Jonathan Martin has an important story about the cycle, and a trend that may more than counter the cash shortage for the GOP ground game

[A]ccording to an internal Democratic spreadsheet obtained by POLITICO, there is a canyon-size gap between the two parties right now when it comes to spending by outside groups.

As of Monday, pro-Republican third-party organizations had paid for a total of $23.6 million worth of ads, while Democratic-aligned groups had spent just $4.8 million on TV....

Perhaps most frustrating for Democrats is the absence of a pure, campaign-oriented third-party group along the lines of American Crossroads, the group founded in part by Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie and now run by veteran Republicans Steven Law and Mike Duncan. No organization on the left will do anything like what American Crossroads, with a fundraising goal of $52 million, is doing now for GOP Senate candidates. And what worries some House Democratic officials is that if Law and Duncan, seeing better prospects for carrying the House than the Senate, shift some of their money away from the statewide races into less expensive congressional campaigns.

Jim Jordan and two other Democratic operatives have started an independent expenditure group called Commonsense Ten that has begun airing ads in Senate races and may offer some help to a few House candidates.

But Jordan said it wouldn’t be able to match American Crossroads.

“The progressive donor base has stopped writing checks,” he explained.