Campaigns Koch was the
Libertarian Party's vice-presidential candidate in the
1980 presidential election, sharing the party ticket with presidential candidate
Ed Clark. The Clark–Koch
ticket proposed to abolish
Social Security, the
Federal Reserve Board,
welfare,
minimum-wage laws, corporate taxes, all price supports and subsidies for agriculture and business, and
U.S. Federal agencies including the SEC, EPA, ICC, FTC, OSHA, FBI, CIA, and DOE. Their platform proposed privatizing all transportation and inland waterways. The ticket received 921,128 votes, 1% of the total nationwide vote, the Libertarian Party national ticket's best showing until
2016 in terms of percentage and its best showing in terms of raw votes until the
2012 presidential election, although that number was surpassed again in 2016. "Compared to what [the Libertarians had] gotten before," Charles said, "and where we were as a movement or as a political/ideological point of view, that was pretty remarkable, to get 1 percent of the vote." After the bid, according to journalist
Brian Doherty's
Radicals for Capitalism, Koch viewed politicians as "actors playing out a script". Koch credited the 1976 presidential campaign of
Roger MacBride as his inspiration for getting involved in politics: Here was a great guy, advocating all the things I believed in. He wanted less government and taxes, and was talking about repealing all these victimless crime laws that accumulated on the books. I have friends who smoke pot. I know many homosexuals. It's ridiculous to treat them as criminals — and here was someone running for president, saying just that. In February 2012, during the
Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election, Koch said of Wisconsin governor
Scott Walker, "We're helping him, as we should. We've gotten pretty good at this over the years. We've spent a lot of money in Wisconsin. We're going to spend more," and said that by "we" he meant Americans for Prosperity. In 2012, Koch spent over $100 million in a failed bid to oppose the re-election of President
Barack Obama.
Views Koch supported policies that promoted
smaller government and lower taxes. He was against the
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Koch considered himself a
social liberal who supported women's
right to choose,
gay rights,
same-sex marriage and
stem-cell research. He opposed the
war on drugs. Koch opposed several of President
Barack Obama's policies. An article from the
Weekly Standard, detailing the "left's obsession" with the Koch brothers, quotes Koch stating that Obama is "the most radical president we've ever had as a nation ... and has done more damage to the free enterprise system and long-term prosperity than any president we've ever had". Koch said that Obama's father's economic
socialism, practiced in
Kenya, explains why Obama has "sort of antibusiness and anti-free enterprise" influences. Koch contributed almost entirely to Republican candidates in 2012.
Advocacy Koch donated funds to various advocacy groups. He served as its chairman of the board of directors and donated funds to it.
Richard H. Fink served as its first president. Koch was the top initial funder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation at $850,000. Koch said that he sympathized with the
Tea Party movement, but denied directly supporting it, having stated that: "I've never been to a tea party event. No one representing the tea party has ever even approached me." The Koch brothers have been involved in blocking regulations and legislation to confront climate change since 1991, when the Cato Institute held the "Global Environmental Crisis: Science or Politics?" According to
NPR, the Koch brothers gave "over $145 million to climate-change denying think tanks and advocacy groups between 1997 and 2018." In August 2010,
Jane Mayer wrote an article in
The New Yorker on the political spending of David and Charles Koch. It stated: "As their fortunes grew, Charles and David Koch became the primary underwriters of hard-line libertarian politics in America." In 2011, 2014, and 2015
Time magazine included Charles and David Koch among the
Time 100 of the year, for their involvement in supporting the
Tea Party movement and the criticism they received.
Prison reform In July 2015, David and Charles Koch were commended by both President Obama and activist
Anthony Van Jones for their bipartisan efforts to reform the prison system in the United States. For nearly 10 years, the Kochs advocated for several reforms within the criminal justice system which include reducing recidivism rates, simplifying the employment process for the rehabilitated, and defending private property from government seizures through
asset forfeiture. Allying with groups such as the
ACLU, the
Center for American Progress,
Families Against Mandatory Minimums, the
Coalition for Public Safety, and the
MacArthur Foundation, the Kochs maintained that current prison system unfairly targeted low-income and minority communities at the expense of the public budget. In 2015,
The Intercept reported that the Kochs' philanthropic efforts exist alongside continued funding of "tough-on-crime" political candidates and committees pushing for harsher sentencing. Writing in
Political Research Associates, Kay Whitlock argues that the Kochs' avid support for measures such as
mens rea or "criminal intent" reform exemplify "an agenda of deregulation and relief for 'overcriminalized' corporations and executives" rather than concern for individual rights of the accused. == Philanthropy ==