Club for Growth President Chris Chocola says Republican strategist Karl Rove is more concerned about the packaging of GOP candidates than their political philosophy, a position he believes dismisses how voters feel about a candidate’s “core beliefs.”
“What Karl Rove and some of the establishment groups care about is only the brand,” Chocola told CBS’ “Face to Face” Thursday. “They only care if someone’s a Republican or not. They don’t really care what their core beliefs are.”
Chocola, whose own limited government group just targeted nine GOP congressmen for defeat because their voting records aren’t conservative enough, was referring to Rove’s Conservative Victory Project, which plans to target conservative Republican candidates whose views may be too extreme to get them elected.
Chocola says there’s a difference between how Club for Growth measures candidates and how Rove does it.
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“The only thing that matters to us is what the candidate believes and whether they have core beliefs based on pro-growth policies,” Chocola says. “Voters care what candidates’ core beliefs are.”
He compares choosing a candidate to choosing food. “If you go to the grocery store and you have a box of cereal that just has that brand, but you don’t know what’s inside, you’re not going to be too enthusiastic about buying it,” Chocola says.
“But if you know what’s inside every single time, you’re going to become a loyal supporter of that brand. I think they’ve gotten the brand loyalty kind of backwards. The principles and the beliefs create the brand, not the other way around.”
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