Koch groups budget nearly $1B for 2016

Conservative political groups backed by billionaire GOP mega-donors Charles and David Koch plan to spend nearly $1 billion in the 2016 campaign cycle.

The Washington Post reported on Monday that a network of 17 conservative Koch-aligned groups will shell out $889 million for national field operations, cutting-edge campaign technology and media campaigns in an effort to elect conservative candidates, build on the GOP majorities in the House and Senate and win the White House.

{mosads}According to the Post report, the figure was revealed to donors at the winter meeting of Freedom Partners, the conservative, free-market group aligned with the Kochs.

It’s more than double the $417 million the network of groups spent in 2012, and eclipses the more than $700 million the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee combined to spend during the last presidential election.

The Post said the wealthy donors contributing to the political spending bonanza are still debating whether to wade into the Republican primaries, a move that could split conservatives and has the potential to saddle the groups with potentially embarrassing losses.

At a Freedom Partners summit late Sunday night, potential GOP presidential contenders Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) defended the explosion of outside political spending as free speech.

“I believe in freedom of speech,” Rubio said. “I think that political spending and political activism is a form of protected speech.

“The people who seem to have a problem with it are the ones who only want unions to be able to do it, their friends in Hollywood to be able to do it, and their friends in the press to be able to do it,” he added.

Some Democrats, and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in particular, have sought to make the Koch brothers the face of corporate influence on the political process. Cruz called that argument “grotesque and offensive.”

“There are a bunch of Democrats who have taken as their talking point that the Koch brothers are the nexus of all evil,” he said. “Harry Reid says that every week. Let me be very clear — I think that is grotesque and offensive.”

Candidates running for the White House in 2016 are themselves gearing up to raise the estimated $1 billion they’re expected to need to run for president.