The Conservative Media Warrior Who May Run for Aaron Schock's Seat

This week began like most of Mike Flynn's recent weeks. The conservative strategist was in a slow, tedious war with Comcast, trying to get NBC affiliates in some key political states to run a two-minute commercial from his Conservative War Chest PAC. The providers had been uninterested in taking money for a video jeremiad against their news divisions, so they'd been resisting. Cleta Mitchell, the ultra-connected conservative attorney and American Conservative Union board member, was making legal arguments. By Friday, if there was no progress, she'd prepare an FCC complaint, and the well-covered crusade against media bias would escalate.

And then Aaron Schock happened. The Illinois congressman's somewhat surprising resignation (he'd been tumbling from scandal to scandal, but had not told leaders that he'd be leaving) opened up a congressional seat in the stretch of rural Illinois where Flynn was raised. In 2010, he'd consulted for Bobby Schilling, a Republican candidate who unseated a Democrat in a district that overlapped with the new 18th. (A Democratic gerrymander, in 2011, merged parts of the districts and helped shore up Schock while taking out Schilling.) Conservatives in the district called Flynn and told him to consider running.