Pence woos 2016 anti-Trumpers to bankroll billion-dollar reelection

When Vice President Mike Pence appeared before some of the GOP’s most powerful donors at the iconic Pebble Beach golf course on Monday evening, he did something that would’ve been unthinkable a few years ago.

Over a surf and turf dinner, the vice president showered praise on Paul Singer, a prominent New York City hedge fund manager who spent millions of dollars in 2016 bankrolling TV ads painting Trump as “too reckless and dangerous to be president.”

But as the group of assembled Republicans — some of whom have been similarly skeptical about the president in the past — looked on, Pence praised the 74-year-old billionaire as a leading free-market thinker and thanked him for his years of financial support to the party and conservative causes.

The private dinner provides a window into a behind-the-scenes, Pence-led mission: to ensure that Republican givers who never came around to Trump in 2016 are on board for 2020. With Democrats already raking in colossal amounts of cash, Republicans estimate they’ll need to raise around $1 billion — a figure that will require the party’s donor class to be all-in. Party officials also want to deprive any would-be Trump primary challengers of the financial oxygen they’d need to mount a campaign.

As it turned out, Pence had his eye on others at Pebble Beach. That evening, the vice president met privately with Warren Stephens, a 62-year-old Arkansas investment banker who, like Singer, was among the biggest contributors to the failed effort to thwart Trump. In 2016, Stephens gave a combined $5.9 million to a pair of super PACs that spent heavily to prevent Trump from winning the Republican nomination.

(POLITICO)