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A pair of Democratic strategists are trying to recruit high-dollar donors to fund a 2020 campaign that will attempt to boost Democratic Senate prospects by going all-in on “Moscow Mitch,” as the group gleefully dubs Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Party Majority PAC is convinced that it can revive Russian election-meddling fears, and McConnell’s ostensible obstinance in addressing them, to damage Republican prospects for holding the Senate next year.
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But first, the group is telling donors this week, it needs more money.
“We want to make sure that Moscow Mitch magic follows him wherever he goes,” Adam Parkhomenko, the group’s new treasurer, writes in a pitch slated to be sent to hundreds of high-dollar Democratic donors this week. “That’s why we purchased the domain name MoscowMitch.com. And it’s why we raised money to pay for mobile billboards to stalk McConnell at a recent fundraiser in California. A fundraiser he canceled after word he would be humiliated.” (The event was canceled due to a shoulder injury McConnell suffered a few days earlier.)
Parkhomenko co-founded Ready for Hillary, a pro-Clinton super PAC, in 2015, and served as the Democratic National Committee’s field director during the 2016 cycle. He consulted for Party Majority PAC last cycle, and is helping to run it this year with the aid of Shelly Moskwa, who was the treasurer for Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign.
Mobile billboards and kitschy microsites are common tactics among a segment of the anti-Trump left that have set up headline-grabbing, if not particularly effective, independent political groups over the past few years. Groups such as the Democratic Coalition Against Trump and Mad Dog PAC have earned reputations as respectable small-dollar fundraisers due to the devoted online followings of their principals, but they haven’t moved the needle much in terms of actual political outcomes.
On paper at least, Party Majority PAC more closely resembles those groups than the powerhouse Democratic operation that its website attempts to convey. The group “adds to existing efforts while seizing on untapped opportunities to strengthen the Democratic Party in every corner of the country,” it boasts. “While there are Democratic super PACs that support efforts to elect candidates to specific offices, no super PAC seeks to support the Democratic Party as a whole. Party Majority PAC fills this void.”
The group’s financials haven’t reflected that scale of impact. During the 2018 cycle, Party Majority PAC raised just over $300,000. But the majority of those funds went toward paying its own staff and consultants, including Parkhomenko, who was paid about $35,000 for consulting he did in the fall of 2018. About $85,000, or roughly a third of its total spending, went toward contributions to other political committees and independent expenditures in support of Democratic candidates for office.
The group’s political activity declined even further in the first six months of this year, when it reported spending less than $20,000. But Parkhomenko says it’s ramping up operations, bringing on top Democratic campaign vendors such as NGP VAN and Blue State Digital, and pitching donors on a “Moscow Mitch”-themed messaging strategy that, he is convinced, can help sway key Senate races in Democrats’ favor.
“We’d love to be able to do TV in Maine,” Parkhomenko said in an interview. “I think there are a lot of people in Maine who are not sure what to think of Susan Collins sometimes, but they have a strong opinion of Mitch McConnell, and she has certainly carried his water time after time.”
But Parkhomenko acknowledged that doing so will require some big donors to step up and fund the effort. His donor pitch aims to establish a “finance council” of supporters willing to fund the quixotic effort.
“While we’re overwhelmed by the support we’re seeing from our grassroots digital army,” Parkhomenko writes in his donor pitch, “we still don’t have the resources we need to make sure this devastating tactic follows McConnell everywhere he goes.”
