As Republican leaders in Washington grappled after the election with their failure to unseat President Obama, Dick DeVos, one of Michigan's wealthiest men, began dialing up state lawmakers in Lansing.
Although Mr. Obama won Michigan handily, Republicans had kept control of the Legislature. A union-backed ballot measure to enshrine collective bargaining rights in the State Constitution was defeated, thanks to an aggressive campaign against it that was financed in part by $2 million of DeVos family money.
The time had come, Mr. DeVos told Republican lawmakers, for the bold stroke they were considering: a law banning requirements that workers pay union dues or fees, in the state where the modern American labor movement was born. If the lawmakers later found themselves facing recalls or tough re-election fights, Mr. DeVos told them, he would be there to help.
"That was when I started to say, you know what, this thing could happen," Mr. DeVos said on Friday. "These people really are serious and committed."
The lawmakers and Gov. Rick Snyder, who is also a Republican, rapidly approved the legislation and delivered a body blow to the labor movement.
Yet much of the groundwork for the quick victory was laid months and years before by a loose network of donors, strategists and conservative political groups that has sought to win Republican control of legislatures around the country and limit unions' political power. Their bet: that money invested in local elections would yield concrete policy victories that could not be had in Washington.
Where the big-spending conservative groups active in this year's presidential race had little to show for their millions of dollars, the state efforts were strikingly successful. While Mr. Obama was winning onetime red states like Virginia and swing states like Michigan and Ohio, Republicans made large gains in state offices in many of the same battlegrounds. Starting next year, Republicans will have one-party control in almost half of the state capitals in the country.
In Michigan, the drive to ban mandatory union payments, known by supporters as "right to work," included national conservative groups like Americans for Prosperity, founded by the philanthropists David and Charles Koch, and a potent coalition of local business groups and donors led by Mr. DeVos, whose billionaire father, Richard DeVos Sr., a founder of Amway, has attended the Kochs' twice-yearly gatherings of conservative donors and leaders.
The DeVos family contributed more than $1 million to the state Republican Party this year, about a third of all its donations. When unions sought the constitutional amendment that would have guaranteed their right to bargain, known as Proposal 2, the DeVos family gave at least $2 million to a committee fighting the effort. The casino mogul Sheldon Adelson contributed another $2 million. Harold Simmons, a Texas industrialist, gave $500,000.
When the union-backed referendum was defeated, the Michigan Freedom Fund, a group run by an employee of a DeVos family company, started a $1 million advertising campaign to support the legislation banning mandatory union payments. Americans for Prosperity, which set up a local chapter in Michigan five years ago and held several conferences for advocates this year, deployed volunteers to make thousands of phone calls around the state, pressing Michigan residents to call lawmakers.
"The air cover helped lawmakers do what they wanted to do," said Jase Bolger, a Republican who is the speaker of the Michigan House of Representatives. "There was a lot of caution in starting."
The effort duplicated other recent successes in the Midwest, where conservatives have seized on the struggling economy and population loss to push for smaller state budgets, lower taxes and laws limiting unions. In Indiana, where Democrats lost their majority in the State House of Representatives after the 2010 election, Republicans enacted the region's first right-to-work law early this year.
In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker, backed by groups like Americans for Prosperity, signed into law limits on collective bargaining and survived a recall effort in June, drawing large contributions from Mr. DeVos, Mr. Adelson and Bob Perry, a Texas homebuilder and "super PAC" donor.
Voters in the region have "seen economic liberalism in its full maturity, and they haven't necessarily liked what they were seeing," said Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Republican Donors Make Gains in States
Dengan url
http://homepageglobal.blogspot.com/2012/12/republican-donors-make-gains-in-states.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
Republican Donors Make Gains in States
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
Republican Donors Make Gains in States
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar