Two of the biggest-spending groups of Republican megadonors are making it clear that they don’t want Donald Trump to be the GOP nominee, a sign that anti-Trump candidates will be well-funded in the 2024 presidential primaries.
The Koch network, the largest-spending political network on the right, and The Club for Growth, a fiscally conservative group that was once close to Trump, both announced plans to work against Trump in recent days.
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Trump didn’t need megadonors in his first presidential primary run in 2016—he was fueled largely by small donors and a huge amount of free earned media given cable TV’s obsessive coverage. But the open plotting against him shows that many powerful forces in the GOP are ready to move on.
The Koch network announced plans to spend heavily to block Trump and his allies in the 2024 GOP primaries, in a memo from Americans for Prosperity, one of the network’s larger organizations.
“The Republican Party is nominating bad candidates who are advocating for things that go against core American principles. And the American people are rejecting them,” Americans for Prosperity CEO Emily Seidel said in a memo sent to supporters on Sunday.
“To write a new chapter for our country, we need to turn the page on the past,” she continued. “So the best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter. The American people have shown that they’re ready to move on, and so AFP will help them do that.”
That’s a significant departure—while the network combined to spend almost a half-billion dollars in the 2020 election cycle, it’s never spent to boost or block candidates during a GOP presidential primary.
Charles and David Koch, the libertarian-leaning billionaires better known as the Koch brothers, were the biggest-spending conservatives in politics until Trump came around. They and their donor network, which includes hundreds of other donors, spent less during the Trump era, though they still spent nearly a half-billion dollars backing down-ticket candidates and on other political organizing in the 2020 election cycle and their super PAC dropped $80 million on the 2022 elections.
The Koch brothers were never Trump fans, and David Koch died in 2019, but this is the first time the Koch network has moved to directly take him on.
And it’s not just them.
The Club for Growth shared private polling of Republican likely primary voters that showed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis led Trump by 49%-40% in a theoretical head-to-head primary matchup. In an all-candidate field, Trump leads DeSantis by 37% to 33%, with former Vice President Mike Pence at 7%, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley at 5%, and three other candidates polled at 2% or lower.
“What the club believes the Republican Party should do is make sure whoever we nominate will actually win,” Club for Growth President David McIntosh told reporters on Monday. “The party should be open to looking at a different candidate. DeSantis is in the strongest position.”
McIntosh said that the group would invite every single Republican candidate named in the poll to the organization’s donor retreat—except for Trump.
The Club for Growth and Trump have had a rollercoaster relationship—and have been on the outs in the past year. The Club opposed Trump during the 2016 presidential primaries, but became one of his biggest backers during the general election, and quickly became one of his closest allies. Trump often name-checked McIntosh, who worked closely with the president to coordinate primary endorsement.
But that all fell apart last year, when the Club and Trump endorsed competing candidates in a number of races, most notably in competitive Ohio and Pennsylvania primaries. The Club has been trolling Trump for months, releasing polling showing him trailing DeSantis shortly ahead of his November presidential announcement (and after Trump’s endorsed candidates lost a number of winnable 2022 midterm races).
McIntosh, a former Indiana congressman, has a long relationship with former Vice President Mike Pence, a likely Trump foe. And the Club, which raised and spent about $150 million in the last election cycle, has been talking up DeSantis as well.
