Gay Rights Activists Pour Money Into Iowa Races

As the McCain camp begins to implode and lay the blame at the feet of Sarah Palin, we here at IDA join Steve Deace and the Iowa Family Policy Council in encouraging Iowa conservatives to focus their last bit of energy and attention on local Iowa races.

Last year (March 2007) an article appeared in The Atlantic featuring Colorado gay rights activist Tim Gill and his crusade to turn state legislatures across the country to Democratic control in an effort to promote gay rights. This article details Gill’s successful effort to change control of the Iowa legislature and oust Danny Carroll, former speaker pro tempore of the Iowa House who is now running again for his old seat.

See the following excerpts from this article to see Gill’s strategy. Note that he works with both liberals AND moderate Republicans to advance his agenda:

Gill’s principal interest is gay equality. His foundations have given about $115 million to charities. His serious involvement in politics is a more recent development, though geared toward the same goal. In 2000, he gave $300,000 in political donations, which grew to $800,000 in 2002, $5 million in 2004, and a staggering $15 million last year, almost all of it to state and local campaigns.

 But several years ago, a growing number of his peers began to sense that they were playing in the wrong arena. “A lot of [gay donors] are driven, cycle to cycle, by the notion that there’s going to be an epiphany—that one day they’ll wake up and accept us,” he said. “But this group had spent millions of dollars on philanthropy, and yet woken up the morning after the election to see gay-marriage bans enacted all across the country.”

Together, Gill and Trimpa decided to eschew national races in favor of state and local ones, which could be influenced in large batches and for much less money. Most antigay measures, they discovered, originate in state legislatures. Operating at that level gave them a chance to “punish the wicked,” as Gill puts it—to snuff out rising politicians who were building their careers on antigay policies, before they could achieve national influence.

Gill’s idea was to identify vulnerable candidates like Danny Carroll and move quickly to eliminate them without the burden of first having to win the consent of some risk-averse large organization or board of directors. Another element of this strategy is stealth. Revealing targets only after an election makes it impossible for them to fight back and sends a message to other politicians that attacking gays could put them in the crosshairs.

Convinced his approach was sound, Gill decided to go big. When I visited his headquarters last fall, liberals were working alongside conservatives on a list compiled by his top consultants—one a national Democratic consultant, the other a former Karl Rove protégé—of seventy races in which a key antigay candidate was vulnerable or the outcome of a race was likely to affect control of the legislature.

In the 2006 elections, on a level where a few thousand dollars can decide a close race, Gill’s universe of donors injected more than $3 million, providing in some cases more than 20 percent of a candidate’s or organization’s budget. On Election Day, fifty of the seventy targeted candidates were defeated, Danny Carroll among them; and out of the thirteen states where Gill and his allies invested, four—Iowa, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Washington—saw control of at least one legislative chamber switch to the Democratic Party. (In Massachusetts, Travis decided to retire rather than seek reelection.)

One component of Gill’s strategy includes courting that element of the Republican Party that’s open to compromise, while at the same time making clear that gay bashing will now come at a price.

Seems like Mr. Gill has figured out to promote his agenda and that agenda starts in state and local races. While social conservatives have been more concerned with national races, Gill and his people have been pulling the rug out from underneath the people of our state. Iowans should be outraged at the amount of money being poured into Iowa races by Gill and people associated with him. In fact, the opponents of several of the candidates that we support here on IDA receive money from people associated with Gill.

To see how much money Gill and Co. have poured into Iowa races go to Let Us Vote Iowa.

Yesterday CBN ran a fabulous piece on Gill and his influence on state races. Danny Carroll and Chuck Hurley from the Iowa Family Policy Council are interviewed. You can see the clip here. As you go vote, remember what Gill says in the CBN clip

“we successfully flipped legislatures around this country from Republican control to Democratic control and the net result is always good for gay people. Always.”