Anonymous “Progressive Century Project” attacks Democrats on Gaza in campaign’s final stretch
Likely Republican astroturfing operation targets Gallego, Baldwin in key Senate races
Young voters in Wisconsin and Arizona are being flooded with “pro-Gaza” ads attacking Democratic U.S. Senate candidates for supporting Israel in the campaign’s final week. What the voters may not know: the ads are likely paid for and created by Republican operatives.
On October 15th, someone named Gary Backus filed a statement of organization with the FEC for a new Super PAC called “The Progressive Century Project.” The timing is noteworthy: new PACs that raise and spend after the 16th of October do not have to file reports disclosing their donors until after Election Day.
On October 19th, the group filed its first expenditure report for over $113,718 on text messaging and direct mail that supports the Green Party candidate for U.S Senate in Arizona and opposes Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego. Since then, they have filed two more similar expenditure reports (see here and here), bringing their current total spend in the Arizona race to $342,154.
Voters have already seen mailers landing in their mailboxes, which urge them to support the Green Party candidate, Eduardo Quintana. “End the genocide!” “Shrink our bloated military budget!” several of the mailers read.
Quintana has condemned the mailers and stated they are not associated with his campaign.
Then, last Thursday, the PAC filed a report noting a $247,000 digital advertising spend against Sen. Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin’s competitive U.S. Senate race. Some of that has already been spent on Facebook, where the group is running video ads from a bare-bones Facebook page targeting voters under 34 years of age.
They’re also running similar ads on Snapchat, a platform where younger voters spend a lot of time communicating with friends. Here is one ad that is currently running on that platform. According to the Snap Political Ads Library, the group is using targeting data provided by i360, a Koch brothers-backed data vendor popular among conservatives.
Because of the last-minute nature of this campaign, I can find surprisingly little information about who’s behind this effort. Even the PAC’s vendors are shrouded in secrecy. Progressive Century Project has thus far relied on two anonymous vendors to carry out its electioneering. For text messaging and direct mail services in Arizona, the PAC paid a vendor called “Progressive Impact, LLC,” which is a limited liability company registered in Delaware. For the anti-Baldwin digital ads, it used “PMG Strategies,” another LLC with little public information about it. The listed addresses for both vendors are random post office boxes in Illinois and Wyoming.
Exploiting the conflict in Israel and Gaza for political gain has been a popular tactic among Republicans this election cycle. There has already been lots of reporting about Future Coalition PAC, a cynical, targeted GOP effort to attack Kamala Harris in key Arab American and Jewish communities. My assumption is that the Progressive Century Project is attempting to do the same.