against it would be incredibly difficult. He warned that the worst thing conservatives could do would be to try to engage with the other side on the argument that the legislation stops billionaires from buying elections. McKenzie admitted, Unfortunately, weve found that that is a winning message, for both the general public and also conservatives. He said that when his group tested tons of other arguments in support of the bill, the one condemning billionaires buying elections was the most persuasivepeople found that to be most convincing, and it riled them up the most. McKenzie explained that the Koch-founded group had invested substantial resources to see if we could find any message that would activate and persuade conservatives on this issue. He related that an A.O.C. message we testedone claiming that the bill might help Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez achieve her goal of holding people in the Trump Administration accountable by identifying big donorshelped somewhat with conservatives. But McKenzie admitted that the link was tenuous, since what she means by this is unclear. Sadly, he added, not even attaching the phrase cancel culture to the bill, by portraying it as silencing conservative voices, had worked. It really ranked at the bottom, McKenzie said to the group. That was definitely a little concerning for us. Gretchen Reiter, the senior vice-president of communications for Stand Together, declined to respond to questions about the conference call or the Koch groups research showing the robust popularity of the proposed election reforms. In an e-mailed statement, she said, Defending civil liberties requires more than a sound bite, and added that the group opposes the bill because a third of it restricts First Amendment rights. She included a link to an op-ed written by a member of Americans for Prosperity, another Koch-affiliated advocacy group, which argues that the legislation violates donors freedom of expression by requiring the disclosure of the names of those who contribute ten thousand