Solar Power

 Many posts have discussed campaign finance.

TIMOTHY CAMA and JACOB WENDLER at POLITICO:

An aggressive new PAC backed by renewable energy supporters notched a major win last night by helping unseat Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) despite President Donald Trump’s vocal support, our colleague Timothy Cama reports.

— The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC is now poised to be a force in future contests after spending $2 million opposing Ogles and boosting Republican primary opponent Charlie Hatcher. Ogles was the third Republican this year to lose a race after being targeted by the super PAC, which was launched by solar executives wanting to get back at Republicans who actively work against renewables.

— The group’s ads did not mention clean energy, instead targeting conservative voters with advertisements that boosted Hatcher’s right-wing credentials and chided Ogles for missing votes. The PAC deployed a similar playbook against Texas Rep. Chip Roy in his unsuccessful attorney general bid and South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman, who lost his campaign for governor.

— “The clean energy industry’s political muscle is only getting stronger and more intimidating,” said Invest in Tomorrow Coalition co-founder Michael Brune, who previously led the advocacy group the Sierra Club. “Our hope here is that clean energy will go back to being a bipartisan issue, and maybe one of the few issues that all Americans can agree on. But before we get there, we’ve got to continue our retribution tour and take out a few more members who have voted the wrong way.”

— Lawmakers like Ogles, Roy and Norman drew the ire of industry last year when they pushed Republican leaders in Congress for a quick phaseout of renewable energy incentives in what became the One Big Beautiful Bill act. Chris Larsen — the PAC’s top backer, who has contributed $6 million of its $6.8 million — has called its advocacy “political warfare.”

— The group has taken lessons learned from the crypto industry, where Larsen was the co-founder of Ripple Labs. Ripple helped fund Fairshake, a super PAC that has spent more than $200 million to unseat politicians it sees as unfriendly to the industry. Larsen also leads the environmental philanthropy Clean Break Fund with Brune.

Nursing Homes and Pay-to-Play Politics

Many posts have discussed lobbying, "shadow lobbying," "unlobbying," and "non-lobbying lobbying."

Kenneth P. Vogel and Christina Jewett at NYT:

The nursing home industry was on a roll last summer.

It had just won a 10-year moratorium on a rule initiated during President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s administration to require increased staffing levels in an effort to reduce neglect among residents, which had led to injuries and deadly infections.

Nonetheless, some in the industry, warning that the rule would have substantially increased costs, wanted to make it go away permanently.

So nursing home executives turned to a tool that has proved successful in getting President Trump’s attention: money.

Starting in early August, the industry began making donations that over the course of weeks would eventually total nearly $4.8 million to MAGA Inc., a super PAC devoted to Mr. Trump and run by his allies.

Later that same month, a handful of nursing home executives who had given the biggest donations joined industry lobbyists at Mr. Trump’s golf club in suburban Washington to plead their case, according to campaign finance filings and people familiar with the meeting.

Over light lunch fare, the contingent “urged the president to formally repeal the harmful minimum staffing mandate, which would have surely forced providers throughout the country to close their doors to new residents — or possibly close their doors altogether,” Bill Weisberg, the founder and chief executive of Saber Healthcare Group, recounted in a text message to The New York Times.

Less than one month after the lunch meeting, Trump administration lawyers quietly stopped defending the pending staffing rule in court against challenges from the industry.

Complete victory came a couple of months after that, when the White House approved a full revocation. The Department of Health and Human Services announced the repeal in a statement that echoed industry talking points, which have emphasized the industry’s difficulty in hiring enough staff, especially in rural areas

The Left Bank

Nicholas Confessore reports at The New York Times:

When Ready for Hillary, a pro-Hillary Rodham Clinton “super PAC,” wanted to take out a million-dollar loan five months before it planned to go out of business, it turned to a bank that was founded to guard the savings of New York City garment workers.

When the Democracy Alliance, an influential club of liberal donors, sought to recruit members in advance of the 2016 elections, the bank’s president helped to make introductions.

And when workers-rights groups wanted to embarrass Walmart and the Gap for unsafe working conditions at factories supplying their stores, Amalgamated Bank, which manages $40 billion in pension fund assets, stepped in again, rounding up fellow investors to warn the companies that they

Four years after nearly collapsing amid the financial crisis, Amalgamated has aggressively carved out a position as the left’s private banker, leveraging deep connections with the Democratic establishment to expand rapidly in a niche long dominated by larger but less nimble financial institutions

...
Founded and still principally owned by labor unions, the 92-year-old bank has signed up hundreds of new political clients, including most of the Democratic Party’s major committees, the progressive organizations that align with them, and several of their top Senate recruits.

This spring, Amalgamated scored its biggest coup yet, winning the main business for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign, which is likely to raise a billion dollars or more.

Campaign clients have access to a 24-hour concierge service, staffed by veterans of President Obama’s campaigns, to handle last-minute media buys or reconcile election paperwork.

...
But many Republican candidates and super PACs, including Jeb Bush and the deep-pocketed super PAC supporting him, do the bulk of their banking with their own version of Amalgamated, the smaller Chain Bridge Bank, based in McLean, Va. Founded by Peter Fitzgerald, the former Republican senator from Illinois, Chain Bridge broke into political banking amid the 2008 financial crisis when the Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, was looking for a safe place to deposit his war chest. He chose it for its Republican pedigree and low-risk balance sheet.

Outside Money, Dark Money, and Public Opinion

The New York Times offers a video on dark money in political campaigns:

 Do real voters care? Not really.

Chris Cillizza explains:

There are two seemingly contradictory data points in a new New York Times-CBS national poll.

1. 84 percent of people -- 80 percent of Republicans and 90 percent of Democrats -- believe money has too much influence in American politics.
2. Less than 1 percent of people said money in politics or campaign fundraising was the most important issue facing the country.

...
There's a huge difference between prompted intent and unprompted action.

And, this isn't just a theoretical argument based on a handful of poll numbers. Think back to the last two midterm election in 2010 and 2014. In each, Democrats -- from the White House on down -- insisted that Republicans' reliance on big money donors would be punished by the voting public. Harry Reid went to the Senate floor time and time again during the summer and fall of 2014 to blast the Koch brothers for their alleged attempts to buy the vote.

You'll remember what happened in both of those elections: BIG Republican victories. Those across-the-board GOP wins didn't come solely from the Democrats' focus on campaign finance issues, obviously, but it's also obvious that attempts to make the 2010 and 2014 elections referenda on big (Republican) money in politics just didn't work.

The simple fact is that outside of committed campaign finance reform advocates -- a single-digit percentage of the overall population -- getting big money out of politics simply isn't a voting priority for the vast, vast majority of Americans.

Ad Money and TV Stations

The New York Times reports on the interplay of political organizations and the news media:

The increasingly expensive elections that play out across the country every two years are making stations look like a smart investment, with the revenue piling up each time a candidate says “I approve this message.”

Despite an array of digital alternatives and a rapidly transforming television business, 30-second commercials remain one of the most valuable tools of campaigns and political action committees. As Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of the CBS Corporation, which owns 29 stations, memorably said last year, “Super PACs may be bad for America, but they’re very good for CBS.”

Indeed, while the law guarantees that candidates can buy time at the lowest available rate, this discount is not available to outside groups.

Next year’s midterm elections will be a boon to stations as well, and “2016 could be amazing,” said Mark Fratrik, the chief economist for BIA/Kelsey, a media research firm and consultancy.
Station owners have come to dread what they call “odd years,” like 2013, when there is little political spending. For stations blessed to be in swing states, political ads routinely represent a third of their overall ad revenue in election years.

For instance, WBNS, the highest-rated station in Columbus, Ohio, grossed about $50 million in advertising last year, of which at least $20 million was attributed to campaign spending. Columbus is the nation’s 32nd largest TV market.

A Super PAC and the McConnell Recording

It appears that the recording of a private conversation at Mitch McConnell's campaign was the result of deliberate eavesdropping, not staff error.  At Salon, Alex Seitz-Ward discusses the likely source, and in the process offers a cautionary tale about how Super PAC activity can backfire on the causes they're trying to help.

Liberal super PAC Progress Kentucky is at the center of controversy after a Democratic strategist in the state said activists affiliated with the group bragged to him that they secretly recorded the audiotape of Mitch McConnell’s strategy meeting that was leaked to Mother Jones this week. If true, they could face criminal sanctions. The treasurer of the super PAC resigned this afternoon.

Now, it’s worth stating that we don’t know for sure that Progress Kentucky produced the tape or is involved in any way — this is just the word of one Democratic strategist, who has an interest in distancing his party from the group.

But it’s not the first time the super PAC has gotten into trouble. In late February, they made a series of offensive “jokes” about McConnell’s wife on Twitter, attacking her for being Chinese-American. Even Ashley Judd felt compelled to issue a public condemnation.

But there’s something important you should know about Progress Kentucky: No one took its members very seriously in Kentucky, even before the slurs or the secret tape. I know this because I once quoted Curtis Morrison, who was one of what appears to be only two or three people associated with the group (he resigned in March), and a number of liberal activists in the state told me to never do it again.

Zuckerberg Super PAC

Previous posts have explained that Silicon Valley has deep stakes in federal policy -- even though Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has a spotty voting record. Carla Marinucci writes at the San Francisco Chronicle:

The newest start-up to watch in Silicon Valley involves a crowd of top tech stars –led by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg — who are seriously exploring the formation of a new independent expenditure group focused on a range of issues, including education and immigration reform, sources tell the Chronicle.

Word is the IE move was organized by Joe Green, Zuckerberg’s old Harvard roommate. And we’ve heard the Facebook CEO has pledged millions to the cause — one source says as much as $20 million — and has gotten others to pledge as much as $2 million to $5 million each.

Some people are raising their eyebrows over the choice of a hard-right Republican consultant — one who produced a famed spot deriding liberals as a “latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading” freak show — to handle the Silicon Valley SuperPAC’s work.

Sources say the group is bringing on Jon Lerner, the Republican strategist who founded Maryland-based Red Sea LLC and who is behind Grover Norquist and his Club for Growth. Joining him will be ultra-conservative GOP consultant Rob Jesmer, a former strategist with Texas Sen. John Cornyn and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Privacy and Campaign Technology

Previous posts have discussed campaign technology. As the New York Times reports, the Romney and Obama campaigns insist that they respect voter privacy when using this technology.

In interviews, however, consultants to both campaigns said they had bought demographic data from companies that study details like voters’ shopping histories, gambling tendencies, interest in get-rich-quick schemes, dating preferences and financial problems. The campaigns themselves, according to campaign employees, have examined voters’ online exchanges and social networks to see what they care about and whom they know. They have also authorized tests to see if, say, a phone call from a distant cousin or a new friend would be more likely to prompt the urge to cast a ballot.

The campaigns have planted software known as cookies on voters’ computers to see if they frequent evangelical or erotic Web sites for clues to their moral perspectives. Voters who visit religious Web sites might be greeted with religion-friendly messages when they return to mittromney.com or barackobama.com. The campaigns’ consultants have run experiments to determine if embarrassing someone for not voting by sending letters to their neighbors or posting their voting histories online is effective.

“I’ve had half-a-dozen conversations with third parties who are wondering if this is the year to start shaming,” said one consultant who works closely with Democratic organizations. “Obama can’t do it. But the ‘super PACs’ are anonymous. They don’t have to put anything on the flier to let the voter know who to blame.”

While the campaigns say they do not buy data that they consider intrusive, the Democratic and Republican National Committees combined have spent at least $13 million this year on data acquisition and related services. The parties have paid companies like Acxiom, Experian or Equifax, which are currently subjects of Congressional scrutiny over privacy concerns.

Vendors affiliated with the presidential campaigns or the parties said in interviews that their businesses had bought data from Rapleaf or Intelius, companies that have been sued over alleged privacy or consumer protection violations.

"Lowest Unit Rate"

Consistent with a recent LA Times piece, The Washington Post explains an important financial advantage for Obama:

Starting several weeks ago, both campaigns gained the ability to obtain radio and TV advertising at the “lowest unit rate,” which is guaranteed to federal candidates within 60 days of an election. The legal requirement means that campaigns — but not parties, nonprofits or super PACs — can commandeer airtime at the cheapest prices.

At the start of September, Romney had about $50 million in his campaign account compared with about $90 million for Obama, who has brought in much of his money in small-dollar contributions. Romney, by contrast, has relied heavily on donors giving up to $75,000, most of which must go to the Republican Party because of legal limits on how much a donor can give to a candidate’s campaign committee.

Outside groups and parties typically pay at least 50 percent more for advertising than candidates do in the final weeks of a national campaign, according to media buyers. Sometimes the gap is wider: One GOP ad buyer said a 30-second slot on “Good Morning America” in Washington will cost a candidate about $2,000, compared with twice that much for an interest group.

Federal candidates also legally receive priority over other clients, meaning they can force regular commercials aside, and they cannot be refused airtime by radio or television stations, regardless of the content.

“When everyone talks about what the media buy is, it’s often very misleading,” said Ken Goldstein, president of Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks political advertising. “Not all dollars are created equal.”

Campaign Finance: Don't Know, Don't Care

The Pew Research Center provides poll data showing that many people neither know nor care about Super PACs:

The public is hearing little about increased spending by outside groups in the 2012 election. Just 25% have heard a lot about outside spending by groups not associated with the candidates or campaigns, while three-quarters are hearing a little (36%) or nothing at all (39%) about this. In fact, the term “super PAC” itself is not widely known: Just 40% can correctly identify the term, nearly half (46%) don’t know what it refers to, while 14% give incorrect responses.

When asked an open-ended question about the effect of increased outside spending on the election, a plurality (48%) expresses no opinion. About equal percentages indicate the effect will be neutral (27%) or negative (24%). Just 2% give a positive response about the effect of more outside political spending.

Lots of Money in This Election

The Center for Responsive Politics reports:

The 2012 presidential and congressional elections will be the most expensive on record, the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics estimates -- though not by much. The Center predicts, based on data from 18 months of fundraising and spending, that the elections will cost $5.8 billion, an increase of 7 percent from the 2008 cost of $5.4 billion. But outside spending, which is soaring while presidential candidate spending declines, is a wild card that makes predictions tricky.

So far overall in the first 18 months of the 2012 cycle, $2.2 billion has been spent, compared with $2.4 billion in 2008.

The presidential race by itself will cost about $2.5 billion, the Center predicts, in funds laid out by the candidates, Democratic and Republican party committees and outside spending groups. The candidates have raised about $608 million, compared with more than $1.1 billion at this point in the 2008 cycle.

As for the outside groups, The Huffington Post reports:

Through July 26, politically involved groups that do not disclose their donors have spent at least $172 million on campaigns that include television, radio and Internet advertising, according to a Huffington Post review of FEC reports, advertising buys, press releases and news stories. Total spending by these groups is likely far greater, since they are required to report only a fraction of their spending to the FEC. Politically involved independent groups that publicly disclose their donors, including super PACs, have spent $174 million so far this election cycle.

"For this cycle, we know almost nothing," said Center for Responsive Politics communications director Viveca Novak, referring to those behind the spending of non-disclosing groups.

Crossroads GPS is the biggest spender, with $85.9 million in spending in announced advertising since the beginning of 2011, according to its press releases.

The Campaign Finance Institute reports:

In an election filled with tumultuous campaign finance change, the six major national political party committees so far have been holding their own financially. According to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission on July 20, the two national committees and four congressional committees had raised a combined total of $792 million in the eighteen months between January 1, 2011 and June 30, 2012.

This put the parties well ahead of the previous hard-money record years of 2008 ($625 million at eighteen months) and 2004 ($616 million) (see Table 1), which were the first two presidential elections after parties had to raise all of their money as hard money under the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA or McCain-Feingold). In fact it even puts the parties ahead of the combined 18-month hard-and-soft money records of $644 million in 2000 and $720 million in 2002. (Information about 1990-2002 is available in FEC press releases of September 2000 and2002.)

The parties’ hard money success since 2002 has come about because the parties replaced soft money with (a) money from small donors coming into all six committees, (b) money from Members of Congress to the four Hill committees, and (c) money from presidential candidates’ joint fundraising committees coming into the RNC and DNC.

The Impact of Citizens United

Our chapters on interest groups and elections discuss Citizens United, the Supreme Court case that reduced restrictions on campaign spending by outside groups.  At The New York Times Magazine, Matt Bai asks whether the decision has transformed politics as thoroughly as critics claim.

Well, not necessarily. Legally speaking, zillionaires were no less able to write fat checks four years ago than they are today. And while it is true that corporations can now give money for specific purposes that were prohibited before, it seems they aren’t, or at least not at a level that accounts for anything like the sudden influx of money into the system. According to a brief filed by Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, and Floyd Abrams, the First Amendment lawyer, in a Montana case on which the Supreme Court ruled last month, not a single Fortune 100 company contributed to a candidate’s super PAC during this year’s Republican primaries. Of the $96 million or more raised by these super PACs, only about 13 percent came from privately held corporations, and less than 1 percent came from publicly traded corporations.

"Social welfare groups," or "501(c)(4) groups," do not have to make public disclosure of contributors, yet can make issue advocacy ads and (subject to IRS limits) some express advocacy ads.  Have they become the conduit for corporate money?

But the best anecdotal evidence suggests that this kind of thing isn’t happening in nearly the proportions you might expect. Kenneth Gross, an election lawyer who represents an array of large corporations, told me that few of his clients have contributed to the social-welfare groups engaged in political activity this year. They know those contributions might become public at some point, and no company that sells a product wants to risk the kind of consumer reaction that engulfed Target in 2010, after it contributed $150,000 to a Minnesota group backing a conservative candidate opposing gay marriage. “If you’ve got a bank on every corner, if you’ve got stores in every strip mall, you don’t want to be associated with a social cause,” Gross told me.

 What accounts for the increase in outside spending?

 The level of outside money increased 164 percent from 2004 to 2008. Then it rose 135 percent from 2008 to 2012. In other words, while the sheer amount of dollars seems considerably more ominous after Citizens United, the percentage of change from one presidential election to the next has remained pretty consistent since the passage of McCain-Feingold. And this suggests that the rising amount of outside money was probably bound to reach ever more staggering levels with or without Citizens United. The unintended consequence of McCain-Feingold was to begin a gradual migration of political might from inside the party structure to outside it. 

And why did liberal outside spending spike under Bush while conservative outside spending is soaring under Obama?

A consequence of McCain-Feingold has been to flip on its head an old truism of politics, which is that incumbency comes with a fixed financial advantage. In the era of soft money, controlling the White House meant that a party could almost always leverage its considerable resources to dominate fund-raising. But today it’s much easier to tap into the fury and anxiety of out-of-power millionaires than it is to amass contributions in defense of the status quo. This dynamic probably explains why wealthy Democrats who pioneered the idea of outside money during the Bush years have largely stood down this year, even while conservative fund-raising has soared. It isn’t that liberals don’t like Obama or grow queasy at the mention of super PACs. It’s a function of human nature: nobody really gets pumped up to write a $10 million check just to keep things more or less as they are. 

ATM v. Bullock

Previous posts have discussed Citizens United. Wendy Kaminer writes at The Atlantic:

Advocates of campaign finance restrictions are not necessarily displeased by the Supreme Court's unsurprising, summary disposal of Montana's ban on independent corporate campaign expenditures. The brief unsigned order in ATM v Bullock, reversing a Montana Supreme Court decision that upheld the ban, will "further fuel" the drive for a constitutional amendment repealingCitizens United, according to freespeechforpeople.org, where hyperbole reigns:

"In the face of overwhelming evidence that the basic premise of the Citizens United ruling was wrong, five justices of the United States Supreme Court today said they do not care. They do not care about the facts."

But, as I've stressed repeatedly, attacks on Citizens United have routinely misrepresented the facts, using that much maligned decision as a catch-all for whatever democrats and progressives don't like about campaign finance. (Monica Youn of the Brennan Center practically acknowledged as much at the recent American Constitution Society convention, as she praised the political uses of the Citizens United meme.)

In fact, Citizens United struck down a ban on independent expenditures by unions and corporations. It did not address expenditures by super-rich individuals, which have dominated in 2012. Instead, it confirmed that "political speech does not lose First Amendment protection simply because its source is a corporation."

That's a principle members of incorporated, progressive advocacy groups should applaud, just as they should vigorously oppose the constitutional amendment promoted by freespeechforpeople.org, which would deny for profit and non-profit corporations fundamental First and Fourth Amendment protections. (I've critiqued the amendment strategy here.)

Montana law had denied corporations their First Amendment rights, and Montana's high court had defied the Citizens United ruling by upholding the law, which is why the Supreme Court slapped it down summarily, without hearing arguments. "The question presented in this case is whether the holding of Citizens United applies to the Montana state law. There can be no serious doubt that it does," ATM v Bullock rightly declares.

Bullock has another point of view:

“It is a sad day for our democracy and for those of us who still want to believe that the United States Supreme Court is anything more than another political body in Washington, D.C.

“I am very disappointed in what the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision means for state and local elections in Montana – and for our entire nation. One hundred years ago, Montanans passed an initiative to protect democracy, to give everyday people a voice that would no longer be silenced by a sea of corporate money. Their wisdom and the Corrupt Practices Act of 1912 have served Montana well for over a century, and could have provided the Court with the opportunity to revisit some of the fundamental fallacies underlying the Citizens United decision.

“I am proud to have led this fight for Montana and honored that 22 other states and Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) stood shoulder to shoulder with Montana. Despite this disappointing decision, the last word has not been spoken on the issue of how we preserve a viable democracy in which everyday people have a meaningful voice. History will show that it was Montanans and the Montana Supreme Court that understood the heart of this issue and stood on the side of ‘We the people.’”

While five of the Court’s justices voted to reverse the Montana Supreme Court’s decision, four justices – led by Justice Breyer – voted to deny ATP’s petition to rehear the case and instead uphold the Montana court’s decision. In the dissent, Justice Breyer wrote:

“Montana’s experience, like considerable ex­perience elsewhere since the Court’s decision in Citizens United, casts grave doubt on the Court’s supposition that independent expenditures do not corrupt or appear to do so.”

Coordination and Congressional Elections

Reposted from Epic Journey:

At The Washington Post, Dan Eggen writes about one-donor/one-beneficiary Super PACs, using the example of the Committee to Elect an Effective Valley Congressman, which Marc Nathanson established to back Rep. Howard Berman in his fight against fellow Democrat Brad Sherman.

The phenomenon began in the Republican presidential primary, when a handful of millionaires lined up to support their candidates through specially targeted super PACs, including one funded by Jon Huntsman Jr.’s billionaire father.

The same kinds of very personalized groups have sprouted in House and Senate races across the country, inundating voters with ads and mailings and testing the limits of federal rules forbidding coordination between fundraising committees and candidates.

...

The pattern is evident in California, which held a revamped primary contest Tuesday allowing the first two candidates of any party to proceed to the general election. At least a dozen primary races in the state featured super PACs founded or funded by close allies and associates of the candidates, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

In the High Desert east of Los Angeles, for example, Republican Paul Cook was aided by more than $200,000 worth of ads and mailers from two super PACs in the newly created 8th Congressional District. The groups were formed by the same lawyer within a month of the primary and have not yet had to disclose their donors.

...

 But the prize for the most personalized super PAC must surely go to North Carolina, where GOP congressional candidate George Holding was aided by a group funded almost entirely by his family.

At The Huffington Post, Michael McAuliff and Paul Blumenthal explain one way in which candidates and super PACs may act in concert without breaking anti-coordination rules.  Their example is Waterfront Strategies.

Waterfront is not actually an independent outfit. The building in Georgetown where it is located is the home of GMMB, the powerhouse media consulting shop that produces President Barack Obama's ads, and where Obama's top consultant there, Jim Margolis, boasts that he represents more Democratic senators than anyone else, among them Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Waterfront, it turns out, is an internal branch of GMMB. It was incorporated in Delaware, and its president is listed as Raelynn Olson. She is GMMB's managing partner.

...

Waterfront Strategies, [consultants] explained, exists so that GMMB has a separate corporate entity where it can employ people to handle outside expenditures -- in this case mostly from the House Majority PAC that aims to retake control of the House from Republicans, and the Majority PAC that is trying to preserve Democratic control of the Senate. The arrangement keeps the money legally separate from people who may be working more directly with Senate or House candidates. Thus campaign laws barring coordination are not violated.

... 

That's not to say that either GMMB or Waterfront Strategies are breaking any laws. But, consultants said, it is increasingly easy to coordinate without breaking the rules.

"The way it works is you hire people who have worked with the candidates and their campaigns before, so they know the person and they know what the campaign wants," said one longtime Democratic consultant. "Then they're all looking at the same polls and research, so they know what needs to be addressed."

Super PAC Goes for Youth

The Des Moines Register reports:

A new Republican super PAC today kicked into gear in Iowa today to whip up support younger Iowa voters.

The new PAC, called Crossroads Generation, is a joint venture of American Crossroads, the super PAC that GOP strategist Karl Rove helped found; the College Republican National Committee; the Young Republican National Federation and the Republican State Leadership Committee, according to a news release.

Iowa native Derek Flowers is the executive director of Crossroads Generation.
It’s doing $50,000 in online ads targeted at young swing voters in eight key states: Iowa, Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia.

The PAC, with $750,000 in startup money, will also do a new website and video atwww.CrossroadsGeneration.com, Twitter feed (@CrossroadsGen), and Facebook effort (www.Facebook.com/CrossroadsGeneration).

Flowers was director of the 2012 Iowa Straw Poll and was the national victory director at the Republican National Committee.

Oppo People

Previous posts have examined opposition research, or oppo.  NBC reports:

As befits the age of internet transparency, Oppo people no longer hide under the dark rocks of the political landscape. From Rodell Mollineau at “American Bridge” to Jonathan Collegio at the conservative “American Crossroads” (co-founded by White House veteran Karl Rove), they are more than open about what they do.

We are, they say, living in the “golden age” of opposition research, where the Internet has not only made it easier than ever to find negative details about a candidates life, innovations like YouTube and Twitter allow them to take their message right to the people. As Ben Smith of Buzzfeed.com puts it, “The Super Pacs have become their own media outlets.” 

...
While opposition research relies on diligent investigation of sometimes arcane facts (for example, that John Edwards spent $400 on a Beverly Hills salon haircut), it’s the weaving together of many of those facts to create a negative storyline that makes this approach such a powerful weapon. “A voter is not going to go through all of these data points and decide whether or not they’re going to vote for someone,” says Jonathan Collegio. “They need to have a package for them.”

Rodell Molineau defended that packaging and says that the public can’t be “spoon fed” lies.

“The way we look at our role, is to find the truth,” he said. “It needs to be grounded in some sort of fact, because the American people are not stupid.”

 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Super PAC Tweets

Two campaign trends:  the rise of super PACs and the increasing use of social media -- are intersecting. Sarah Lai Stirland reports:

In what is likely to be among the first of a following flood of SuperPAC promoted tweets, the Obama-allied superPAC Priorities USA Action used the microblogging service Twitter on Tuesday to promote its campaign messaging against Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney.

Romney’s agenda for the wealthy is hurting him with those who aren’t. A @Priorities2012#SuperTuesday Memo: bit.ly/zSAINf
— Bill Burton (@billburton716) March 6, 2012

Priorities USA Action's Bill Burton used searches for the hashtag #SuperTuesday to promote a tweet that bashed the former governor of Massachusetts. The micro-ad neatly encapsulated the Democrats' talking point for the day: "Romney’s agenda for the wealthy is hurting him with those who aren’t," read the message. The tweet linked to memo on the SuperPAC's web site that presented exit polling statistics that showed that much of Romney's support comes from the relatively wealthy.

While television networks are expected to still gobble up the majority of SuperPAC dollars during the 2012 election cycle, online companies are also hoping to be able to edge in on the action. Earlier this year, Google told techPresident that it has set up a special unit to deal with the expected inflow of cash.

Super PAC Background

The Center for Responsive Politics explains:

Super PACs are a new kind of political action committee created in July 2010 following the outcome of a federal court case known as SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission.

Technically known as independent expenditure-only committees, Super PACs may raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, associations and individuals, then spend unlimited sums to overtly advocate for or against political candidates. Super PACs must, however, report their donors to the Federal Election Commission on a monthly or quarterly basis -- the Super PAC's choice -- as a traditional PAC would. Unlike traditional PACs, Super PACs are prohibited from donating money directly to political candidates.

As of January 06, 2012, 269 groups organized as Super PACs have reported total receipts of $32,008,813 and total expenditures of $18,092,719 in the 2012 cycle.

At The Atlantic, Ben Heineman writes:

Super PACs themselves, which are organized under federal election laws, must register with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and disclose contributors. But many Super PAC donors will be tax-exempt "social welfare organizations" or trade associations or "issue organizations" organized under the Internal Revenue Code -- the so-called 501(c)(4), 50l(c)(6), or 527 entities. And, under long-standing IRS rules, such tax-exempt organizations are not required to disclose their corporate or individual donors, who will thus not be listed in Super PAC reports filed with the FEC. 

Another loophole involves coordination.  The law forbids candidates from coordinating with Super PACs. But if the people running Super PACs have a long history with a candidate, they need little guidance.  And it is lawful for candidates to provide such guidance, provided that they do so in public.  At Politico, Kenneth P. Vogel and Dave Levinthal write:

Gingrich last month issued such a dictate to any outside group supporting him and took it a step further by pledging to “publicly disown” any super PAC that went negative on his behalf.

In spite of that, a supportive super PAC called Winning Our Future, run by his former aides, had signaled its intent to go after Romney. And, hours after Gingrich in his Iowa concession speech vowed to hit Romney harder, Winning Our Future began featuring on its website a tough anti-Romney ad from McCain’s 2008 campaign.

That’s likely no coincidence.

“We’re Newt’s super PAC. We take out marching orders through the media for Newt Gingrich,” said Rick Tyler, a former Gingrich spokesman who is advising Winning Our Future. “I do what Newt tells me through the media. And it’s all within the confines of the law.”