FIRST ON FOX BUSINESS: A recently formed conservative group that’s spending an initial seven-figures to target former President Donald Trump in two crucial early voting states in the GOP nominating calendar is upping its game with a new spot.
The ad by a super PAC titled Win it Back features a one-time Trump voter who is not supporting the former president as he makes his third straight White House run. Trump continues to hold a commanding lead in the latest GOP presidential primary polls both in the early voting states and nationally.
Win it Back has ties and shares some limited staffing with the politically influential and fiscally conservative group the Club for Growth. David McIntosh, a former conservative congressman and the longtime Club for Growth president, is listed as the designated agent for Win it Back.
McIntosh and the Club for Growth have had an up and down relationship with Trump. They opposed Trump as he ran for the White House in 2016 before embracing him as an ally. In the 2022 election cycle, the former president and the Club teamed up in some high-profile GOP primaries but clashed over combustible Senate nomination battles in Alabama, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
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Trump was not invited in early March to the Club’s annual donor retreat, which was held just a few miles from the former president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, former ambassador and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, former Vice President Mike Pence, and entrepreneur and political commentator Vivek Ramaswamy – who are all currently challenging Trump for the GOP nomination, spoke at the confab.
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Trump pummeled McIntosh and the Club, referring to them as “The Club for NO Growth,” claiming they are “an assemblage of political misfits, globalists, and losers,” and saying he did not need their support.
When asked why Trump was not invited, McIntosh said at the time in a Fox Digital interview that “what we decided we wanted our members and donors to do is…. They know Trump, and they know his record. They like his record as president, but they’re not sure he can win.”
“I supported his agenda when he was in the White House. We want to be able to win in 2024, and we’re going to continue to be the biggest conservative super PAC and be out there supporting great champions,” McIntosh emphasized.
Win it Back isn’t the only group on the right taking aim at Trump.
Americans for Prosperity, an influential conservative public advocacy group linked to billionaire Charles Koch, is also expected to launch efforts to try and prevent Trump from securing the GOP nomination. The group recently announced it raised over $70 million to invest in political races.
And on a smaller scale, the Republican Accountability PAC, a group founded by anti-Trump Republicans in 2020, is taking aim at the former president with a six-figure ad buy in Iowa.
The voter portrayed in the Win it Back spot notes that she used to support Trump, but added “I still don’t like when Trump goes about attacking people within our own party. We are a family. We are a Republican Party. But he sees it as his family. Not really a family. Not really a team.”
The woman, who’s identified as a Republican primary voter, went on to argue that “2024 is just about him saying ‘I’m back.’ It’s going to make it tough for us to win. My hope is that we will have a candidate that can beat Biden.”
Win it Back tells Fox News that the spot will run in Iowa and South Carolina, which hold the first and third contests in the Republican Party’s presidential primary and caucus calendar.
And the group says the commercial’s the second in a $3.6 million TV and digital ad blitz in both states that launched on July 11 and runs through the end of the month.
Will efforts by Win it Back, Americans for Prosperity, and other conservative groups that are targeting the former president make a dent in Trump’s broad support among Republican primary voters?
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“There’s a certain amount of voters in New Hampshire and the other early states that will respond to someone saying this is a candidate that can beat [President] Biden,” New Hampshire Institute of Politics executive director Neil Levesque told Fox News.
But Levesque emphasized that “whether this is something that’s going to take votes away from Trump in the long run and erode what is a serious lead is the big question mark.”