Meet the DC insider who put Marlin Stutzman over the top
Club for Growth president David McIntosh talks with Fort Wayne Politics about his super PAC’s decisive ads against Tim Smith and Wendy Davis in the Congressional campaign’s closing days
An aide handed his iPhone to Jim Banks. There was something on it he thought the four-term Congressman would want to see.
Banks had just wrapped up a series of interviews with local media outlets at Allen County GOP Headquarters in downtown Fort Wayne after formally declaring victory1 in the Republican primary for Indiana’s open U.S. Senate seat.
He looked at the phone’s screen. The Notes app was open, showing a list of the latest vote totals in the race to replace Banks as 3rd District Congressman.
He saw that with 19,727 votes counted, Marlin Stutzman — the man who held the seat prior to Banks — was ahead of Wendy Davis by less than a percentage point.
Hours later, Stutzman squeaked out a victory over Davis and second-place finisher Tim Smith, who fell short of winning by just over a thousand votes.
Fifteen feet away from Banks, David McIntosh, the man whose ads against Davis and Smith had helped Stutzman win, stood in the back of the room, mostly unnoticed.
What the other attendees didn’t seem to realize is that, outside of Donald Trump, the former three-term Congressman (1995-2001) and special assistant to President Ronald Reagan standing in their midst might just be the most powerful person in Republican primary politics.
Maybe that’s because it’s not McIntosh’s style to seek the spotlight.
“I try to be humble about what I do,” he told me in an exclusive interview Tuesday night after Banks’ address.
Since 2014, the Kendallville native has been president of the Club for Growth, a DC-based organization which Axios called “one of the most consequential groups within Republican politics.”
The Club for Growth’s super PAC, Club for Growth Action, is believed to be the largest independent super PAC on the GOP side. In the 2022 election cycle, Club for Growth and its affiliated organizations spent around $150 million to influence House and Senate races, and that number will likely be even larger in 2024.
In Northeast Indiana, Club for Growth spent more than $750,000 in support of Marlin Stutzman, according to a release they put out after Stutzman was declared the winner.
McIntosh said getting behind Stutzman wasn’t a difficult decision for them.
“One of the biggest factors was [Stutzman’s] score on the Club for Growth’s [annual economic] scorecard [when he was in Congress]. He was a ‘defender of economic freedom,’ which means you’re 90 percent and higher,” McIntosh told me. “I think he averaged 93 percent over his career. And that says something.”
Stutzman’s voting record during his three terms in Congress meant it was going to be nearly impossible for any other candidate to earn the Club for Growth’s endorsement.
“Look, if somebody has that good of a score and they’re running again,” said McIntosh, “we really should get behind them.”
He emphasized that he doesn’t personally decide which candidates the Club for Growth will support, but does play a key role in that process.
“We have a whole mechanism, [an] interview process. We do polling. And then my board of directors vote on it,” he told me. “So it’s a team effort.”
Backing Stutzman meant the Club for Growth would use their super PAC’s unlimited funds to try to take out the two biggest threats to his candidacy: Davis and Smith.
Last week, they ran an ad that called Davis “Woke Wendy” and “DEI Davis,” both terms that are toxic to many GOP primary voters.
It was built around audio of her speaking at a non-partisan forum on religious freedom that was aired in early 2020 on WBOI, Northeast Indiana’s public radio station.
McIntosh, who was one of the co-founders of the influential Federalist Society — a group that sparked the conservative judicial movement — said he was shocked by some of Davis’ answers in that recording.
“We’ve tried to have judges that didn’t think of the Constitution as a living, breathing document,” he told me. “Her position on that told me she doesn’t have good instincts for what a conservative would do in Congress.”
McIntosh said he worried that if elected, Davis would kowtow to pressure to “forget conservatism, vote for the spending” in order to get re-elected.
Davis did her best to fight back against the ad, alleging that it violated a recent Indiana law against using digitally altered media in campaigns. “The entire ad is fabricated,” Davis told WPTA after it started running. “The entire ad is a lie.”
A Club for Growth spokesman acknowledged the audio had been spliced together but argued that it accurately reflected the spirit of her comments, releasing the full clips to an Indianapolis TV station as proof.
As bad as that spot might have been for Davis, the ones Club for Growth ran against Smith were even more devastating. They centered around allegations of sexual abuse at a youth facility run by Lasting Change, a Fort Wayne-based organization that Smith oversees as CEO.
The first ad fudged things a bit, claiming that staff was allowed to “sexually abuse boys under Smith’s watch,” citing an April 2023 report in the Indianapolis Star. That article, however, does not include any allegations of abuse occurring after Smith started at the organization in January of 2022.
Smith responded to that ad with an ad of his own, saying that “the Swamp” was lying about his work with Lasting Change because his opponents were losing.
“Lying liberals blame me for problems that happened before I took over the organization,” Smith says in the ad, “problems I’ve worked hard to fix.”
Soon after, the Club for Growth was back up with another ad, this one centered around a detail Smith failed to mention in his reply to their initial salvo: in 2023, he’d testified in front of an Indiana Senate committee in favor of a bill that would give Lasting Change immunity from lawsuits relating to sexual abuse claims.
His motivation, he said at the time, was to save money on Lasting Change’s liability insurance premiums, which had skyrocketed after their insurance company paid out a claim for $72,000 to settle a sexual abuse lawsuit in February 2022. According to the Indy Star, Smith testified that their insurance bill increased from $30,000 for $3 million in coverage to $500,000 for less coverage.
Club for Growth Action combined footage from his rebuttal ad and video from his Senate testimony to great effect. The result proved to be a knockout blow for Smith’s candidacy.
One GOP insider said that days before the election, Smith was telling people the Club for Growth’s ads against him were too powerful for him to overcome. He knew any chance he had to win the race was over.
“That [final] ad was a hard call,” McIntosh told me. “We went through different versions [of it] because I wanted to make sure that it was totally accurate based on the Indianapolis Star reporting, because I recognized what it would be saying.”
In McIntosh’s view, Smith had asked for legal protection that would cover up those episodes of underage sexual abuse. “I’m sure he condemned them. I’m sure he had nothing to do with it. But to ask for legal protection to cover them up, that just seemed like the wrong direction,” McIntosh said.
“And we thought it was important for voters to know that.”
McIntosh said he recognizes that many Northeast Indiana voters didn’t like the negative ads he and other super PACs ran during the Congressional primary, but to him, they’re a necessary part of politics.
“The way I look at it is, we’re bringing information to the voter that otherwise wouldn’t be out there. That’s our real function as a super PAC,” he told me.
“Now it is directed to try to help a certain candidate. In this case, I think it benefited Marlin, but the real value to the voter is this is information that nobody else is bringing into the debate and into the campaign.”
And McIntosh’s message to supporters of Smith and Davis who say the Club for Growth’s super PAC effectively won the election for Stutzman?
“We can’t cause someone to get elected who’s not a good candidate,” he said.
“Marlin gets the credit.”
Election night photo gallery
Banks ran unopposed thanks to an Indiana State Supreme Court decision to throw out a Marion County Superior Court judge’s ruling that initially put Seymour-based egg farmer John Rust on the GOP primary ballot against Banks.
Great job exposing the dirty underbelly of our local politics