Tag: outside spending
Midterm Roundup: An Outside Spending Record

Midterm Roundup: An Outside Spending Record

Here are some interesting stories on the midterm campaigns that you may have missed on Monday, September 22:

• Today in GOP outreach: The conservative group Americans for Shared Prosperity has released an odd new ad featuring a woman who wants to break up with her boyfriend (Barack Obama) and all of his friends (the Democrats on the ballot in November). As Nia-Malika Henderson puts it in The Washington Post: “So yes, this ad is, um, strange. Probably sexist too — but mainly it’s just weird and bad. Very, very bad.”

• Outside spending in this cycle has officially surpassed the record for most money spent in a midterm election — and we still have 43 more days to go.

• If Senator Mark Udall’s (D-CO) new web ad is any indication, Democrats still have no intention of letting Rep. Cory Gardner (R-CO) retreat on fetal personhood. Udall leads by less than 1 percent in the Real Clear Politicspoll average (although one recent Quinnipiac survey, showing Gardner up 8 percent, appears to be a significant outlier).

• If you’re a politician, you never want to see a headline like this about yourself: “Kansas gubernatorial candidate addresses 1990s strip club incident.”

Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler slammed the latest attack ad from Georgia Senate candidate David Perdue (R), which claims that his Democratic opponent Michelle Nunn’s “own [campaign] plan says she funded organizations linked to terrorists.” Kessler called the charge “utterly bogus,” and awarded it four Pinocchios.

• And embattled Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) had an interesting time at Saturday’s LSU-Mississippi State game:

The Bayou Bengals lost by five points, which is roughly the same deficit Landrieu faces in her re-election fight against Republican congressman Bill Cassidy.

Photo: dpmshap via Flickr

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The Liberal Koch? Bloomberg Pledges $50 Million For Gun Reform

The Liberal Koch? Bloomberg Pledges $50 Million For Gun Reform

It’s sometimes easy to forget that infamous conservatives like the Koch brothers are not the only wealthy Americans who use their wallets to influence elections. As former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) reminds us, plenty of liberals are also giving large sums to influence national politics.

Unlike many of his peers in the dark money game, Bloomberg isn’t hiding his motives. In a New York Timesinterview and an appearance on NBC’s Today Show on Wednesday, he touted a new effort to strengthen gun laws and curb gun violence on a national level in the United States. The former mayor then pledged to spend $50 million to fight the influence of the National Rifle Association, which spent over $11 million on the 2012 elections.

To sell his new gun-control effort, Bloomberg painted the issue in ethical terms. “This is not a battle of dollars. This is a battle for the hearts and minds of America so that we can protect our children, protect innocent people,” he told the Today Show’s Savannah Guthrie. “We’re the only civilized country in the world that has this problem. We have to do something.”

But Bloomberg’s effort is ultimately about influencing politicians and policy. His ultimate goal, he told Guthrie, is to shore up enough public support to scare politicians away from voting against gun restrictions.

“People will vote for whatever they think is in their own self-interest to get elected and re-elected,” he said. “We’ve got to convince them that the 80 percent of gun owners, the 90 percent of Americans who are in favor of just simple background checks to make sure criminals, minors and people with psychiatric problems can’t buy guns—something that’s common sense—we’ve got to make sure they understand that’s what the public wants and the public’s going to vote that way.”

When it comes to elections, it shouldn’t be hard for Bloomberg to match the success of the NRA.

Contrary to its reputation, the NRA has not fared well in its fight to influence elections across the United States in recent years. In 2012, for example, the gun lobby donated $11 million to various campaigns — and got its desired result in just 0.81 percent of those races.

To be sure, Bloomberg does not have a perfect record of influencing elections either. In 2013, he gave $350,000 to two Colorado state senators who faced recall elections. The senators, both Democrats, had voted for stricter gun laws in the wake of the mass shooting at a Colorado movie theater. Despite Bloomberg’s donations, both senators lost to pro-gun rights Republicans.

The former mayor’s new group, called Everytown for Gun Safety, has already begun its effort to spread gun-violence awareness. The group will combine two already existing gun-control advocacy groups: Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which Bloomberg co-founded, and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. The group will primarily lobby women to make gun control an important policy issue that will influence their vote. This video is the group’s first attempt to galvanize supporters and reach a wide audience:

Bloomberg’s pledge to devote up to $50 million to the initiative will make him one of the nation’s top political donors to outside spending groups. In 2012, Bloomberg checked in as the fifth largest donor to outside spending groups, contributing over $13 million to a variety of politically active groups. If Bloomberg had spent an additional $50 million in 2012, he would have been the second largest outside donor.

Only Sheldon Adelson, who spent of $90 million on outside spending groups, would have outspent the former mayor.

Photo: Center for American Progress via Flickr

Top Democrat Sounds Alarm On Right-Wing Spending: ‘We Can’t Keep Up With Them’

Top Democrat Sounds Alarm On Right-Wing Spending: ‘We Can’t Keep Up With Them’

Republican-leaning outside groups are spending unprecedented amounts on the 2014 midterm elections, stoking Democratic fears that their candidates could be buried early on in the critical campaigns.

The 2014 elections are on track to be easily the most expensive in American history, and right-wing, 501(c)(4) “dark money” groups are leading the way. The Koch brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity alone has already spent more than $20 million on ads attacking Democratic congressional candidates, vulnerable incumbent senator Kay Hagan (D-NC) being the primary target.

On Tuesday, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) sounded the alarm during an interview with the New York Times.

“We’re faced with a grim reality that more money is being spent earlier in some of these hot races than we’ve ever seen,” Senator Durbin said. “We’re spending some, but we can’t keep up with them.”

Outside groups won’t be the only Republicans to spend liberally in the 2014 campaigns. The National Republican Senatorial Committee announced Tuesday that it raised $4.62 million in January, making it the committee’s most productive month of the 2014 campaign cycle.

The big haul marks the second consecutive strong fundraising month for the Republicans’ Senate campaign arm. The committee raised $4.02 million in December, narrowly edging the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s total of $4 million. The DSCC has not yet released its January fundraising amount; the deadline for it to do so is Thursday.

Overall, the DSCC still holds a decisive fundraising advantage for the cycle; the Democratic committee has outraised its Republican counterpart by almost $16 million, and outspent it by more than $10 million. The DSCC currently has just over $12 million in cash on hand, with $3,750,000 in debts. The NRSC has just over $8 million to spend, but is debt-free.

UPDATE: On Wednesday morning, the DSCC revealed that it raised $6.6 million in January. It now has $15 million in cash on hand, and $2.5 million in debt.

Photo: Center for American Progress Action Fund via Flickr

Poll: Democrat Sink Leads In Florida Special Election

Poll: Democrat Sink Leads In Florida Special Election

Democrat Alex Sink holds a slight lead over Republican David Jolly in Florida’s hotly contested special election for U.S. House, according to a new Tampa Bay Times/Bay News 9/WUSF Public Media poll of likely voters in the state’s 13th congressional district.

The poll finds Sink with a 42 to 35 percent advantage over Jolly; 4 percent support Libertarian candidate Lucas Overby, and 14 percent are undecided.

Those undecided voters are likely to swing the election; 81 percent of them say they are not leaning towards any candidate.

Unsurprisingly, the Affordable Care Act is serving as a dividing line between the candidates. Voters who support the law favor Sink by an 81 to 14 percent margin, while Jolly wins voters who oppose it, by 84 to 9 percent. Overall, 43 percent of those surveyed support the Affordable Care Act, while 47 percent oppose it, and 10 percent have no opinion.

Although health care reform has dominated headlines throughout the campaign — both Jolly and outside groups have trained their fire on Sink’s support for the law — it may not prove decisive in the election; 39 percent of respondents said the law’s impact on their voting preference is “very important,” while 33 percent said it is “somewhat important,” and 26 percent said it is “not at all important.”

This should alarm Republican strategists across the nation, who have seemingly decided to put all of their eggs in the “Obamacare is a train wreck” basket. Florida’s 13th district has a reputation as a national bellwether; if a quarter of voters across the nation don’t consider Obamacare to be any sort of factor in their 2014 voting decisions, then Republican candidates could be in big trouble.

As the March 11 election draws nearer, the deeply negative campaign has increasingly become a proxy battle between liberals and conservatives across the country. Outside groups have spent a staggering $1.1 million on the race in the past nine days alone, with much more expected to follow in the coming weeks. Overall, outside groups have spent $3.5 million on the campaign — $2.6 million of it in support of Jolly — making it among the most expensive races of the cycle.

The Tampa Bay Times/Bay News 9/WUSF Public Media poll surveyed 603 voters by telephone between February 4 and February 9, and has a +/- 4.0 percent margin of error.

Photo: Village Square via Flickr