How the Conservative ‘Save America Coalition’ Helped Kill Build Back Better

While Senator Joe Manchin acted alone to kill President Biden’s transformational Build Back Better bill last week, conservative activists say he benefitted from a popular pressure campaign devised by a coalition of think tanks and advocacy groups that spent millions to expose the more extreme provisions within the package.

“This didn’t happen by accident,” Stephen Moore, co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, told National Review in a recent interview. “This was a really protracted campaign, well-organized and well-financed by groups on our side — on the Right — that really just deconstructed this bill and really pounded it over and over again, especially in states like West Virginia and Arizona.”

In September, Moore joined with Larry Kudlow and Brooke Rollins, who is president and CEO of the America First Policy Institute, to launch the Save America Coalition — a collection of roughly 70 conservative groups that held meetings twice a week to strategize.

The coalition, which takes its name from a phrase Kudlow coined on his Fox Business show – “Save America, kill the bill,” — first set out to spend $10 million on its efforts but has come in closer to $20 million as of last week, Rollins told National Review.

When they launched the coalition in September, they brought “every major organization on our side to the table” and had policy teams focused on several key categories that reflected the “more egregious items” that Build Back Better represented, including provisions drawn from the Green New Deal and socialized medicine.

Twenty groups have helped lead the “Save America” Coalition, including Americans for Prosperity, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Americans for Tax Reform, Center for Renewing America, Committee to Unleash Prosperity, Freedom Works, Heritage Action, Texas Public Policy Foundation, Goldwater Institute, Independent Women’s Forum and Job Creators Network.

Rollins said she first realized while working as president and CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an Austin-based free-market think tank, that if conservative groups put differences aside and worked together for a common cause they could make a powerful change.

The very first call the coalition held, Rollins remembers saying, “If we do this right and if we put all the egos aside and we don’t worry about who gets the credit, it’s a new day for our entire movement.”

Knowing what was at stake and what the other side was capable of — Democrats are estimated to have spent between $50 to 100 million building public support for the bill — Rollins told the group it was “time to really come together.”

The coalition did polling nearly everyday with Scott Rasmussen to find the “weak underbelly of the bill,” Moore said, and joined together to run millions of dollars worth of advertising to “pound the airwaves” in West Virginia and Arizona where the two senators who were most likely to oppose the bill — Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) — are from.

“Everyone thought it was inevitable” that the bill would pass, Rollins said. In her initial conversations with Moore and Kudlow they discussed whether they should just focus on stripping the bill of some of its worst provisions, including the addition of 80,000 new Internal Revenue Service agents or the climate corps.

“Ultimately within 30 seconds both Steve and I sort of went to each other and said, “No, this bill, even with the worst of it peeled away, fundamentally transforms our country in a way we may never, never be able to come back from.”

The coalition pushed the message that BBB was bad for West Virginians and even offered support for Manchin while he was attacked by the left “pretty impressively,” Moore said. They held a “Republicans for Manchin” event last week before Manchin made his announcement.

The coalition also crafted a number of studies and reports showing the negative impacts the bill would have on the states and on the country as a whole, and shared notes with pollsters and key staff on Capitol Hill.

A huge part of the efforts was just educating people on what was actually in the bill, including using a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal last weekend.

While Democrats kept arguing that if people truly knew what was in the bill, they would love it, the coalition found that the more it educated people, the more support for BBB declined, Moore said.

“This is why it failed, because this is still a center-right country,” he added. “And people don’t want trillions of dollars of more spending.”

“People who were opposed to the bill were much more intensely opposed to it than people were in favor of it and we tapped into that,” he said, adding that Manchin was “bombarded” with phone calls from his constituents who opposed the bill.

“It was quite a conservative victory and it didn’t happen by accident,” he said. “It was really, I think, a result of this coalition effort.”

Despite being outspent, Moore said working with state think tanks, including the Texas Public Policy Foundation, enabled the coalition to have a better message than Democrats did. They used polling to strategically find issues that resonated with people, including funding for increased IRS enforcement, money for illegal immigrants, the state and local tax deduction for millionaires and billionaires, and a slate of welfare payments with no work requirements.

The group also hit an “extremely unpopular” provision in the bill that would have given a $2.5 billion handout to trial lawyers in the form of a new tax write-off.

“Finding the weak spots and really penetrating those and pounding them, I think, really had a big impact,” Moore said. “I don’t think most people six months ago would have thought that this bill was defeatable.”

But Kudlow argues the “hero of ‘Save America, kill the bill’” is Manchin.

“Make no mistake about that,” Kudlow said. “Joe Manchin, who is very brave, stood up for his principles and was absolutely consistent for the last six months.”

Still, Kudlow said the content of the bill made it “relatively easy” to pull the coalition together.

A trimmed down version of the legislation may yet pass in the New Year but for now, the folks behind the Save America coalition are savoring a hard won victory.

‘This bill was so unpopular but it was so important,” he said. “They want to transform this into some left-wing, progressive, woke country and that is not what people want and that is not what the conservative activist community wants.”

“This was all the marbles on the line. This was the left-wing, socialist vision and we wanted to beat it,” he added. “As it turns out, so did everybody else.”