Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg and his Internet-billionaire friends really don’t want Donald Trump to be president because he will block their plans to increase immigration above the current inflow of 1 million people per year, according to a report from Politico.
Including Trump, “there are several [GOP candidates] who are out of the mainstream… From a policy situation if we nominate any of those people we are going to lose. No two ways about it,” said the director of the billionaires’ lobbying group, Fwd.us, which also plans to hit pro-American House Representatives.
Fwd.us is launching a multi-pronged campaign that could spend as much as $10 million over the next year on digital and TV ads, research and polling, according to plans first shared with POLITICO. The initiative includes an expansion of its ground operation into 12 states, focusing on presidential battlegrounds and targeted House seats held by Republicans.
The push comes as GOP front-runner Donald Trump has campaigned on mass deportations and building a wall across the U.S.-Mexico border…
Fwd.us is looking to counter the anti-immigration reform rhetoric in the GOP primary and lay the groundwork for an overhaul of the country’s immigration laws in early 2017 once the next president takes office. Formed in 2013 by tech giants including Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman and Eric Schmidt, among others, the group accounted for 75 percent of all paid media spent in 2013 and 2014 to support immigration reform and had field operations in 29 states and 149 target House districts at the peak of the debate.
“It’s a good time to inform people of the stakes,” said Rob Jesmer, a veteran Republican political operative and campaign manager at Fwd.us. “There is a lot of focus on one candidate, frankly,” he added of Trump, “(but) there are several who are out of the mainstream. … From a policy situation if we nominate any of those people we are going to lose. No two ways about it.”
In 2013 and 2014, Jesmer—a former director of the GOP Senators’ campaign-funding committee—relied heavily on skewed polls to persuade some Republicans to back his bosses’ failed push to import 33 million more wage-reducing, productivity-cutting, welfare-supported workers who double as taxpayer-subsidized consumers. That push failed because it was so unpopular in all corners of America that GOP voters in Virginia ejected the GOP’s Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor in his June 2014 primary, while other voters ejected five Zuckerberg-backed Democratic Senators in November.
In fact, the bill was so unpopular that Trump jumped into the wide-open 2016 race, which he is now leading because of his promise to build a border wall and to enforce immigration laws.
Zuckerberg is worth $38 billion, less than half the net-worth of fellow Fwd.us founder, Bill Gates, but slightly more than half as rich as a major shareholder in the New York Times, Carlos Slim. The median net-worth of American adults is roughly $45,000.
For 2016, the Fwd.us group is armed with some of the billionaires’ cash, plus a new set of skewed polls that portray Trump’s popular promise to enforce popular immigration laws as “mass deportation” and a “police state.”
Initial polling by Fwd.us focuses squarely on pushing back against Trump’s plan for mass deportation.
Voters prefer a candidate who supports a pathway to citizenship over one who supports mass deportation, 74 percent to 18 percent, according to a survey conducted in October by Global Strategy Group that queried 600 likely general election voters in Colorado, Florida and Nevada.
Many other polls say otherwise.
The poll also found that 55 percent of swing voters and 46 percent of voters who self-identified “not very conservative” oppose the “imposition of a U.S. police state.”
That’s a shocker. Read it all here.
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