Anti-incumbent group will be back for 2014

The Campaign for Primary Accountability, a super-PAC that targeted a number of House incumbents in 2012, will be back for the next election, The Hill has learned.

“We are definitely going to be engaged in the next cycle. We’ve already been planning,” group spokesman Curtis Ellis told The Hill.

{mosads}The organization raised $3 million and spent more than $1.6 million in the past year, contributing to the primary defeats of Reps. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas), Tim Holden (D-Pa.), Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio) and Don Manzullo (R-Ill.).

They also unsuccessfully targeted Reps. Jo Bonner (R-Ala.), Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.), Tim Murphy (R-Pa.), Ralph Hall (R-Texas), Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) and Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.).

Ellis said it was “way too early” to say how much the group would spend or which incumbents were in the super-PAC’s sights this time around — but promised their efforts would be “comparable if not better” than in 2012.

He did concede that Jackson would likely wind up on their list again.

“It looks like someone might step up to challenge Jesse Jackson Jr. in the primary,” he said. “I’m not gleeful about anybody having health problems, but as one of the folks we targeted this year that might be targeted next cycle, he seems like an obvious one.”

The group was created and mostly bankrolled by conservative Houston businessman Leo Linbeck, but it ran out of money in June, before the primary process was finished.

But Ellis said the group would return with more ads and direct-mail pieces, as well as a renewed emphasis on turning out more primary voters with advanced ground game efforts, including “peer pressure” letters similar to those used by President Obama’s campaign that publicly called out registered voters who had yet to cast their ballots.

“This time we’re not going to have a big noisy presidential race to suck money out of the room,” he said. “I say to all the people who gave to Karl Rove this cycle, call me. We get better results than Karl, our Texans are smarter.”