Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
A deep-pocketed Democratic dark-money group is using a national direct-mail campaign to hone the party’s congressional election messaging, providing a potent avenue for donors to secretly finance key political work.
The dark-money group, House Majority Forward, is staffed by top Democratic operatives at its sister super PAC, House Majority PAC.
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It made a splash last month when the group announced the first ads in what it promised would be a $10 million 2020 ad spree in tandem with the super PAC’s efforts to elect and re-elect House Democrats.
Less publicized was the large direct-mail campaign that HMF used to test and refine Democratic messaging strategies—and to provide valuable data to any campaign that knows where to look for it on HMF’s website.
The direct-mail campaign targeted 10 districts with vulnerable Democratic incumbents who “took risks on progressive health care and ethics votes,” according to a memo on the campaign posted discreetly on HMF’s website. Each district received 10 mail pieces, which tested two messaging approaches—a standard appeal and a personal voter “testimonial”—on five different issues.
The memo provides extensive details on the direct-mail campaign and which messages tended to move voter opinions most. “Testimonials,” or direct-mail pieces that featured a specific person’s story, tended to be more effective, HMF found. But the single most effective mail piece was a more traditional, non-testimonial one focusing on insurance coverage of pre-existing conditions.
That sort of messaging data is extremely valuable and will likely inform not just House Majority PAC strategy heading into 2020, but also the approaches of the 10 Democratic campaigns tested, all of which are seeking to retain seats that Democrats flipped last year, and all of which will be crucial to the party’s efforts to retain its new House majority.
Neither HMF nor its sister super PAC can legally coordinate messaging with any of those campaigns. But the dark-money group pulled a classic “independent” political group move: It created a page on its website titled “research,” posted a small, easily overlooked link to the site on its homepage, and deposited the direct-mail campaign memo there.
HMF also expects to run extensive television and digital ads promoting key House candidates. But the direct-mail memo shows how groups funded by secret donors can more directly assist the campaigns they support without running afoul of federal election laws.
