Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer’s super PAC, Next Gen Climate, wants to implement a “haircut strategy” against Republican campaigns in order to depress conservative turnout.
“Our Republican Haircut Strategy — a precision focus on a specific harm in target Republican markets — we will seek to degrade Republican performance,” Steyer’s super PAC explains in a memo obtained by Politico that the RNC flagged as outlining a “voter suppression” tactic.
“The election results in many states may be as narrow as a few thousand votes, so we sought to determine whether we could have an impact at the margins of the race by dampening Republican enthusiasm levels,” the memo says.
“Our opinion research has identified issues potentially relevant to Republican voter enthusiasm that have a common denominator — the Republican candidates side with their corporate donors against the tangible interests of Republican voters,” it also says.
“It is disappointing that liberal billionaire Tom Steyer would rather convince people not to vote at all rather than engage in a real policy debate. Of course, if voters knew he was spending millions of dollars on behalf of Democrats to protect his far-left anti-energy policies, they’d lose,” Reince Priebus says in a statement to National Review Online. “So I guess he ran out of better options.”