Hijacking Campaign 2022 | Independent Expenditures | Issue Ads | Candidates | Offices | Campaign 2022
Posted: Juy 29, 2022
Updated: March 22, 2024
This is a Super PAC located in Washington, D.C., with a track record of opposing Democrats in general elections and Republicans in primary races who it does not feel are conservative enough.
The Super PAC, which was founded in 2010 as an arm of the national Club for Growth, focuses on “defeating big-government politicians and replacing them with pro-growth, limited-government conservatives.”
In the 2020 election cycle, Club for Growth Action spent more than $71 million mostly on independent expenditures in congressional races.
In late July 2022, the Super PAC registered to make independent expenditures in Wisconsin to oppose GOP candidate for governor Rebecca Kleefisch. She faced three opponents in the Aug. 9 GOP primary to determine who would face Democratic Gov. Tony Evers on the November ballot.
Initially, the group reported spending more than $2.5 million on television ads to oppose Kleefisch. The group told WisPolitics.com that it was spending about $1.3 million on television, cable, and radio ads in the Milwaukee and Green Bay markets.
The group’s first ad accused Kleefisch of taking junkets around the world paid for by foreign interests while she was lieutenant governor between 2011 and 2018. After leaving office, the ad says Kleefisch took a cushy Washington job where she “works for them, not for us.”
Five days before the primary, Club for Growth reported spending nearly another $1 million for radio, television and digital ads to oppose Kleefisch and yet another $9,800 towards further television advertising the day before the primary.
A second ad by the group in early August criticized Kleefisch for a 2014 trip to China she took as lieutenant governor. The ad said she returned to Wisconsin "spouting Chinese propaganda," and that Kleefisch was "easy to co-opt, too weak to lead."
Years earlier, another arm of the national Club for Growth called Club for Growth Wisconsin spent more than $11.4 million mostly on undisclosed issue advertising in Wisconsin legislative and statewide races from 2007 through 2013.
This organization is an unregistered independent expenditure committee that is required to report any such spending done within 60 days of a primary or an election to the Wisconsin Ethics Commission per Chapter 11, Subchapter X of Wisconsin Statutes.