The radical anti-tax Club for Growth announced Thursday that it was endorsing businessman Chris Putnam’s primary bid against Texas Rep. Kay Granger, who is the top Republican on the powerful Appropriations Committee.
The Club soon said that it would launch a seven-figure ad campaign against Granger, which Politico’s Alex Isenstadt reports is expected to start this week. Whoever wins the GOP nod on March 3 should have no trouble prevailing in the general election for Texas’ 12th District, a Fort Worth-based seat that backed Donald Trump 63-33.
While the Club once focused on denying renomination to incumbents it considered insufficiently conservative on fiscal issues (in 2013, it even threw up a site called PrimaryMyCongressman.com), the group has almost completely turned its attention in recent years towards aiding like-minded candidates in open seat primaries and in general elections. As Isenstadt notes, Granger is the first GOP incumbent that the Club has targeted since 2016, when it unsuccessfully went after Illinois Rep. John Shimkus.
Granger, though, is exactly the type of Republican the Club has long detested. As we’ve noted before, the 12-term congresswoman has played a vital role in the creation and funding of Panther Island, an expensive development project in Fort Worth that has gone far over budget and appears to be nowhere close to being finished. Granger’s son, J.D. Granger, also ran the initiative until he was replaced after an independent review released last summer argued that leadership changes needed to be made.
The congresswoman’s opponents have already signaled that they’ll use Panther Island to attack Granger. The Club’s president, David McIntosh, said this week that his group would focus on her work securing federal money for the project, while Putnam has labeled Panther Island “a boondoggle.”
Granger will be tough to defeat here, though. Trump endorsed the incumbent last year, and Granger has already launched ads tying herself to the White House. Granger’s campaign also released a poll from mid-December that gave her a massive 62-16 lead over Putnam, and the challenger has yet to respond with contradictory numbers. However, an expensive ad campaign from Club could weaken her and give Putnam more of an opening ahead of the March primary.
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