Super PAC takes last-minute aim at Donald Trump in Iowa
Iowans who flip through the Sunday newspapers will find a page dedicated to bashing Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for lacking consistent conservative views. It is part of an effort to stop the front-runner just one day before the Iowa caucuses by a new anti-Trump super PAC, Our Principles PAC.
The PAC, founded in January by Katie Packer, a former top staffer to 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney, is running a full-page ad in the Des Moines Register and other papers across the state. Following heavy TV, online, and digital advertising, it just one piece of the PAC's anti-Trump effort.
"I think you would be surprised by how little the average person knows. They don't know that he has taken incredibly liberal positions," Packer said.
The PAC also went door-to-door in Iowa on Friday to distribute 100,00 voter guides. Atop a photo of Trump at Trump Tower, the voter guide and the ad in the papers say, "Do we really know him?" It then hits the billionaire for non-conservative views on taxes, immigration, healthcare, the Second Amendment and right to life.
Because the super PAC was established this quarter, its donors do not have to be disclosed until April, and Packer would not say who its main donors were -- only that there was a lot of interest in donating.
The TV ads, costing more than $1 million, go after Trump specifically on immigration. Packer, the chairman of the PAC, called Trump's campaign "chameleon-like" and said the ad is meant to demonstrate his real positions to voters.
"This shocking new ad raises new questions -- thanks to Donald Trump's own words -- about whether the voters of Iowa can trust him, even when he makes tough statements about his signature issue of immigration," Packer said. "Trump's entire campaign claims that he 'says it like it is', yet we are finding that over and over, on core Republican issues, Trump says different things to different audiences."