While press coverage tends to gin up excitement about a handful of expensive and tightly contested races every election cycle, most congressional races are not competitive. With very rare exceptions, Republicans from Alabama and Democrats representing Seattle are guaranteed to cruise to victory. In 2012, for example, the average Senate election was decided by nearly 20 points.

That doesn’t stop surefire winners from raising huge sums of money, though: 2012’s biggest recipient of PAC money was House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.), who has never been re-elected with less than 60 percent of the vote and had a margin of victory of nearly 30 percentage points in 2012.

As a result, PACs have a choice to make: Do they want to focus their resources on the minority of races where the outcome is in doubt, helping to elect more lawmakers who share their views? Or do they want to give exclusively to candidates who are safe bets to win, guaranteeing themselves access to lots of elected officials who owe them a favor?

We can learn a lot about a PAC’s strategy by looking at the average margin of victory in the races where the PAC made contributions. If a PAC is primarily donating to guaranteed winners, the typical candidate receiving money from that PAC will be an easy winner — one who won by 30, 40, or even 50 percentage points. A PAC focusing on tight races, on the other hand, will contribute to candidates who win or lose by fewer than 20 percentage points. (To make fair comparisons, using CRP’s data we weighted the average margin by the amount the PAC donated in each race. If a PAC gave $1,000 to a candidate who won in a landslide and $10,000 to a one who lost by just a few votes, that PAC’s average margin will be very low.)

As an example, 2012’s largest PAC contributor to candidates was the National Association of Realtors. The NAR had an average margin of 29.3, meaning that the average dollar donated by the PAC went to a candidate who won by 29.3 percentage points. To give an idea of scale, that’s roughly the amount by which Democrats in Rhode Island and Maryland and Republicans in Tennessee and Utah won their races in 2012 — near-landslides. On balance, this means that the Realtors targeted candidates who were safe bets at the expense of candidates whose races were still up in the air. As we’ll see below, the NAR’s high average margin was not at all unusual among major PACs in 2012. (A high average margin could also indicate a PAC that backed lots of candidates who got beaten badly, but all heavy-hitting PACs were wise enough not to do so.)

Excluding PACs with an official connection to a party or candidate, such as leadership PACs, there were 716 PACs that made at least $100,000 in contributions to candidates during the 2012 cycle. Most of these PACs (86 percent) were affiliated with businesses or trade associations, with the remainder representing large national unions or issue-oriented liberal and conservative groups. Each dot on the graph below represents one of these PACs, showing the amount the PAC donated in total and the average margin:

The average margin of victory for the PACs on this chart was 27.2 percentage points, meaning that most major PACs spent large sums of money on races that were never in doubt. Even the PAC that focused the most on close races, the International Foodservice Distributors Association, gave to a few candidates without serious opposition, such as Tennessee Republicans Marsha Blackburn and Bob Corker.

The smaller PACs on the left side of the chart use a much wider range of strategies than the very biggest contributors at right. Small PACs varied greatly in the extent to which they targeted hotly contested races, ranging from an average margin of 8.3 points for the IFDA to 51 points for the utility Georgia Power, which gave exclusively to candidates from its home state, including some who were running unopposed. In contrast, no PAC that made more than $2 million in contributions in 2012 had an average margin of under 25 points; every single one of the largest contributors spent most of their money on blowouts.

In fact, it wouldn’t have been possible for a PAC to donate $2 million without giving to lots of sure winners (or losers). PACs can only contribute $5,000 to a candidate per election ($10,000 in a cycle with a primary and general election), so to give $2 million a PAC generally has to target at least 200 candidates — far more than the number of close races in any given cycle. This doesn’t prove that corporate and labor mega-PACs are only interested in buying influence from candidates who are virtually certain to be elected, but it does suggest they’re at least aware that most of their largesse is going to frontrunners rather than to those running in tossup contests.

Which PACs do target close races? The graph below plots each PAC’s average margin of victory against the percentage of donations that went to that PAC’s favored party. At the right edge of the graph are PACs that gave exclusively to one party’s candidates, while PACs that split their money more evenly between Democrats and Republicans are at left.

PACs that gave almost solely to one party donated to candidates with a much lower average margin of victory than PACs that split their donations down the middle. Among PACs that gave at least 95 percent of their donations to one party, the average recipient won by 18.4 points, compared to 29.5 points among PACs that gave less than 55 percent to their favored party. The same holds true whether the PAC is affiliated with a business, a labor union, or an ideological group.

This pattern suggests that political players of all kinds face the same tradeoff between maximizing their influence with elected officials and swaying the results of elections. For groups that rely heavily on a single party to advance their agendas — labor unions and oil companies, for example, which respectively support Democrats and Republicans almost exclusively — this might not be much of a choice at all. Knowing that their agenda won’t pass a chamber controlled by the other party, such PACs are more likely to back the marginal candidates whose races could decide which party controls Congress.

For businesses and ideological organizations that are on the fence between the two parties — healthcare companies, for example, or ideological PACs representing the interests of specific ethnic groups — the choice is much harder. Groups like these might have a preference for one party over the other, but recognize that they need supporters on both sides of the aisle to achieve their aims. By contributing to candidates in close races, such groups increase the odds that their strongest allies will be elected, but run the risk of backing losers and seeing their donations go to waste. While we don’t know how political strategists and government relations professionals go about choosing one strategy or the other, we can see the results in the candidates they choose to support — and learn a great deal about how they hope to influence our government.

Andrew Mayersohn is a researcher at the Center for Responsive Politics.

Image: House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp; AP Photo/Charles Dharapak.



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