A well-funded Republican super-PAC is intensifying its assault on GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump, preparing to hit the airwaves in New Hampshire and Iowa.
By the time its anti-Trump campaign is done, Our Principles PAC will get its messages before nearly every Republican voter in both Iowa and New Hampshire, founder Katie Packer said Thursday in a telephone interview with The Hill.
{mosads}”We are very confident that virtually every voter in New Hampshire and Iowa will see the ads [before voting],” Packer said.
“This is new money,” she said when asked whether this campaign should be counted within the more than $1 million of anti-Trump ads already disclosed to the Federal Election Commission by her super-PAC.
A larger but undisclosed amount is being used to run a new ad that targets Trump’s contradictory stances on immigration. Showing he supported “amnesty” before flipping to a tougher stance, the ad reinforces the group’s previous attacks on Trump’s past liberal positions through digital ads, radio and direct mail.
Packer, who was deputy campaign manager for Republican nominee Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential race, says her super-PAC has another “seven-figure” buy planned in New Hampshire.
She would not disclose the super-PAC’s donors and said she felt compelled to establish a new group to take on Trump because the GOP establishment has been unwilling to do so.
Packer is especially frustrated with pro-Jeb Bush super-PAC Right to Rise because the group has spent much of its $103 million attacking Bush’s establishment rival Marco Rubio and nearly none hitting Trump.
Asked whether she was worried that by hurting Trump she was ultimately helping Ted Cruz become the GOP nominee, Packer paused.
“I am not focused on that,” she said. “I believe personally that if either Ted Cruz or Donald Trump are the nominee, I think we will probably lose in November.
“I think they are both very weak candidates for our party. … But the problem with Donald Trump is I think he’s downright dangerous and he would basically destroy the Republican Party. If you nominate a guy who abandons all the views we have advocated for the last few decades, then we don’t have a party.”
Despite Cruz’s hard-line views, “nobody could argue that he’s not a conservative,” Packer added.
This story was updated at 6:01 p.m.