Americans for Prosperity Action (AFPA), the PAC founded by the billionaire Koch brothers, announced that it was Endorsing Nikki Haley as the Republican nominee for president. 1 This is a major event in the timeline of the fracturing of the Former Republican Party (FRG), which is operating as an unstable coalition of three parts: the chaos caucus (MAGA insurrectionists), the grievance caucus (limited government loving, oligarch-funded, developers of Project 2025) and the remnants (RINOs, still inclined to bipartisanship, vulnerable in purple districts).2
The AFP Action endorsement of Haley is a must-read for every Democrat. It is an outline of how they plan to win the Republican primary and election.
There are far larger consequences than just winning the next election. This is the final step before they can institute Project 2025 and institute unitary control of the executive branch. This would complete the government trifecta. Extensive control of the legislative branch was accomplished through gerrymandering and OPERATION REDMAP. Control of the judiciary was done through stacking the courts, including SCOTUS, with nominees vetted by the Federalist Society. The plan for control of the executive branch is Project 2025. This is a libertarian agenda. David Koch had at one point run as a Vice Presidential candidate on the Libertarian Party ticket.
In a major polling effort, AFP Action has contacted over 6 million people since February to discuss issues and the candidates they support and why, according to the news release.
They used this data to pick who could win the Republican primary presidency and would be best able to lead them in the implementation of their priorities of limited pro-business government, with low taxes, and a limited social safety net. You can read about their polling results in detail here.3
There is history here. Charles Koch has a long history of opposition to Donald Trump, and sat out the 2016 presidential election cycle, focusing instead on state and local races.4 In the AFP Action endorsement announcement, the repudiation of Trump was clear. Trump is being thrown under the bus. The Kochs are mounting their offensive to split off the chaos caucus because, ultimately, they are bad for business.
As many of you know, AFP Action has never engaged in a presidential election before, but as we said in February, to write a new chapter for our country, we need to turn the page on the past. Donald Trump and Joe Biden will only further perpetuate the country’s downward spiral in politics. Furthermore, a significant majority of voters want somebody new. The American people have shown they’re ready to move on from the current political era, so AFP Action will help them do that.
The results are incredibly encouraging: The American people are ready to move on, with nearly 75% of Republican primary voters saying they are open to supporting a candidate other than Donald Trump. In addition, nearly 60% of the Republican voters AFP spoke with who have never voted in a primary or caucus say they are “extremely enthusiastic” to vote for the first time.
It’s now time to help rally those voters behind a candidate who can win the primary and win the general election.
Haley, in the AFP view, has what it takes to implement their agenda. You can read about their objectives in more in their handy one-page policy summary.5
AFP Action is proud to throw our full support behind Nikki Haley, who offers America the opportunity to turn the page on the current political era, to win the Republican primary and defeat Joe Biden next November. She has what it takes to lead a policy agenda to take on our nation’s biggest challenges and help ensure our country’s best days are ahead. [My emphasis. they are refering to Project 2025]. With the grassroots and data capability we bring to bear in this race, no other organization is better equipped to help her do it…
…Nikki Haley has a long track record of empowering people with more freedom and opportunity and supporting policies that favor competition over control. [Emphasis mine. This is the Koch libertarian agenda. All square brackets here will be my commentary.] As Governor, Haley’s work to expand education opportunities [subsidized charter schools], improve access and lower costs in our health care system [privitization of Medicare], and protect freedom and flexibility in our workforce [no more affirmative action, anti-union labor laws] shows she shares our belief that the solutions to our most pressing challenges lie in free people – not heavy-handed government. While we don’t agree with anyone on every issue, Nikki Haley, by far, offers the best opportunity to improve the lives of all Americans. The foremost challenge confronting our nation, affecting every American, is the economy. Nikki Haley presents a bold and robust strategy to tackle the inflation that is making everything more expensive for American families - addressing the out-of-control government spending and simplifying the tax code to benefit the American people rather than special interests [this is an outright lie. Koch wants minimal government and low corporate and business taxes]. Simultaneously, she has the courage to advocate for reforms to an entitlement system that makes promises it can’t keep [Medicare and Social Security benefits will ultimately be gutted and privatized].
Below, in their own words, is what AFP Action brings to the table in terms of support for Nikki Haley in the primary. This is showing what they can do thanks to the unlimited money available after the Citizens United decision.
What AFP Action’s Endorsement Brings [Their heading]
AFP has been speaking with millions of voters at their doorsteps and on the phone already this year. They have also been targeting a unique universe of voters who vote reliably in general elections but not in the primaries or caucuses. AFP Action has now acquired that data and will encourage a significant number of these general election voters to vote in this primary. So far, enthusiasm to participate is far beyond what we expected.
With the largest grassroots operation in the country and a presence in all fifty states, AFP Action’s endorsement will put thousands of AFP Action activists and grassroots leaders into the field - with a focus on the early primary states - knocking on doors and urging voters to support Nikki Haley.
Additionally, in the coming days, we’ll launch extensive mail, digital, and connected television campaigns to supplement those on-the-ground efforts. As we’ve proven in past elections, a layered approach of digital and mail, combined with that crucial one-on-one conversation at the door or on the phone, is the best way to engage and persuade voters.
In recent days, Haley was reported to be in conversations with Jamie Dimon, 6 and Ken Langone,7 billionaire bankers and hedge fund managers who have supported Democrats in past elections. The oligarchs are gathering.
This is a gift letter from Paul Krugman to his subscribers-
Voters may feel one way, but the economy itself feels fine
Author Headshot
By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist
Ten finance guys are drinking in a bar. Nine of them are Masters of the Universe — wheeler-dealers who make many millions of dollars every year. The tenth is what Gordon Gekko, in the movie “Wall Street,” called a “$400,000-a-year working Wall Street stiff.”
Then the stiff leaves for a while, maybe to answer a call of nature. When he leaves, the average income of the guys still in the bar shoots up, because he’s no longer dragging that average down; when he comes back, the average drops again. But these fluctuations in the average don’t reflect changes in anyone’s income.
Why am I telling you this story? Because it’s most of the story of wages in the U.S. economy since Covid-19 struck. In 2020 the average wage of workers who still had a job shot up, because those who were laid off were disproportionately low-wage service workers. Then, as people resumed in-person shopping, started going to restaurants and so on, growth in average wages was held down because those low-wage workers were being rehired. You need to look through these “compositional effects” to figure out what was really happening to earnings as that played out.
Until recently I thought everyone — well, everyone following economic issues — knew this. (Assuming that people know more about the numbers than they actually do is an occupational hazard for nerds who become pundits.) But lately I’ve been seeing even mainstream news organizations publish charts that look like this:
FRED
And these charts are accompanied by commentary to the effect that real wages generally rose under Donald Trump but have generally fallen under Joe Biden, which in turn is supposed to explain why Americans are feeling so negative about the economy.
But that’s not what these charts actually tell us. Mostly they reflect the working stiff temporarily leaving the bar, then coming back.
There are wage measures that try to adjust for changes in the mix of workers, like the Atlanta Fed’s wage growth tracker. If we use this measure instead of average wages, the picture looks like this:
Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Bureau of Labor Statistics
The spurious wage surge of 2020 is gone, as is the wage stagnation of early 2021. It’s still true that wages lagged behind inflation in 2021 and 2022, but they have run well ahead of inflation this year.
Even this view of economic performance, however, misses some of the temporary distortions caused by the pandemic. Prices of many commodities were very low in 2020 — the price of oil briefly went negative! — not because policy was good but because the world economy was flat on its back, depressing demand. These prices surged as the economy recovered, and there were also large but temporary disruptions to supply chains — remember all those ships waiting for someplace to unload their cargoes?
Oh, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brought war to one of the world’s major food-producing areas.
In the end, it’s basically a fool’s errand to try and compare economic performance before and after the White House changed hands; there was just too much crazy stuff going on. What we can say, with considerable certainty, is that while prices have gone up a lot since the pandemic began, most workers’ wages have risen significantly more:
FRED
OK, at this point one runs into a buzz saw of criticism. I am regularly assured by correspondents that economists’ measures of inflation are meaningless, because they exclude food and energy. No, they don’t; economists often use measures of “core” inflation for analytical purposes, but the Consumer Price Index, which is what I’m using here, includes everything.
Or I’m told that real people know that inflation is still running hot, whatever the government numbers may say. Actually, the American Farm Bureau Association, a private group, tells us that Thanksgiving dinner cost 4.5 percent less this year than last. Gasbuddy.com, another private group, tells us that prices at the pump are down more than 30 percent since their peak last year. Neither turkeys nor gas prices are good measures of underlying inflation, but both show that the narrative of inflation still running wild is just not true.
Sorry, folks, but “immaculate disinflation” — rapidly falling inflation without a recession or a big rise in unemployment — is actually happening. The 2021-22 inflation surge definitely rattled Americans after decades of relative price stability, and I’m not here to lecture people about their feelings. But I guess I am here to lecture journalists about using statistics. Presenting misleading numbers that seem to justify public opinion is actually an act of disrespect: Voters have a right to their feelings, but journalists have a duty to present the facts, as best we can understand them.
And while the public’s negative view of the economy is a major puzzle, acknowledging that puzzle is no reason to soft-pedal the evidence that the U.S. economy is currently doing very well — indeed, much better than even optimists expected a year ago.
One should always fear the Kochs. They have decimated politics in OK, TX, KS and MO with their gerrymandering and their deep pockets.
This line seems to be incorrect- AFP has been speaking with millions of voters at their doorsteps and on the phone already this year. Generally, these "conversations" are in the form of emails, texts and speeches. The proper phrasing would be 'speaking to" not "speaking with".