Oil billionaires and Americans for Prosperity founders Charles and David Koch have bankrolled efforts in cities and counties across the country—from Little Rock and Phoenix to southeast Michigan and central Utah—to fuel a fight against public transit.
As The New York Times reports, the effort is an offshoot of the Koch brothers’ national crusade for lower taxes and smaller government. At the heart of their effort is a network of activists who use a data service built by the Kochs, called i360, that helps them identify and rally voters who are inclined to their conservative worldview. It is a particularly powerful version of the technologies used by major political parties.
In Little Rock, Americans for Prosperity made more than 39,000 calls and knocked on nearly 5,000 doors to fight a proposed sales-tax increase worth $18 million to fund a bus and trolley network. In Utah, it handed out $50 gift cards at a grocery store, an amount it said represented what a proposed sales tax increase to fund transit would cost county residents per year.
In Nashville, Koch-financed activists are finding tremendous success. Early polling suggested that the $5.4 billion transit plan would easily pass. It was backed by the city’s popular mayor and a coalition of businesses. Its supporters had outspent the opposition, and Nashville was choking on cars.
But the outcome of the May 1 ballot stunned the city: a landslide victory for the anti-transit camp, which attacked the plan as a colossal waste of taxpayers’ money.
