American Bridge 21st Century President Pat Dennis joined The Lobby Shop podcast to discuss the unique mission and work of American Bridge, our first-ever U.S. House program, and our recent paid media ad launch.
Listen to the full episode here.
Key Quotes:
- “American Bridge 21st Century, we’re a Democratic super PAC. We’re in the first wave of Democratic super PACs to be founded after the 2010 election. So we were founded in 2011, really designed to be a centralized hub for opposition research, candidate tracking, and then a communications war room on top of that to utilize all that other stuff. And the thing we’ve added most recently, which is now a very important part of us, is we also do paid media.”
- “What we do is, to me, very important in a democracy, is we are essentially out there to pull information that is valuable to voters, that voters need to know about the candidates they’ll be electing. Of course, we’re a Democratic super PAC, we do this only about Republicans. But we do that by sending people to their campaign events to record them. You know, the classic sort of political mistake is to go to one group of people and say one thing and go to the other group of people and say something else. And we’re here to catch you doing that.”
- “You look at someone like Mark Robinson, who’s running for governor in North Carolina. If he was a generic Republican, he would be extremely strong right now… But he does not get to run as a generic Republican there because we were there throughout the entire primary pitching things that,number one, all moderates just recoiled from the absolutely bonkers things he was saying. But also we got a double whammy from it because that stuff was firing up the conservative base to vote for him in the primary.”
- “When the Dobbs decision came down, we just posted all of our oppo on every Republican nationwide on abortion, which was super important as folks started to scrub their websites, you know, sort of put out statements that contradicted their previous votes and statements. And really something we’ve been — this has made more and more sense as the media environment has changed — is just put it all out there. Now, we still have, I would say hundreds of thousands of pages of research that we don’t actually publish, but we’re publishing more than ever. So we’ve got Repro-Files.com, which is what I was talking about.”
- “The whole Trump Research Book. Like, look, if somebody just wants to look at Trump and like, learn some facts and decide that’s going to decide their vote by all means Trump Research Book is a great place to do that. But it’s also like a really important just catalog of the things that got memory-holed from his administration because, you know, it was a one week news cycle after which like thirteen more terrible things happened and having a place to look that up and when it becomes relevant again, you know, if there’s a bird flu, where we’re, that’s, you know, looking kind of weird right now. It’s kind of important to remember that this guy told us to inject bleach into our veins.”
Published: May 21, 2024 | Last Modified: May 22, 2024