Updated to remove a 5-letter word from the title.
I’ve been doing my weekly reading over at Alternet, and came across several headlines that are disturbing, that are of interest to this community. Since I don’t want to write them all up (still working on part 2 of 4 or 5 on Treason in the US), I recommend heading over there to hit some stories that have not gotten much play in the media or on DKos. That said, the one article that I thought would be of great interest here, has the following headline:
Conservative Democrats’ dark money-funded rural voter project has everything to do with sinking Medicare for All
It’s a rewrite of an article on Truthdig, which in turn, summarizes the primary source at The Intercept (poorly IMHO) : Conservative Dems’ Rural Voter Project Is All About Sinking Medicare-for-All. The two-cent version of both articles describe how Heidi Heitkamp and Joe Donnelly, erstwhile members of the US Congress, have both become paid lobbyists for a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization, the One Country Project, funded with what are characterized as “dark money” donors, that claims to exist to “attract rural voters to the Democratic Party”. However, its mission is more complicated than that; it’s tangled up with insurance industry dark money.
An investigator working with The Intercept and another at Maplight (The Intercept with Andrew Perez) have uncovered a voter outreach scheme with a hidden agenda, where both Heitkamp and Donnelly are fronting the One Country Project 501(c)(4), backed by a dark money group seeking “to push an anti-Medicare-for-all agenda.” The non-profit’s website is registered to Forbes Tate Partners (FTP; former Clinton administration officials), which has as a lobbying client, “Partnership for America’s Health Care Future (PAHCF).”
The article goes on to report that PAHCF is an healthcare industry backed non-profit which exists to break momentum towards establishing a a comprehensive, universal health care system in the US. Heitkamp’s relationship with FTP goes back a long way: she used them as a campaign resource (PR/lobbying) for the 2018 elections (which doesn’t seem to have helped her much, IMO) and placed her former chief of staff with the firm. Donnelly has anti-Universal Healthcare and anti-M4A ties as well, having joined Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, which also lobbies for health care industry clients and appears to throw funds at the DCCC from time to time. Please note that both Heitkamp and Donnelly campaigned against progressivism, universal comprehensive care, and M4A in their 2018 runs.
Maplight (The Intercept) said this:
Donnelly and Heitkamp both campaigned against Medicare for All during their failed re-election bids, even though polling by Data for Progress and the Kaiser Family Foundation last year found that 55 percent of Democratic voters in Indiana and 51 percent in North Dakota support Medicare for All. Heitkamp lost her 2018 race by 11 points, Donnelly by almost 6 [emphasis mine].
The Truthdig and Alternet articles summarize more ties to the industry-backed lobbyists, but shed little light on what, exactly, One Country Project (OCP) claims to be its mission, so I’ll cover that, below.
Here’s what the website says about the OCP:
The One Country Project is dedicated to reopening the dialogue with rural communities, rebuilding trust and respect, and advancing an opportunity agenda for rural Americans.
Heitkamp is clearly the leader in this project. She hits all the claptrap notes about how the rural Trump voter, needs to be brought back into the fold, and how that voter demographic’s influence on Democratic politics is significant, crucial and influential enough that they must be catered to, in order to ensure electoral victory.
Heitkamp and Donnelly claim to be developing voter research data on them, and offers mentoring and teaching to sitting politicians on how to talk to these voters to gain their buy-in (!). Supposedly, Heitkamp is using left-over campaign funds to support the 501(c)(4), to push the idea that the solution to the Democratic party’s losing ways is founded in the knowledge and expertise re: rural voters, that she and Donnelly (who is scarcely to be found on the site) can provide. The site also contains this statement:
Their team looked at rural votes by county and state from 2000 to 2018 and found that if Democrats don’t break their performance with rural voters, they’re projected to once again win the popular vote but lose the electoral college in 2020.
Go visit the websites: Alternet, Truthdig, Maplight, or the One Country Project, for more information. The Maplight site (linked above), is definitely worth your time — it names names and offers much more detail regarding ties between insurance industry lobbyists, Heitkamp and Donnelly, One Country Project, and DCCC-preferred PR firms.