The Koch brothers don't need to take over the Republican party, they're building their own

Ken Vogel at Politico has another massive, important story in his series about the "Koch Machine," this time looking at the brothers' party-building apparatus which is increasingly looking like an effort not to take over the Republican party, but to bury it. 

Koch and his brother David Koch have quietly assembled, piece by piece, a privatized political and policy advocacy operation like no other in American history that today includes hundreds of donors and employs 1,200 full-time, year-round staffers in 107 offices nationwide. That’s about 3½ times as many employees as the Republican National Committee and its congressional campaign arms had on their main payrolls last month, according to POLITICO’s analysis of tax and campaign documents and interviews with sources familiar with the network. And the staggering sum the network plans to spend in the 2016 election run-up―$889 million―is more than double what the RNC spent in the previous presidential cycle. […]

The Koch network’s data operation is now regarded by many candidates and campaigns as superior to the party’s, and it has invested in efforts to become the leading force on the right for training activists and registering voters. Its biggest group, Americans for Prosperity, plans to place full-time staff in all but eight states by late 2016 and aspires to copy the National Rifle Association’s broad-based membership plan for longevity, according to a POLITICO investigation. It found that the group has even discussed expanding its influence by writing and pushing model state budgets, a technique similar to the one used by the American Legislative Exchange Council to push various state legislative initiatives. […]

In the post-Citizens United era of relaxed campaign finance laws, the Kochs and their megadonor allies, more than any other group of affluent political partisans recruit like-minded candidates, collect intelligence on rivals and win converts among the disadvantaged.

On the upside, this is pretty clearly a well-staffed astroturf organization, as its own audits have proven. According to what Politico reports, an "assessment found an 'overwhelming' percentage of the 2 million members claimed by the group were not actually involved and 'do not self-identify as being volunteers.'" Where they came up with their 2 million member names isn't clear, and thus they don't have the kind of grassroots ground force they like to claim. The downside is they don't really need it—they've got all the money in the world and a Republican party running scared.

That's because the Kochs are increasingly willing to take on Republicans they find insufficiently loyal to their corporatist ideals and replace them with their handpicked lackeys. That's not just in federal elections, but all the way down to state and local offices. They're at the point that they don't really need to take over the Republican party, though it's proven handy to have for the past several years. 

All this means we're moving toward an actual three-party system, and not in a good way, with the advent of the Koch Billionaires' Party. But there is always hope. Charles Koch—the brother seen as the linchpin to massive fundraising—is 80 and little brother David is 75. There's the possibility that the political empire they've built will self-destruct once they're dead.