Since the spring, Republicans and Democrats have braced for super PAC spending. | AP Photos GOP super PACs hit a crossroads

Republican super PACs are about to face a potentially existential test of their reach and impact as the 2012 election cycle comes to a close, with their spending being closely watched as a way of answering a central question at the core of modern American politics: can an avalanche of money from outside groups move the needle in the presidential race and Senate contests across the country.

Since the spring, Republicans and Democrats have braced for the juggernaut of super PAC spending, an advertising tidal wave that was expected to swamp the messaging from the other side and quite possibly play a determinative role in deciding who will hold the presidency. Democrats have not been nearly as effective in fundraising this cycle, and have been casting jittery glances across the partisan divide.


Yet so far, the results for Republicans are muddled - at best.

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The fall crush of advertising is really just beginning in earnest, but even after months of media carpet bombing, the presidential race remains tight but with President Barack Obama ahead in most battleground polls. This has Republican operatives and donors keeping a close eye on where the spending goes from here in the national race and the other key GOP goal, retaking control of the Senate.

The group being most closely monitored is Americans Crossroads, and its affiliate, Crossroads GPS. They are the relative newcomers to outside spending, and have focused the most attention on ad dollars at the presidential level.

Democrats have fanned the notion for the last two weeks, as Mitt Romney has struggled, that Crossroads may start shifting its resources and begin walking away from a race that seems increasingly uphill. Obama allies have been gleeful that, for all the ad dollars spent, the presidential race is still roughly where it was a few months ago.

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Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio said that is a simplistic way of looking at advertising campaigns.

“This is an argument by and for four-year-olds, not people who take their reputations seriously,” he said. “This assumes advertising takes place in a vacuum, without any pushback from the other team — and one could just as easily make the case that Obama’s $173 million of ads over the summer to define Romney failed because the race remained tied.”

Those spots were fought back to something of a draw in terms of both candidates’ negatives, he said.

“The fact is that while Obama was driving Romney’s negatives up, Obama’s own negatives were going up — which is why the Gallup poll had the race tied almost continuously from May through August,” Collegio said. “If the dollar is getting weaker at the same time the euro is getting weaker, the exchange rate isn’t going to change much. Same thing.”

Another source involved in Republican outside groups pointed out that while Democrats have less that they’re spending on ad dollars, their supporters are arguably more involved in field and grassroots operations, the less visible but important elements of keeping races close.

While the Obama campaign spent millions on ads featuring Obama looking directly to the camera, Crossroads was prohibited from that type of candidate-based appeal under federal law, preventing them from using the most effective form of positive advertising, a super PAC official added.

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Whether the group ultimately shifts resources toward the Senate map - it recently bought $1 million of air time in Indiana - remains to be seen.

Sources familiar with Crossroads spending say that there are no plans for changes now, that the race is still distant from a point where any type of shift would occur, and that the Obama-Romney race is still within the margin of error. Other sources said nothing would happen until at least after the second presidential debate at Hofstra University on Oct. 16, at which point there will be a clearer picture of how things stand.

Americans for Prosperity, the national group linked most closely to the Koch brothers, also has no plans to slow down the overall pace of its spending, said AFP President Tim Phillips.

But Phillips said that AFP would probably narrow its focus, geographically, toward the end of the presidential election. States will fall off the map as they break decisively for Obama or Romney, Phillips said, and AFP won’t continue to blanket the airwaves in places where the race is effectively over.

“Odds are, as it narrows down in the last 30, 40 days, or the last 10 or 15 days, you narrow down to four or five states,” Phillips said. “You probably won’t see an 11-state express advocacy buy from us, because that’s not necessary.”

Said Phillips: “We know that it’s a close-run thing at this point.”

AFP, which has grassroots efforts in over 200 counties nationally, according to one source familiar with their work, recently held a meeting in New York with board members and some donors to focus on the remainder of the cycle. No major strategy shift was announced, according to people briefed on the meeting.

Spending from campaigns and outside groups on political ads has well exceeded $500 million this cycle. Republicans have outmatched their Democratic counterparts in terms of fundraising, aided in part by a small cadre of donors willing to write eight-figure checks. Others badly want to beat Obama, and have contributed accordingly.

While there’s little indication so far that national groups are planning to shift money out of the presidential race, one GOP operative involved in the outside-spending world said the key organization to watch is Crossroads. Unlike other conservative spenders, Crossroads is motivated primarily by partisan goals, rather than ideological ones, and a more purely practical weighing of its electoral options.

“If there is a shift, I think the biggest shift that you’ll see is with Crossroads,” the strategist said. “They’ve billed themselves as the preeminent, anti-Obama money organization. So if they scale back or shift more into Senate, I think that’s the story.”

To some veterans of the outside spending game, the massive, eight- and nine-figure sums spent by the post-Citizens United groups seem to blow past the point of diminishing returns. While independent expenditure groups have played targeted roles in the past – weighing in on key races or to push a specific agenda – Crossroads and its allies have tried to outdo the candidates and party committees all over the electoral map.

That may have been an essential function in 2010, when the Republican National Committee was adrift and broke under then-Chairman Michael Steele. Now, the proliferation of new independent expenditure groups risks both redundancy and financial overkill.

Their messaging is not always consistent, a Democrat tracking the Republican spending pointed out - there is Solyndra advertising, there is debt and deficit advertising, there is Obama-as-failure advertising. Most of the groups coordinate loosely on advertising buys, but their messaging has been diffuse.

Others in the constellation include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce which, like AFP, has been around for awhile, but which is also spending at a heavier level this cycle than in the past, although on Senate and House races only.

There is also not a constant supply and demand for the more target-specific super PACs on the right. The pro-Mitt Romney group Restore Our Future took in $7 million in August, roughly a third less than the pro-Obama Priorities USA Action did.

The party’s top donor class also have generally enjoyed being pitched by Karl Rove, the former George W. Bush adviser who is a co-founder of Crossroads. The group has, throughout the last year, been hunting for dollars from the same donors that Restore Our Future has, and has been able to make the case that giving to them is preferable.

“They love Karl,” said one veteran Republican fundraiser.

Restore played a critical role in the primary cycle, grinding down both Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. But with so much money being invested elsewhere on the right - and with options like Crossroads GPS, where donors aren’t disclosed - they have become a lower-tier force in the general election.

Their ad buys have been legitimate but not huge, and in very targeted states, although the group was responsible for some of the most consistent positive messaging about Romney’s background with a massive ad buy related to his time at the Salt Lake City Olympics.

Yet even if Romney loses this fall, one Republican who has been involved in outside groups this cycle predicted Rove and others wouldn’t face a pitchfork-type reaction from donors, especially since the Romney campaign’s own advertising has been relatively light for weeks.

“I think everybody recognizes that if they hadn’t been doing what they’ve been doing it would be a lot worse,” the source said .

At a Christian Science Monitor breakfast Thursday morning, Club for Growth President Chris Chocola sounded a skeptical note about some of the titanic spending goals other organizations on the right had set for themselves, explaining: “If I ever went to our membership and said, for 2014, we’re going to engage in 100 races, we’re going to raise $200 million, sitting here today, they should fire me. Because there’s no way that you know what races you should be in, shouldn’t be in, who the candidates are, how the races develop.”

“I’m not criticizing groups like Crossroads but they do it differently than we do,” he said. “They’re going to engage in a whole bunch of races and hope to get enough. We engage in a few races and try to be a determining factor in those. I think the case can be made that our spending is more effective because it’s very targeted.”

Democratic strategists, who feel a combination of relief and glee at the limited impact of Republican super PACs, are already openly questioning the tactical savvy of the other side.

“So far this cycle, the advantage they’ve had is money. They’ve obviously outpaced us financially. But I think we’ve been a whole lot smarter than they have,” said J.B. Poersch, the former executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and an adviser to the Senate-focused group Majority PAC. “Given the volume of money they’ve spent, they don’t have a whole lot to show for it.”

Democratic strategists privately dream of Nov. 7 – the day after the election – as a moment of reckoning for the constellation of GOP-aligned groups that have spent tens and hundreds of millions of dollars against them.

Much as liberal mega-donors reacted to a defeat in 2004 by closing their checkbooks, Democrats imagine a reaction on the right against disappointment this year.

But any donors who respond that way had unrealistic expectations from the start, said Center for Competitive Politics President David Keating.

“You go into this with your eyes wide open. You know that it’s a 50-50 chance at best,” said Keating, a former executive director of the Club for Growth. “You’re not going to take something that’s a 50-50 and make it into a slam dunk.”

That’s especially true, he added, in a presidential race: “It’s just not the way these things work. Advertising is probably the least effective at moving numbers in a presidential race than any other race, because so many people are paying attention.”