GOP superPACs plan to spend $1 billion on elections this year

Republican super PACs and other outside groups shaped by a loose network of prominent conservatives – including Karl Rove, the Koch brothers and Tom Donohue of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – plan to spend roughly $1 billion on November’s elections for the White House and control of Congress, according to officials familiar with the groups’ internal operations.

That total includes previously undisclosed plans for newly aggressive spending by the Koch brothers, who are steering funding to build sophisticated, county-by-county operations in key states. POLITICO has learned that Koch-related organizations plan to spend about $400 million ahead of the 2012 elections - twice what they had been expected to commit.

Just the spending linked to the Koch network is more than the $370 million that John McCain raised for his entire presidential campaign four years ago. And the $1 billion total surpasses the $750 million that Barack Obama, one of the most prolific fundraisers ever, collected for his 2008 campaign.

Restore Our Future, the super PAC supporting Mitt Romney, proved its potency by spending nearly $50 million in the primaries. Now able to entice big donors with a neck-and-neck general election, the group is likely to meet its new goal of spending $100 million more.

And American Crossroads and the affiliated Crossroads GPS, the groups that Rove and Ed Gillespie helped conceive and raise cash for, are expected to ante up $300 million, giving the two-year-old organization one of the election’s loudest voices.

“The intensity on the right is white-hot,” said Steven Law, president of American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS. “We just can’t leave anything in the locker room. And there is a greater willingness to cooperate and share information among outside groups on the center-right.”

In targeted states, the groups’ activities will include TV, radio and digital advertising; voter-turnout work; mail and phone appeals; and absentee- and early-ballot drives.

The $1 billion in outside money is in addition to the traditional party apparatus – the Romney campaign and the Republican National Committee – which together intend to raise at least $800 million.

The Republican financial plans are unlike anything seen before in American politics. If the GOP groups hit their targets, they likely could outspend their liberal adversaries by at least two-to-one, according to officials involved in the budgeting for outside groups on the right and left.

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vetteman said:

If it was Obama, you'd love it. because Obama has the advantage of a captive MSM promoting his agenda, we have to raise a lot of money to get our points about freedom in edgewise. So, fuck you and your totalitarian solutions to every Democrat problem.

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KingOrfeo said:

Let's please not allow this any more.

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koalabear said:

I agree, can't you find a source Soros doesn't own.

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vetteman said:

If it was Obama, you'd love it. because Obama has the advantage of a captive MSM promoting his agenda, we have to raise a lot of money to get our points about freedom in edgewise. So, fuck you and your totalitarian solutions to every Democrat problem.

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vetteman said:

If it was Obama, you'd love it. because Obama has the advantage of a captive MSM promoting his agenda, we have to raise a lot of money to get our points about freedom in edgewise. So, fuck you and your totalitarian solutions to every Democrat problem.

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mercury14 said:

I dislike it on both sides. Money in politics is the primary reason for corruption in America.

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richard_daily said:

He's on record as being against Citizen's United... Are you?

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4est_4est_Gump said:

Bet you we spend more on selling dog food...




I also bet you simply forget that when we discuss the size, scope and power of the federal government.

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mercury14 said:

Who is "we"? I don't sell dog food, bro.

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mercury14 said:

Are you suggesting that 1 billion in inherently misleading voter propaganda isn't a tremendous problem for a democracy?

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mercury14 said:

Who is "we"? I don't sell dog food, bro.

Are you suggesting that 1 billion in inherently misleading voter propaganda isn't a tremendous problem for a democracy?

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4est_4est_Gump said:

That second part did not show up, it must have been a hasty edit.

It seems only to be a problem when one side is losing the loyalty of its customer base.

Propaganda rarely works in a free market with any segment not already leaning to the issuers....

When it looked, from the outside, that the Republicans were not going to do well, no one was concerned, to my recollection, about the damage about to be inflicted upon us by a billion dollars in negative ads on the part of President Obama, so I have to say, the on this issue, the charges are due more towards the anger over Wisconsin, the tightening polls and Romney actually out-raising Obama last month.

It has the stench of panic about it.

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mercury14 said:

You didnt answer the question at all.

And you're an idiot of you think a billion dollars in propaganda will not be effective in doing anything.

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But the bigger confusion concerned Citizens United. It turns out, of course, that not a dollar that made its way into the Walker or Barrett campaign would have been kept out had Citizens United gone the other way at the Supreme Court. Citizens United related not to contributions to candidates' campaigns, but to contributions by corporations and unions to organizations that made independent expenditures. In Wisconsin, Walker outraised Barrett by $30 million to $4 million. This occurred in part because Walker raised money for months before he knew who his opponent would be. Also, Wisconsin law, both before Citizens United and after, allows a governor to raise unlimited contributions for such a recall effort.

Barrett had to raise money for the Democratic primary fight and then raise more in the short period before the recall vote, with lower limits on the maximum size of his contributions, also as set by Wisconsin law. Were a Republican effort made to recall a Democratic governor in Wisconsin, the exact same limits for both the governor and the recall opponent would have been in place, favoring the Democratic incumbent. The outside party expenditures favored Walker by $15 to $5 million without counting the union money, and favored the recall effort by $25 million to $15 million, with the union money included.

In other words, the outside expenditures favored Barrett and the recall, after including the union contributions. The unions spent a lot of money before the Democratic candidate was known, to gather the roughly one million signatures that were sufficient to generate the recall election and then to help their preferred candidate in the Democratic primary (who lost). It is entirely artificial to include only union money in the one month after Barrett was nominated.

Greg Sargent, a left-wing columnist for the Washington Post, admitted that the Walker/Barrett funding disparity had its roots in state law:

Walker, meanwhile, has benefitted from the state's election finance rules that allowed his campaign to raise unlimited contributions from individuals after recall petitions were filed in November 2011. His challengers could take no more than $10,000 from individuals.

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Note of course, the word "individuals," not "corporations" or "unions." The big-money donors to Walker, in a few cases, were the same individuals who gave to the Republican Governors Association, which provided over $4 million to support Walker. But again, the money came from individuals. The Democratic Governors Association could have raised big gifts from George Soros or Jeffrey Katzenberg to back Barrett. There was nothing in the law before or after Citizens United that prevented the left's big donors from backing Barrett, other than Barack Obama trying to suck up all the available cash.

Blaming Citizens United for the decisive Walker victory is nothing more than a smokescreen to cover up the fact that most Wisconsin voters were tired of 15 separate, very divisive, and angry recall campaigns, all mounted because of unhappiness among some voters with some of Walker's policies since he took office. Most people think you get your next shot at an elected official when the candidate runs for re-election. Recalls of governors are more like impeachments -- something that is done to address corruption, or other criminal behavior (applicable to most recent governors of neighboring Illinois, for instance).

So too, the left is unwilling to consider that its side might have lost on the merits -- that Walker has done a good job, addressing the state's deficits, and eliminating some of the imbalances between public- and private-sector benefit packages for workers. The changes to public employee collective bargaining rights have had their most dramatic result in the number of union members who have chosen to continue with their union dues (and membership) now that said dues are not automatically deducted and then paid by the state to the unions. It looks as if more than half of AFSCME members opted out. Some of them may have decided that the extra money they will have from not paying union dues might help pay for the extra health care or pension costs they now have to account for (still pretty modest by comparison with private-sector workers). Some of them may even realize that the additional contributions they are making are a major reason why some of them still have jobs, since the alternative to the higher contribution levels was layoffs of public-sector workers.

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4est_4est_Gump said:

I did not say that.

I think you are beginning to become desperate to win this argument, so there it is, you win.

I just cannot refute your argument about how there's just too much money drowning out the rational arguments on ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, MSNBC, CNN...,

Congratulations.

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mercury14 said:

Non-sequitur.

I've asked you whether you see billions of dollars in politics as a threat to democracy and you've failed to answer on four occasions right now. I take from your weasley topic shifting and ignoring the question that you believe it is.

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