Washington, D.C. – In case you missed it, Club for Growth Foundation President David McIntosh joined Peter Lipsett on a recent episode of DonorsTrust’s Giving Ventures Podcast to discuss the evolution of the Foundation since its inception.
During the appearance, McIntosh outlined how the Foundation’s fellowship has expanded in recent years, the impact that both state level economic and missed votes scorecards have on legislatures across the country, and the relevance of various policy reports published by the Foundation.
Click here to listen to the full episode of Giving Ventures from DonorsTrust.
EXCERPTS:
Peter Lipsett: One of the classic brands, the prestige brands, in free market politics is the Club for Growth. Since 1999, it has been a critical leader in identifying candidates for office that care about free trade, limited government, tax relief, and overall, a strong, pro-growth economic climate for America. It long operated as a political operation, with a 501C4, and PAC, etc., but a few years ago launched the Club for Growth Foundation, a 501C3 educational arm to go deeper into policy, establish an economic scorecard, and, as we’re going to explore today, train future leaders. It does that with its Club for Growth Foundation Fellowship, equipping public and private leaders with the foundational principles on core issues and to unpack what all that means is Club for Growth Foundation President David McIntosh… Before we dive into the fellowship, what took you so long to have a C3? What was the impetus to have it, why now?
David McIntosh: … we started interviewing lots of candidates, probably about 300 per year, and over and over again I would hear from a good Republican how they were for cutting taxes, they wanted to keep government small, but really when I asked them why they wanted to be in Congress, they would say ‘I just want to solve problems.’ It occurred to me, having been there, that means they’re going to expand government, or use government to solve problems because they’re in government if they’re a Member of Congress. And so I realized, we have to catch people before they become public servants and teach them the principles that free-markets, individual liberty, and individual initiatives solve problems way better than the government does, and instill that into them and train them with the best thinkers in that area… we set up the C3, the fellowship you mentioned was our first program, we’ve also got the state scorecards that track how members vote in their state legislatures, and we’ve published probably a dozen or so critical papers that are on key issues that affect the policy based on free-market principles.
Peter Lipsett: I want to touch on some of those other things the Foundation is doing, but let’s go into the Fellowship. So, what is the goal of that?”
David McIntosh: The goal there is to really train the next generation of leaders and do three things: One, teach them free market principles, have them exposed to Bastiat, Milton Friedman, along with limited government principles and how good leaders can be corrupted in Washington by the way the system works in Congress to force people to vote for bigger spending bills and what you can do to try to resist that. Teach them those principles and methods and strategies for promoting individual liberty. Second, give them media training so they can be winsome representatives out in their community. These are people who are in their thirties, early forties, a few twenty-year-olds and even a few fifty-year-olds; but younger leaders who are already doing things in their communities. They’re not candidates, so the political part of the Club for Growth doesn’t interact with them. But they’re out there leading and so we want them to be able to go and do an interview, write op-eds, use social media to promote those ideas. But the third goal has turned out to be the most important. It’s creating a network of these young leaders around the country who didn’t know each other before we brought them together… That was modeled off of the Federalist Society, which I am one of the co-founders and board members there, but we created this network of conservative lawyers who went out and did projects on their own. That’s been a great success, it’s fun for me to see and hear reports about how the Fellows got together, a small group of them, and compared notes on how do you resist movements to have DEI in the city councils that they work on, or legislators who compare notes on bills that are coming up and what are the most successful arguments to have a pro-liberty position. I’m very happy that we were able to build, it was one of those situations four years ago when we started what will happen, build it and they will come. It’s really worked well.
Peter Lipsett: How many total have gone through the program?
David McIntosh: Right now, we’ve got just under 200, about 185, and we were talking with our executive director Glyn about next year’s Fellows, and we have a group of about 40-50 already that we’ve identified and want to accept into the Fellowship program.
Peter Lipsett: And who are these folks? You mentioned the separation of the Club for Growth side and what this is doing but I got to imagine, given the brand, there is perhaps some bias towards people who want to be candidates, or want to be local leaders, state leaders, national leaders. Is that true or do you want to disagree with me on that?
David McIntosh: No, it’s probably the case that that is part of their desire. It’s not part of our filtering or application process. They’ve ranged from a lot of state legislators, who want to have an education about how Congress works. But also, they have different challenges at the state level where people want them to be pro-business, which is different from them being pro free market… They’re think tank leaders, businessmen and women who are interested in government and politics, and what we do is we bring them together for these monthly Zooms with a professor. Interesting that we got started during Covid, so we couldn’t do the live meetings, and we started doing Zoom programs, and that’s turned out to be a great thing to continue even after Covid. We’ve got a couple people who are very involved in politics. One of them is a state chairman in Alabama, one of our early Fellows ran for, and became state chairman in Texas, but that is somewhat the exception. Most of them are people who are civic leaders in their town and community and in their state.
Peter Lipsett: You mentioned media training earlier. One of the things I really like about your Fellowship, the things I’ve read about it is that you are touching on some of these things that other trainings aren’t hitting, and getting conservative leaders to actually be resilient in hostile environments is a big deal. I’ve done media training before, it’s hard, and you get people saying bad things to you… So tell us about the murder boards and some of the media training that you’re putting these folks through.
David McIntosh: This was something again we learned from the Federalist Society where they trained young lawyers in the Supreme Court battles to be able to go out and do press interviews and explain that these nominees are actually good people and here’s why it’s important… We try to focus on ‘we have a positive message, freedom works, free markets work, it blesses everyone in the society.’ Lets focus on those blessings even when the negative question comes from a reporter. The murder boards are the staff here at Club for Growth, we think of the worst, nastiest questions that we can ask them and out them on the spot just so they get used to getting relaxed and comfortable coming back with an answer to that… I got a great note the other day from one of our Fellows, he’s the Utah State Treasurer, Marlo Oaks, and Marlo was called to testify before the House Ways and Means Committee about the diversity, equity, and inclusion issue and he got some pretty nasty questions from the Democrats. Later he wrote me and said ‘Look, the media training you all had me do prepared me for that. It made me comfortable, I wasn’t nervous, and it helped me know how to take a negative question and turn it back to my positive points.’ It’s great when you set up a program and you’re leading the organization to have somebody write you and say: ‘Hey, thank you. It really helped me when I was doing this.’
Peter Lipsett: Briefly, before we wrap up, you mentioned the scorecard and some of the other research that you’re doing with the Foundation. Tell us a little bit more about those particularly the scorecard. I think it’s really interesting.
David McIntosh: For a long time, Club for Growth did the Washington scorecard, for the House and Senate, that led us to evaluate which people were doing a really good job for freedom and which ones weren’t. We realized that’s all public education so the C3 can pick it up, but as we started the Foundation, we also realized there’s a missing information gap, if you will, at the state legislative effort. A lot of people, Republicans who run as conservatives, go and then they end up voting for tax increases. They vote for spending on development projects that benefit certain businesses but are costly for the taxpayer. So, we’ve started initially with about 10 states, I think we’re up to about 30, doing state legislative scorecards… We also notice that a lot of them skip votes on things like a tax increase, and it would pass by voice vote, or they wouldn’t be recorded as voting so they couldn’t be dinged by the constituents in their race. So, we started a separate scorecard on the percentage of votes that they missed… A couple of years ago we started looking to see where we’ve been in a state for 3-4 years, are the scores improving? We’ve noticed that there’s been a shift among the Republican legislators to be much more conservative in their voting record as a result of people paying attention and their constituents being able to look at the scorecard and ask them ‘Hey, why are you so low on a Club for Growth scorecard.’
Peter Lipsett: I think that’s great and you said at the beginning the difference between having a certain political label and the actual ideology behind it and being able to back that up. I think this program and everything you’re doing with the C3 really helps to improve that a lot and that’s a big deal as we go into a very actionable year.
David McIntosh: Yeah, over on the political side on the C4 and I have to say, the real blessing of the Fellowship have been what the Fellows themselves have been doing. Three of the guys from the first class decided last year to run for Congress. We knew them, interviewed them, and put them through our process. And then the C3 doesn’t do politics so we said, ‘good for you, do what you want to do’, but theC4 part of the Club for Growth picked it up. We endorsed them, raised money, and helped them get elected and now all three are members of Congress. We’ve helped a lady in South Carolina, Ellen Weaver, run against a school union rep to be Superintendent of Education and she’s a huge school choice proponent. And we helped her get elected on the political side of Club for Growth, but we knew about her because she had been one of our fellows. So, there’s a legally allowed continuity there, but we’re careful to make sure the Foundation doesn’t do politics and we tell the Fellows that. This doesn’t mean that you’re going to get a Club for Growth support if you do run for office. We’re here to educate you and have you educate the public.