Super PACs today are known for pumping millions of dollars into political ads bashing opposing candidates, but one Super PAC holds the crown for liberal opposition politics in the modern era.
American Bridge 21st Century was the creation of David Brock, who started his career as a right-wing journalist committed to writing hit-pieces on liberal politicians. Through the 1990s, he targeted the Clintons and wrote a book critical of Anita Hill, who accused Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. While working on another book about Hillary Clinton, Brock had a kind of conversion and decided he was challenging the wrong people. He switched sides and brought his track-and-attack skills to the liberal camp to use against conservatives.
His first newly blue project was Media Matters for America, a watchdog of conservative media giants like Fox News intended to highlight hypocrisy and falsehoods. Brock used much of that same model to found American Bridge 21st Century in 2010. The Super PAC intended to compile opposition research against conservatives to help liberals win elections.
Tracking and attacking
At first, unlike most of the leading Super PACs active today, American Bridge made very few independent expenditures. Most of its money went toward staffing its vast tracker network: Starting in the 2012 election cycle, American Bridge trackers would follow Republican candidates and elected officials to every public appearance they made and monitor their public comments to build an opposition research portfolio on each of them. Their biggest get of that year was a quote from Todd Akin, the Republican Senate candidate in Missouri, defending his no-exceptions stance on abortions by saying women won’t become pregnant in the case of “legitimate rape.” The quote was quickly clipped and disseminated by an American Bridge tracker, went viral, and sunk Akin’s campaign, demonstrating the impact the Super PAC’s tracker system could have.
The group spent only around $330,000 on independent expenditures, but raised just under $10 million in that cycle, with major donations coming from George Soros ($1 million), philanthropist Anne Earhart ($850,000), the AFSCME union ($575,000), and Democratic mega-donor Paul Egerman ($400,000).
After the Akin quote, conservative campaigns got wise to the tracker system and tightened their public messaging in the 2014 midterms. Leading into the 2016 presidential race, Brock would use another project through American Bridge to keep their opposition operation fresh.
In 2013, he started Correct the Record, which intended to counter disinformation about Hillary Clinton online. Because the hybrid PAC was web-based, Brock argued it should be allowed to coordinate with the Clinton campaign without violating FEC rules. Correct the Record would hire former Clinton advisors like Burns Strider, and in 2015, it broke off from American Bridge to run its own operation.
Brock and American Bridge continued to provide opposition research for Clinton’s camp, hitting Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders in the press when they could. Ahead of the Republican National Convention, the Super PAC funded a pop-up museum featuring all of Donald Trump’s failed businesses and highlighting his odd merchandise. American Bridge continued to spend most of its money on staff and had most of the same top individual donors as 2012, except now, its biggest donor was its own 501(c)(4) arm, which provided more than $3 million that cycle.
Taking on Trump
After Clinton lost, Brock announced he had launched yet another oppo-research operation: the Trump war room. American Bridge would monitor Trump’s transition and early days in office for corruption and improprieties, and continued to fundraise as a counter to the wave of conservatism. The group’s work culminated in a more than 1,000-page file of opposition research on Trump that it released to the public ahead of the 2020 election—and later, a file on Vice President Mike Pence, shortly before his debate.
In this most recent cycle, American Bridge’s financial records looked much closer to that of a typical super PAC. The group hired Michael Bloomberg’s digital ad firm Hawkfish to produce web ads to run in key swing states bashing Trump’s record. The group made just under $60 million in independent expenditures, nearly all of it on web ads, making it one of the top outside spending groups of 2020. The donor rolls included many familiar faces, but now, American Bridge was firmly embedded in the liberal dark money and outside spending network: Chief among its donors was, again, its own nonprofit arm ($11.1 million) and dark money group Sixteen Thirty Fund ($4.2 million).
Like many liberal Super PACs in recent months, American Bridge has shifted its energy toward promoting President Biden’s stimulus package and generating excitement for Democrats ahead of the 2022 midterms. No doubt American Bridge will be back to do its oppo-thing when the 2024 Republican presidential candidate arrives, but for now, the team is focused on promoting the positives for a change.
