When Super PACs are everywhere, there are bound to be some zany ones.

Last year, Ronnie Manns was feeling down on his luck. His two Rockford, Illinois-based transportation and financial services enterprises—Manns Logistics, Manufacturing & Distribution and R. Manns & Associates—had gone bottom up during the recession, and the political rancor on television had put him in a sour mood. But from his frustration was born an idea: He would start his own super PAC.

“To be completely honest, to tell you exactly what I was thinking would be a lie, because I honestly can’t remember,” Manns told me over the phone. But the result was a group called “American Citizens of Modest Means,” which, according to Manns, would tell “the whole story” about Americans who were struggling, while promoting his own distinctive political platform. “I have inventions that will create thousands of jobs right here in America,” he explained via e-mail. “I have an innovation that could reduce our housing crisis. ... I have multiple inventions one of which has anti-cancer properties and could decrease mortality.”

Manns’s policy prescriptions may be unorthodox, but, in the world of super PACs, he isn’t so unusual. Perhaps believing the potential to spend unlimited amounts of money on federal elections somehow increases the likelihood that one will receive unlimited amounts of money, numerous aspiring politicos with all kinds of agendas have formed super PACs over the past two years. At least 325 such groups have materialized, and together they’ve raised more than $98 million in the 2012 campaign cycle. Most of the expenditures have been made by a few big groups that have declared allegiance to one GOP candidate or another—such as the pro-Romney Restore Our Future or the pro-Gingrich Winning Our Future. But plenty of other super PACs, like Ronnie Manns’s, have interests that are far more niche.

TAKE THE “Damian C. Palmer and Jack C. Pilgrim for a Better America Super PAC.” “Before mailing in the application, I made sure to call the FEC [Federal Elections Commission] so that I wasn’t doing anything illegal,” Palmer, the organization’s assistant treasurer, told me. One of his reasons for concern, he explained, was the fact that he is a 17-year-old “future voter” at Glendale High School in Springfield, Missouri.

Jack Pilgrim, the other half of the PAC, is Palmer’s friend. “We sit next to each other in class, and we talked about it, and we kind of felt the same way about doing it. And he said, ‘Well, if you’re doing it, I want my name on it, too.’” At first, Palmer recalls, most of his friends and teachers thought “it was crazy, that it’s kind of stupid, and that it’ll never work, but, when I figured out that it went through, my government teacher was surprised.” As for his future plans, Palmer alternates between the grandiose and the timid. “It might sound crazy, but I created Damian C. Palmer and Jack C. Pilgrim for a Better America Super PAC to be almost a voice for the younger generation, speaking against what is wrong with campaign elections today,” he wrote in an e-mail. But later, he told me, “I kind of plan on using it, but I’m almost a little scared that someone will donate money to it, and I might not file it correctly, and then I’ll go to jail for fraud or something.”