Stop Hillary PAC Helps Defeat Clinton, Accepts a New Mission Democrats Won't Like Much Better
Control of Congress may not be the only thing at stake during this year’s midterm elections.
Given that numerous Democrats are already seeking to impeach President Donald Trump, Republicans losing majority control of Congress would not just mean a halt to their GOP agenda, but possibly an end to Trump’s White House tenure.
With so much on the line, conservative organizations have stepped up efforts in preparation for what will surely be a grueling 2018 midterm season.
One organization in particular is going all in for the Republican president.
“Our organization will do everything they can to continue to push Trump’s agenda through Congress in 2018,” said Ted Harvey, a former state lawmaker who now serves as chairman of the Committee to Defend the President, a political action committee dedicated to protecting Trump from Democrat attacks.
Harvey spoke to The Western Journal about his organization’s work and how it plans to execute its strategy during the midterm elections. Despite it being a year where many experts believe Democrats will make gains in the House of Representatives, gubernatorial seats and other down-ballot elections, the Democratic Party will be forced to defend a lopsided number of seats in states Trump won handily — making them vulnerable.
“(We will) remind the voters, specifically in the six states that the Democrats currently hold the U.S. Senate seats in that Trump won … by 60 percent or more, we’re going to do everything we can to flip those seats,” Harvey explained.
“We are going to go after those vulnerable Democrats in Congress who voted to impeach the president last month.”
Harvey’s group will use its massive online following to boost conservative activists and run campaign ads to showcase the president’s accomplishments in office.
The group has already proved effective at both. The Committee’s Facebook page has over 800,000 “likes” and has created a litany of television ads. The group broke a recent story on the Clinton campaign’s unethical relationship with the Democratic National Committee ahead of the 2016 Democrat primaries.
“It was our organization that found out the Clinton campaign was funneling $84 million and using the DNC to launder that money to the benefit of the Clinton campaign. We filed that last month with the FEC and we will be going forward with that complaint,” Harvey said.
Despite its name, the Committee to Defend the President was not originally formed to assist Trump after he was elected. In fact, it was created well before the New York Republican ever decided to run for the White House. Established in 2013 to defeat the woman who was already considered to be the Democrat frontrunner, the organization was originally called the Stop Hillary PAC.
And stop her it did.
Through a successful email and outreach strategy, the organization’s fundraising skyrocketed during 2015 and 2016, garnering over $6.3 million from donors, according to Federal Election Commission filings. The effort fit every definition of a small-donor, grassroots campaign, with about four-fifths of that money coming from people who gave $200 or less.
These funds were used to run advertisements on behalf of then-candidate Trump.
But with that presidential election won and in the rearview mirror, the Stop Hillary PAC saw a new threat emerging on the horizon — one they knew needed to be addressed. That’s when they decided to change their name and their goal.
“Right after the election, when we saw that the media was relentlessly going to continue to attack the president, discredit the election and discredit the presidency, we changed the name of the PAC from the Stop Hillary PAC to the Committee to Defend the President,” Harvey told The Journal.
“Since then, we have been working every day to (build) our organization and (build) our membership. We are the largest PAC defending the president, solely focused on defending the president right now.”
A lot is riding on the committee’s shoulders in terms of defending Trump. Not in recent memory has the party out of power so openly called for the removal of a sitting president.
Last week, Rep. Al Green, a Democrat from Texas, vowed to again introduce articles of impeachment against the president, referring to Trump as a racist. His latest efforts come after a handful of Democrats failed miserably to push for impeachment late last year.
Speaking on the House floor Wednesday, Green said he would continue to bring articles of impeachment forward for a vote, vowing to repeat his actions over and over.
“I have done it before; I will do it again and again and again,” the Democrat said to his colleagues, according to The Hill. “I will not allow (Trump’s conduct) to happen unchallenged.”
Unlike any other election in the modern era, many Democrats will be actively campaigning on the idea of impeaching the president.
Tom Steyer, a billionaire liberal activist from California, has pledged to spend $30 million of his own money during the midterms in an effort to impeach Trump. Steyer, who has already run ads calling for the removal of the president, said he will also get heavily involved in House races.
The billionaire’s plan is to give control of the House back to the Democrats, which will then pave the way for a successful impeachment vote, according to The Mercury News.
Harvey will be on the front lines fighting this effort, but he also believes the Democrats’ strategy is pathetic.
“It speaks volumes of how the Democrats don’t have a message of making America better,” he said. “All they have to run on is ‘we’re going to tell our base we’re going to impeach the president.’”
He reiterated that his group will fight to the death to defend the Republican administration.
“We are going to tell our army of conservative grassroots activists across the country what the Democrats are trying to do. We are going to fight tooth and nail to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
Jason Hopkins is The Western Journal’s Washington, D.C., correspondent.
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