Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer is back and he’s making a big investment in Pennsylvania in this year’s election:
He was in Philadelphia on Thursday to kick off a statewide campaign to boost Democrats Hillary Clinton and Katie McGinty, the party's nominee for U.S. Senate. The organizing project will be funded by NextGen and several powerful labor unions through For Our Future, a super PAC that aims to raise and spend $50 million.
Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump is a particular target of the group's ire.
For Our Future's backers include AFSCME, the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO and the National Education Association. It plans to raise cash from outside donors and to work in Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Nevada along with Pennsylvania.
In addition to climate change, the effort will advocate for "shared economic prosperity," public-school funding, and racial justice. Organizers hope to build a liberal infrastructure that will live beyond 2016.
"This campaign is about getting back to the basics of organizing ... real conversations, eye to eye and heart to heart," Lee Saunders, president of AFSCME, said in a news conference starting the venture. "We'll be on Facebook and Twitter, sure, but more importantly, we'll be in the neighborhoods."
Saunders called Trump "a charlatan and a fraud who doesn't care about our families and communities." The New York businessman also rejects the view that the global climate is warming and that human activity is to blame.
Erin Kramer, leader of the liberal group One Pittsburgh, said that only an ongoing grassroots campaign can empower working people to change "an economy that is not working for us."
Steyer said in the news conference, held at AFSCME's District Council 33 headquarters at 30th and Walnut Streets, that in the United States, "our race, our gender, and our zip code too often determine our destiny." For Our Future's goal is to chip away at that.
In the interview, Steyer maintained that the broad agenda of For Our Future is complementary to the struggle to fight climate change.
NextGen also is launching a $25 million effort called Youth Vote to register and mobilize young voters around climate change issues on 203 college campuses in seven states - Pennsylvania, Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, Nevada, Illinois, and Colorado.
In Pennsylvania, the project plans to have 200 staff organizers working on 70 campuses.
It’s important that Steyer is helping put boots on the ground because the Koch Brothers have their people out in the field trying to dupe voters into re-election Tea Party U.S. Senator Pat Toomey (R. PA):
The network has spent about $15 million on ads in Senate races — mainly through its super PAC Freedom Partners Action Fund and AFP — and has reserved $30 million in airtime for the fall in five key states so far: Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Florida. The amount is lower than past election cycles, but sources involved maintain that the infrastructure they have created overtime can move numbers without spending hundreds of millions on ads, as it believes it has done in North Carolina against Ellmers.
“TV is still important — we are clear about that,” said Tim Phillips, president of AFP. “But it has shown diminishing returns.”
Based on a review of Federal Election Commission reports and sources affiliated with the campaigns, at least 16 Senate campaigns — including those of Sens. John McCain, Ron Johnson, Mark Kirk, Kelly Ayotte, Richard Burr, Rob Portman and Pat Toomey — are using the data platform called i360 created by the Koch’s political operation.
With an increasing focus on grassroots activity this cycle, Phillips declined to give an estimate of how much AFP would end up spending, adding that it would be “significant,” as the group continues to identify potential races it could still get involved in. The group is also debating the nature of the involvement in each of the races — sticking to issue advocacy or expressly calling for the victory or defeat of a candidate in ads. “We are continually reassessing,” he said. “This has been such an unpredictable last 15 months.”
Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO is launching a digital campaign against Toomey:
The AFL-CIO will be running anti-Toomey ads on Facebook. Those ads will then redirect people to petitions demanding that Senators strengthen the Voting Rights Act, support infrastructure investment, reform the tax code, and oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Rick Bloomingdale, President of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, declared that Toomey “fails to stand up for working Pennsylvanians. Whether he’s supporting bad trade deals that destroy our jobs or allowing billionaires to pay lower taxes than nurses and teachers, Senator Toomey leaves working people out in the cold.”
The ads are part of a larger group that will be also targeting the Senate races in Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Florida, and Wisconsin.
And McGinty has been making the TPP a campaign issue against Toomey:
Pennsylvania's Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate is going against a trade agreement supported by her campaign chairman and the Obama Administration.
At a rally outside Philadelphia City Hall Katie McGinty told union workers she's against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, even though she normally agrees with the president.
"There are a variety of different issues, you are not going to see eye to eye on every single one, but I am in this race specifically because I want to be a force to grow more good paying jobs in this commonwealth and therefore I can't be for a deal that even those who support it say it will cost jobs," she said.
McGinty's campaign chairman, former Governor Ed Rendell also favors the TPP. McGinty says even though she supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 30 years ago, times have changed.
"People were telling us the way to win market share is through trade deals but the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result," she said.
While this is all very encouraging news, it’s important for us to get ready to take on Toomey now. Click here to donate and get involved with McGinty’s campaign.