If it feels like outside groups have an enormous amount of influence on Republican groups, that's because they do. Or they at least have a huge share of the money, according to new research from Theda Skocpol, an influential Harvard University political scientist.
The Republican Party's official organs have seen the amount of money at their disposal decline by hundreds of millions of dollars. Meanwhile, outside conservative advocacy groups — mostly controlled by a small network of extremely wealthy donors — have built sprawling national political institutions with large enough staffs and financial clout to rival a weakening GOP infrastructure.
Below, for instance, you can see the rapid growth of one of these groups: Americans for Prosperity, funded by the wealthy libertarian industrialists David and Charles Koch.
The effect of this shifting locus of key resources has been to yank Republican politicians toward positions held by outside groups like AFP, Skocpol says.
"AFP leverages Republican candidates and officeholders and pulls them to the far right on political and economic issues," Skocpol says. "The Koch network exerts a strong gravitational pull on many Republican candidates and officeholders, resetting the range of economic issues and policy alternatives to which they are responsive."
Republican officials moved to the far right on economic policy
Particularly since the mid-2000s, Republican politicians have moved almost uniformly toward a set of far-right positions on tax policy and cutting government spending, according to Skocpol.
The presidential candidates' tax plans are a good shorthand illustration of this. In 2000, George W. Bush proposed a tax cut that would have amounted to $1.8 trillion in today's dollars. But by this election cycle, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump want tax cuts amounting to $8.6 trillion and $9.5 trillion respectively, according to the Tax Policy Center.
"On one economic issue after another, virtually all Republican politicians ... have moved toward unpopular far-right positions," Skocpol says. "Republican politicians universally call for massive, upward-tilted tax cuts — and such proposals have become more sweeping."
There's good evidence that these positions are to the right of even the Republican electorate. A 2015 Pew poll, for instance, found that about half of Republicans think the wealthy don't pay "their fair share" in taxes — even as their party moves to dramatically slash tax rates on top earners.
There's strong evidence that Republican politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz are to the right of even their own voters on taxes. Why? (Xinhua/Yin Bogu via Getty)
Understanding this disconnect has become one of the key puzzles for political scientists. Much of the previous research on this question has looked at the decisions of individual leaders, like leaders in Congress, or at voter polling data.
Skocpol worked with Vanessa Williamson of the Brookings Institution, Harvard Ph.D. candidate Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, and several Harvard students to take a different approach and see which institutions in the conservative orbit were gaining power and which were losing it.
They followed the money. The researchers added up the budgets of all the major organizations in the conservative political universe — including think tanks, lobbyists, and fundraising groups — and looked to see if there had been any big changes over the same time.
The Republican Party itself has gradually lost control of important resources
The researchers' first major finding was that the Republican Party has lost much of its levers of power.
In 2001, the Republican Party's various committees — at the federal, state, and local levels — had a combined budget that commanded about 50 percent of the financial resources on the right, according to Skocpol's research.
Now, by contrast, party committees control closer to 30 percent of the money in the right-wing universe. And it's not just that other groups in the conservative orbit have gotten bigger: In the aggregate, funding for Republican Party committees has fallen by more than $200 million since 2001.
"We see sharp shifts in the organizational channels through which political resources flow, with the share of resources directly controlled by the GOP party committees dropping sharply," the researchers write. "Our data reveal that the Republican Party itself has recently lost considerable ground."
These numbers furnish evidence for the widely made claim that the structure of the GOP has grown weak. And they show the opening that's been created for outside groups seeking to steer the agenda in a different direction.
"When we talk about a GOP establishment, there isn't much of one left," Skocpol says in an interview.
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http://www.vox.com/2016/4/14/11348780/gop-megadonors-koch-brothers
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