The chairman of a new political action committee dedicated to preventing Hillary Clinton from winning the White House in 2016 said the organization is about to ramp up its efforts against the former secretary of state because, “I don’t think there’s any doubt she’s running.”
“I don’t think anybody has any misconception that she’s not going to run,” Ted Harvey, a Republican state senator in Colorado, said in a phone interview Monday. “There are tons of huge pro-Hillary PACS that are raising huge amounts of money right now. She is doing everything that a candidate would be doing at this point to be preparing for a full scale national campaign.”
The outfit chaired by Harvey — appropriately called the Stop Hillary PAC — has been working behind the scenes for months, but is about to become much more visible in politics in the coming days.
It announced a slew of political and fundraising hires Monday. On Wednesday, Stop Hillary PAC plans to release a video explaining its mission — though it’s not hard to guess what that is.
“I am very passionate about making sure that the Republicans take back the White House in 2016 and passionate that Hillary Clinton doesn’t get off the ground,” Harvey told The Daily Caller. “I have watched the Clinton machine for years involved in politics and the last thing I want to see is Hillary Clinton be president of the United States, especially after the Benghazi fiasco and cover up.”
“Our main goal is to define who Hillary Clinton is,” he elaborated.
Unlike other organizations with a similar goal — a group of former RNC and Romney campaign officials recently started an opposition outfit called America Rising — the organizers behind this argue that their PAC is “run by the people, not the party bosses.”
“We’re not looking for endorsements or to resurrect the Romney campaign,” another person involved in the effort said. “We’re out to win.”
Harvey said the PAC will be aggressive. “My goal is try to change the way the Republican Party has worked and managed campaigns in the past, which is sitting back and trying to raise money and then waiting until the last minute to engage in the campaign, all while the Democrats are defining who we are,” he said.
Part of their strategy: they will follow Clinton to any campaign in which she makes an endorsement. She’s expected to help out Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe this year, for example.
“We’re going to get involved in campaigns across the country,” he said. “If Hillary Clinton endorses in a governor’s race, we will be there to define that Democrat candidate. If she endorses in a congressional or U.S. Senate race, we will be there that same day defining who that candidate is.”
In terms of raising money, Harvey said their focus isn’t on “high-end donors in Washington DC” but on “small donor contributors across the country at the grassroots level.”
“We’re keeping our focus on Hillary because I think she’s the best candidate that they have and the best positioned candidate that they have,” he said. “That’s probably because their field is so weak. They’re having to go back to a 1990s era administration to try to find somebody to run.”
Harvey said they will eventually run TV and radio ads.
“The fact is she is a very dangerous liberal Democrat,” he said, “and I want to do everything I can to make sure that she’s not our next president.”