Heritage Action’s Jessica Anderson is leaving to lead new realm of conservative grassroots
Salena Zito
Video Embed
In an exclusive interview, Jessica Anderson, Heritage Action’s executive director and a well-respected young conservative grassroots and policy pro, told the Washington Examiner she is taking a leave of absence to lead the Sentinel Action Fund in preparation for next year’s historic election cycle that not only has a presidential race on tap but also very competitive races for the U.S. Senate and House.
The Sentinel Action Fund is a super PAC that will be completely and legally separate from the Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action.
HOW SAUDI ARABIA IS USING SPORT TO EXPAND ITS REACH
Anderson said Sentinel will take the spirit and the DNA of what she brought with her from her experience working in North Carolina during the Tea Party movement.
“We are going to do things that no other super PAC is doing, and that is actually build out true voter absentee chase balloting, coordinating ballot collections by neighborhood,” said Anderson.
Since the summer of 2020, when then-president Donald Trump began trashing vote-by-mail efforts during the restrictions of COVID, Republican officials in state parties across the country have spent two cycles ceding their once-vaunted absentee balloting programs — going as far as filing lawsuits and introducing bills attempting to dilute the method. The misguided effort put them at a disadvantage in voter-turnout efforts.
Anderson said at Sentinel, they will have an app that will help the grassroots follow each vote cast by mail from the very people who live in the individual battleground states — people she said they already have ready to go.
“They are so hyped to actually do the things that the Left has been doing, but the big political right-of-center machines have never given the tools to them to do,” she said.
Part of the problem with the big party apparatuses is their location. Everyone, “everyone,” she stressed, is of DC, from DC, and not connected at all to the people that are their base and their volunteers.
“They fly in and out, their campaigns, they’re happy to volunteer for them, but there’s nothing long-lasting in these communities. And so I’m thrilled about it because I think it will actually allow us to engage directly with voters year-round,” she said.
Anderson’s activism in the conservative movement began in North Carolina during the beginnings of the Tea Party movement, It was hardworking, on-the-ground grassroots organizers like her that moved a once solidly Democrat-controlled North Carolina in 2010 to the supermajority the Republicans hold in both chambers today.
Anderson is proud of that move but has enough of the restlessness and ambition of youth that she is unsatisfied it took 13 years to get that far.
“Yes, we made progress, and the policy is getting better, but it is just taking too long nationally, and I no longer feel like we’ve got time as a country to keep playing the long game,” she said of the conservative movement.
“We need to get in power quicker. And to do that, I firmly believe that we need a political war chest and super PAC that can represent the grassroots,” she said. “The Club for Growth [a well-known conservative action group] is great; they play a really important role. This is not a knock on the other folks, but they just don’t represent the grassroots. They just don’t. And they are missing out on the goodness of America because of it.”
Anderson said relying on the Republican National Committee of today, or the political organization of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell to come save the day to clock the wins needed for good conservative policy is foolhardy because, in some winnable places, conservatives just need a little extra investment in the people who live there.
“The current political world thinks that you can win races purely by spending billions of dollars on ad campaigns,” she said. “Now, I’m not saying that ads don’t matter. Of course they do. You have to have overhead support, and you have to actually have persuasive messages. But if you think that you win a cycle by just spending on TV, you’re missing the whole point of voter engagement.”
In the 2022 election cycle, there was $8.9 billion spent on federal elections, Anderson said in frustration. “And on the Republican side, there wasn’t a single major independent expenditure that did get out the vote, or voter registration, or mail-in balloting.”
“It doesn’t exist until now, and we are building this out now — and that is why it is so important that this operation runs through Sentinel Action Fund because sentinels are the grassroots leaders that have been clamoring to do this stuff,” she said.
Anderson said the super PAC will operate in states year-round: “We won’t turn off the lights. The state offices will be literally in communities working with families, working with the grassroots leaders that are in place, and triaging between state races, federal races. Basically, if special [elections] come up, then the infrastructure’s already there.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Anderson said what Sentinel will be doing is unique to the political ecosystem right now, which she said is very biased toward building support for the Senate majority leadership.
“We will hope to disrupt that in a major way,” she said. “The Sentinel Action Fund did do work last cycle as a side project to Heritage Action, so it’s not new to the scene, per se. It’s new in the fullness that it will no longer be just a partner to Heritage Action. It’ll be an independent entity that will harness all of this work by the grassroots, do the things the party’s not doing, the RNC is not doing nearly enough for, and actually make grassroots political work and win.”