Powerful Right-Wing Groups Are on a Stealth Mission to Make America Look Like Texas

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This latest project in conservative infrastructure building comes at a time when power is drifting away from political parties and other long-established organizations. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has accelerated this trend, with new Super PACs and attack-ad nonprofits springing up almost as fast as donors can write checks. The upgraded state echo chambers, led by SPN think tanks, seem particularly well-suited for this environment: they are fast-paced, Internet-savvy and dedicated to eliminating their perceived opposition.

Months before Scott Walker took the oath of office as Wisconsin’s forty-fifth governor, the groundwork for his controversial “budget repair bill,” which severely curtailed public sector collective bargaining rights, had already been laid. The John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy, founded in 2009 as the second SPN think tank in the state, had—along with the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, an older state affiliate—published several studies calling for government leaders to tackle public sector employee bargaining. Specifically, they targeted teacher pay and benefits as the driver of the state’s budget ills. Unlike the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, the MacIver Institute waged its advocacy through YouTube videos and social media, including its own blog.

Brett Healy, president of the MacIver Institute, explained later that it was “critically important” that the state think tanks used “digital media” advocacy and “not the traditional research and analysis…that we’re normally accustomed to doing.”

In January 2011, as Walker began his term, conservatives opened two new reporting outfits in the state. The Franklin Center helped sponsor one called Wisconsin Reporter, while American Majority, a group that helps train conservative activists, started another called MediaTrackers.org. The MacIver Institute bloggers, joined by these new reporting organizations, moved quickly to frame the debate, interviewing protesters who had gathered in Madison to try to stop the bill. The interviewers highlighted the radicals among the group, harshly criticized child participants and sought to rebut union arguments against the budget. 

Meanwhile, the Wisconsin chapter of Americans for Prosperity began a “Stand With Walker” campaign in partnership with the MacIver Institute. The group aired over $342,000 worth of advertising to support the governor’s budget and also began a bus tour crisscrossing the state to drum up support. A turning point came when the MacIver Institute’s bloggers reported that a group of teachers on sick leave were being given fake doctors’ notes by volunteer physicians among the protesters. The story took off, garnering coverage by the local and national media; there was so much Internet traffic to the MacIver Institute’s website that the server crashed. “Tracie [Sharp] probably remembers the panicked phone call that she received from me trying to figure out a patch to fix the situation,” Healy recalled. 

The Wisconsin groups went on to help re-elect a pro-Walker State Supreme Court judge and successfully fend off the attempt to unseat Walker himself in a recall election. 

The strategy in Wisconsin—with several think tanks and nimble media outlets all coordinating to enact laws to weaken labor unions—also played out in Indiana, where Republicans enacted a right-to-work law, and in Ohio, where a bill to limit collective bargaining was passed (Ohio’s law was subsequently repealed by referendum in 2011). Then, in December 2012, Republicans in Michigan reversed a previous promise and enacted a right-to-work law during the post-election lame- duck session. Happening as it did in the cradle of private-sector union activism, this was perhaps the crowning achievement of the state-based conservative movement. (The Taft-Hartley Act allows states to enact right-to-work laws, which quickly erode unions by allowing workers to benefit from union contracts and negotiations without having to pay dues.)