Center for Responsive Politics: the 2016 presidential race may be a whole new ballgame for fundraising, but most of the players’ names are awfully familiar

The 2016 presidential race may be a whole new ballgame in terms of fundraising, but most of the players’ names are awfully familiar – even if their faces are a bit more lined.

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Very few of the top donors to the super PACs backing one of the many GOP White House hopefuls or handful of Democratic candidates are new to giving substantial political gifts, according to a review of Federal Election Commission data by the Center for Responsive Politics, and many have been active for decades.

The relative absence of new faces in the very small pool of really big donors magnifies the impact of ultra-wealthy individuals who have been participating in the process for years – the Robert McNairs, Jeffrey Katzenbergs and Richard Uihleins of the fundraising world.

But they are anteing up more than ever before as their favored candidates’ campaigns become ever more intertwined with the Super Pacs, announcing combined fundraising totals and splitting up activities, like voter outreach, that once were firmly functions of the campaign committees – not the supposedly independent outside groups.

While there are no complete ingenues among the rosters of top donors to the Super Pacs, which filed their disclosure reports for the first half of the year this week, there are a few who previously haven’t given sums anything like those they are notching this year. They include the Texas-based Wilks family, four members of which gave $15m to groups backing Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas); brothers Farris and Dan are religious conservatives who got rich in the fracking business. Another: Laura Perlmutter, who gave $2m to a Super Pac supporting Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla).

The pure numbers are staggering: in the 2012 election cycle, all the presidential Super Pacs together had raised about $26m by 30 June of the year before the vote. This time, the total comes to more than $258m at the same point in time.

That’s about double the more than $130m the presidential campaigns raised in the first six months of this year, setting up a new paradigm for campaign finance at the federal level. Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, with combined totals of $114m and $71m respectively, have settled themselves atop the all-time list of presidential campaign-related fundraising in the first six months of the year before the election.

Several of the Republican efforts have been utterly dominated by outside groups raising unlimited amounts from individuals, corporations and other organizations. Seven Republican candidates reported larger fundraising totals for their supposedly unconnected Super Pacs than they disclosed for their campaigns, with the pro-Bush Right to Rise group pulling in nearly 10 times as much as the campaign itself.

A caveat, though: absent this super PAC fundraising, the candidates themselves are lagging far behind the pace set in 2007, the last campaign with no incumbent seeking re-election. Six of the seven largest fundraising totals at this point in all prior cycles came in 2007 when Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and John Edwards all raised more than $23m by 30 June. Only four of this year’s competitors (Bush, Clinton, Cruz and Rubio) have reached that level for their campaigns and Super Pacs combined.

One important impact of Super Pac activity in the 2012 presidential race could be looming again in the earliest stages of the 2016 contest. These groups, which allow candidates to benefit from the seemingly limitless financial support of a small number of ardent and affluent supporters, can keep campaigns going long after they ordinarily would have died a natural death.

In 2012 the campaigns of former Rep. Newt Gingrich (Ga), former Sen. Rick Santorum (Penn) and other Republicans were prolonged by funding in the tens of millions from a handful of supporters. Friday’s filings show that contributions from five or fewer donors make up the majority of the Super Pac funding for nine of the GOP candidates: Rubio, Rand Paul, Cruz, Rick Perry, Carly Fiorina, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee and Santorum. In many cases, the money given by five or fewer individuals or institutions is more than the total given by all individuals directly to the presidential campaign committees of these contenders.

Some donors have hedged their bets, giving large amounts to groups backing multiple candidates. Hedge fund manager Robert Mercer, for instance, was among the top three donors to Super Pacs backing both Jindal and Cruz, though he gave far more to the pro-Cruz effort. Houston Texans owner Robert McNair was more equitable, giving $500,000 each to Super Pacs backing no fewer than four Republican candidates: Security is Strength (Graham), Unintimidated (Walker), Keep the Promise (Cruz) and Right to Rise USA (Bush).

Only a few of the 17 declared Republican candidates, five Democrats, and the Green Party entry lacks at least one supporting Super Pac, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.), former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee and Green Party candidate Jill Stein. On the other hand, Paul has at least two major Super Pacs in his corner, and Cruz has four, each of which seems to have been “purchased” by one or two mega-donors and has a name that is some version of “Keep the Promise”.

What’s a wealthy donor to do? The two primary outside groups supporting Hillary Clinton’s campaign have addressed the potential for confusion by organizing a joint fundraising committee to distribute funds among themselves – one-stop shopping that keeps prospective contributors from having to choose and the groups from having to compete for checks. Priorities USA Action will get the bulk of the funds, with a smaller share going to Correct the Record, the group that fights attacks on the former secretary of state.

Here’s a rundown of the main presidential Super Pacs, by the numbers:

Right to Rise USA

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Backing Jeb Bush

Amount Raised: $102.5m

Amount Spent: $5.4m

Top Donors: Miguel Fernandez ($3m),Rooney Holdings ($2m), William Oberndorf ($1.5m)

The mother of all presidential super PACs – so far – Right to Rise USA had 24 donors giving more than $1m (even Bush at one point asked donors not to give more than that) and was sitting on almost all of its cash as of 30 June: it had spent just $5.4m of its $102.5m. Critics maintain Bush crossed a legal line when he jetted to dozens of fundraisers for the group before officially declaring his candidacy; in any case, he built up quite a war chest, and appears to have focused far less on raising money for his campaign.

Top donor Miguel Fernandez, who has known Bush since before he became Florida’s governor in 1998, is chairman of Coral Gables-based MBF Healthcare, a private equity firm, and has been a founder and/or CEO of many healthcare-focused companies. No stranger to the presidential Super Pac world, he gave $500,000 to Restore Our Future in 2011, the Super Pac that backed eventual GOP nominee Mitt Romney. William Oberndorf is a California billionaire investor with a passion for school privatization. He’s also a longtime Republican donor who has given to the occasional Democrat, including (surprise!) Barack Obama in 2008 – but has laid out hundreds of thousands for Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and Joe Ricketts’ (see Scott Walker section) Ending Spending Action Fund. Fernandez and Oberndorf, with their spouses, have given $1.3m and $1.6m, respectively, over the course of their donor careers at the federal level.

Rooney Holdings is a building and construction management firm. Its CEO, L Francis Rooney III, is now the majority owner of Manhattan Construction, a mammoth firm that built the new stadium for the Dallas Cowboys and the US Capitol Visitors Center and is now working on the George W Bush presidential library. Rooney was a donor to Jeb Bush’s brother, former president George W Bush, and was appointed by him to be ambassador to the Vatican. He was a top donor of hard money (which does not include Super Pacs) in the 2014 cycle. Rooney Holdings also gave $1m to Restore Our Future in the last presidential election.

Keep the Promise I, Keep the Promise II, Keep the Promise III, Keep the Promise Pac

Backing Ted Cruz

Amount raised: $37.8m

Amount spent: $638,000

Top donors: Robert Mercer ($11m), Toby Neugebauer ($10m), Wilks family ($15m combined)

Cruz hit the jackpot in the first half of 2015 – the top two donors to all presidential candidate-backing super Pacs chose to give to a constellation of groups that support him. At $11m and $10m respectively, Robert Mercer and Toby Neugebauer made the biggest individual contributions to Super Pacs between January and July, period. Another coup: $15m from four members of the Wilks family from Cisco, Texas.

Robert Mercer is the CEO of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies; the firm has been under investigation by the IRS for many years. He’s a prolific Republican donor, having given, even before the Cruz Super Pac contributions, $16.6m with his wife to federal politics. Toby Neugebauer is in some ways the antithesis of Mercer, practically a newcomer to big-time political donations. He’s a founder and director of engineering firm Quantum Energy Partners. He’s also a big game hunter. Until now, he and his wife had made less than $200,000 in gifts to federal politicians and committees.

For their part, the Wilks family struck its gold – or at least shale gas – in central Texas in 2002 and rode the fracking boom to a spot on Texas Monthly’s 41 Wealthiest Texans, with net worth estimated at $1.5bn for each brother, Dan and Farris. They’re strong social conservatives (Farris is even a pastor). They’ve given money before, but never at this magnitude – together, they gave $37,500 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 2012. Until now, the brothers and their spouses had given just $263,000 at the federal level since they made their first contribution in 2006. They’ve just entered a whole new league.

Priorities USA Action, Correct the Record, Ready Pac

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Backing Hillary Clinton

Amount raised: $20.3m

Amount spent: $1.5m

Top donors: Nine, each of whom gave $1,000,000

None of the top donors to the Super Pacs behind Clinton are new to the world of high-rolling donors; they’re also mostly longtime Clinton backers. Haim Saban, chair of the Univision network and CEO of Saban Capital Group, a private media and communications investment firm in Los Angeles, and his wife Cheryl, a philanthropist focused on women’s issues, each of whom gave $1m to Priorities, have long given to Hillary Clinton, and he backed her husband in his 1996 re-election bid. They’ve also, with their foundation, given between $10m and $25m to the Clinton foundation, putting them among the top donors to the charity; their federal political giving comes to more than $14m, not including the just-reported Priorities funds. Hedge fund manager Donald Sussman, who’s married to Democratic Rep. Chellie Pingree of Maine, supported Bill Clinton in both of his presidential races and Hillary Clinton in her 2008 White House bid; he gave millions to the Democratic Party in the pre-2002 soft money days, and since the 2010 Citizens United decision has sent millions more to House Majority Pac, the Super Pac that helps elect House Dems. Hedge fund guru George Soros, who chairs the Open Society Foundations, needs no introduction to conservatives, whose name they invoke to represent liberal devilry; he too has given to both Clintons over the years and was a significant soft money donor prior to 2002. He has forked over much more to Democratic Super Pacs in recent years. Total giving to federal candidates and committees? Almost $40m.

Herbert Sandler, who previously operated Golden West Financial, a California-based savings and loan company, has been giving to Democrats at least since 1989 (which is as far back as CRP records go). Hollywood moguls Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg, each of whom also gave $1m, are also longtime Democratic donors of long – and huge – standing. Fair Share Action is a liberal Super Pac that has spent about $5.7m in the last two election cycles, the largest part of which was dedicated to helping re-elect Obama. And, like other labor unions, the UA Political Education Committee, a unit of the Plumbers and Pipefitters union, has a history of being active in Democratic politics.

Unintimidated PAC

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Backing Scott Walker

Amount raised: $20m

Amount spent: $976,000

Top donors: Diane Hendricks ($5m), Marlene and Joe Ricketts ($5m), Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein ($2.5m)

Diane Hendricks, Wisconsin’s richest woman and one of the richest in the nation, has been Walker’s biggest donor at the state level. She owns Hendricks Holding Co, which has a broad portfolio, and the roofing company ABC Supply. She’s a devoted Republican donor, having given hundreds of thousands of dollars to GOP party committees over the years, and gave $1m in 2014 to Freedom Partners Action Fund, a Super Pac tied to billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch. Walker also appears to have won the Ricketts primary; while Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts and his wife Marlene also gave to groups supporting other candidates, the $5m to Unintimidated PAC is the largest sum by far. Ricketts is the founder of Ending Spending and Ending Spending Action Fund, two outside groups backed by a group of billionaire investors like Paul Singer.

Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein own a shipping supplies company, Uline (think bubble wrap and plastic peanuts), and like Hendricks are Wisconsinites. But they moved their company to Illinois when that state offered them significant tax incentives. Their giving total through the years, not including the $2.5m collected by Unintimidated Pac: $10.3 million.

Conservative Solutions PAC

Backing Marco Rubio

Amount Raised: $16.1m

Amount Spent: $108,000

Top Donors: Norman Braman ($5m), Lawrence J. Ellison ($3m), Besilu Stables, LLC ($2.5m), Laura Perlmutter ($2m)

Norman Braman is the owner of Braman Management, which has 23 franchised luxury car dealership locations in Florida and Colorado; he got involved in the business in 1972 when he purchased a Cadillac dealership. Before that, he was CEO of Philadelphia Pharmaceuticals and Cosmetics. He is also an art collector, and has an estimated net worth of $1.89b. Braman has long been an enthusiastic Rubio supporter, though not a hugely active federal donor, with a lifetime total of $865,000. Rubio also has the support of tech executive Lawrence Ellison, the founder of Oracle, a giant information technology company. He likes to buy property, including a Hawaiian island. Forbes puts his net worth at $50.1bn. Federal contributions come to $3.9m.

Besilu Stables is a Florida-based thoroughbred breeding company owned by Benjamin Leon, owner of Leon Medical Centers. While Leon, a longtime donor, has given mainly to Republican causes, he has also given tens of thousands of dollars to Democratic party committees. At $2m, Laura Perlmutter’s donation to the Rubio-backing Super Pac makes her a notable newcomer to political giving. The wife of Marvel Entertainment’s chairman, Perlmutter, along with her husband, gave $50m to the NYU Langone Medical School’s Cancer Center. The school also hosts the Laura Perlmutter Center for Woman’s Imaging. But the federal-level political giving of Perlmutter and her husband came to just $6,000 until now.

Opportunity and Freedom PAC I, Opportunity and Freedom PAC II

Backing Rick Perry

Amount Raised: $12.8m

Amount Spent: $916,000

Top Donors: Kelcy Warren ($6 million), Darwin Deason ($5 million)

As political donors, Kelcy Warren and Darwin Deason seem to move almost in tandem. Warren, the CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, gave the Perry-backing constellation $6m. His Texas-based company’s lines of business include natural gas, natural gas liquids, refined products and crude oil pipelines. He and his spouse have given more than $650,000 at the federal level since 2008. His biggest contribution previously? A $250,000 donation to Make Us Great Again in 2012 – the super PAC supporting Perry’s first bid for the White House. His most recent donation is about 24 times that.

Deason is a Texas-based billionaire who started off working primarily in the energy/oil industry, became CEO of MTech at a young age and then started Affiliated Computer Services, which he sold to Xerox for $6.4bn. He’s been a Republican donor since at least as far back as the 1990 cycle but didn’t start writing larger checks until after 2000. But the $5m he turned over to the pro-Perry Super Pac is 20 times larger than his previous personal best of $250,000, which, like Warren, he gave to Make Us Great Again in the 2012 presidential cycle; it’s also nearly 10 times the nearly $600,000 that he and his wife Amy have given to federal candidates and committees over the years.

Pursuing America’s Greatness

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Backing Mike Huckabee

Amount Raised: $3.6m

Amount Spent: $147,000

Top Donor: Ronald Cameron ($3m)

The pro-Huckabee super PAC’s sugar daddy – who is responsible for 83% of the group’s fundraising – is in the chicken business. Ronald Cameron is the CEO of agribusiness firm Mountaire Corporation, a poultry company and the largest corporate donor to the Koch-backed Super Pac network, Freedom Partners Action Fund, in the 2014 cycle. Cameron himself made a $500,000 donation to help start Freedom Partners. He and his wife have given $1.8m to federal political committees since 1990, including nearly $1.2m in the 2014 midterm cycle.

America’s Liberty

Backing Rand Paul

Amount Raised: $3.1 million

Amount Spent: $412,000

Top Donor: George Macricostas ($1.1m)

George Macricostas is CEO of RagingWire Data Centers, which offers network services, IT infrastructure design and the like. He has also held roles at Photronics, Inc and serves on the board of the Jane Goodall Institute. He has barely given to federal candidates or committees, though he did back Paul’s father, Ron.

Carly For America

Backing: Carly Fiorina

Amount Raised: $2.9m

Amount Spent: $1.3m

Top Donor: A Jerrold Perenchio ($1.6m)

Carly for America’s largest donor, former Univision chairman A Jerrold Perenchio, gave $1.6m; Forbes estimates his worth at around $2.7b. Perenchio and his wife have given a substantial $20.1m to candidates, parties and other committees, not including the latest gift to Carly. The pro-Fiorina group also received a curious $500,000 donation from Keep the Promise I, the Super Pac Robert Mercer is using to support Ted Cruz.

Security is Strength

Backing Lindsey Graham

Amount raised: $2.7m

Amount spent: $151,000

Top donors: Robert McNair, Robert Perelman and Access Industries ($500,000 each)

It took 1,226 donors to Graham’s campaign committee to raise the $2mm he brought in from individual contributors. It took just five donors to the Super Pac supporting him to bring in the same amount. Overall, Graham’s campaign, at $3.6m, was more successful at raising money than the Super Pac, but the group pulled in half a million dollars each from McNair (who also gave to three other candidates’ Super Pacs), Perelman (whose holding company MacAndrews & Forbes has investments in everything from cosmetics to military equipment) and Access Industries, which is led by Leonard Blavatnik. Blavatnik and his wife have invested far more of their political giving over the years in Democrats than Republicans. Access’s wide-ranging holdings include Warner Music Group.

Generation Forward

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Backing Martin O’Malley

Amount raised: $289,000

Amount spent: $83,000

Top donors: Retail Services and Systems ($120,000)

In keeping with other Democratic candidates, but unlike most of the Republicans, O’Malley’s Super Pac raised far less than his campaign, which brought in about $2m during the second quarter. Generation Forward’s biggest donor, at $120,000, was Retail Services and Systems (RSS), which is based in O’Malley’s home state and is the parent company of alcoholic beverage retailer Total Wine & More. Robert and David Trone, the co-owners of RSS, have never been prolific donors, but their contributions over the years show that David has been firmly in the Democratic camp while Robert was more bipartisan. David Trone held a fundraiser last year for Maryland’s Democratic candidate for governor, Anthony Brown, that featured former president Bill Clinton and reportedly brought in about $1.2m. But after Brown lost to the Republican candidate, Larry Hogan, Total Wine and its affiliates were forking contributions over to help Hogan. Other contributors to the Super Pac include John Deane ($66,512), CEO of the Advisory Board Co, a consulting firm whose clients are mostly in healthcare and higher education; venture capitalist Ryan Smith ($30,000), owner of Variance Ventures; and trial lawyer John Coale ($30,000).

America Leads, Leadership Matters for America

Backing: Chris Christie

Amount Raised: $14.3m

Amount Spent: $3m

Top Donors: Steven Cohen ($1m) (was SAC Capital Advisers, now Point72 Asset Management), Alexandra Cohen ($1m), Winecup-Gamble Inc ($1m)

Paul Fireman, Reebok’s former chief executive, controls Winecup-Gamble Inc. For decades, Fireman gave money primarily to Democrats, but took to favoring Republicans in 2012. In 2010, Fireman put the Winecup-Gamble Ranch in Nevada on the market for $50m. Steven and Alexandra Cohen, a husband and wife pair, live in Connecticut, where Steven is a hedge fund manager with an estimated net worth of $11.4bn. Cohen had to shut down his firm, SAC Capital Advisers, after it pleaded guilty to engaging in insider trading, according to Forbes.

Believe Again

Backing Bobby Jindal

Amount raised: $3.7m

Amount spent: $1.1m

Top donors: Gary Chouest ($2 million), Robert Mercer ($500,000),Tracy Krohn ($500,000)

Chouest, the CEO of Edison Chouest Offshore, has been a prolific donor and a particular boon for Louisiana Republicans for decades. Ditto for Tracy Krohn, another offshore oil company executive. Jindal appears to have received a consolation prize from Mercer, a major donor to Ted Cruz and the largest overall.

New Day for America

Backing John Kasich

Amount raised: $11.1 m

Amount spent: $824,000

Top donors: Wendt Family Trust ($1m), Schottenstein Management Co ($1m), Thomas Rastin ($1m), Abigail Wexner ($1m)

The Kasich-backing 527 organization turned Super Pac looked for home-field advantage with its fundraising. Schottenstein Management, a Columbus-based real estate company whose CEO has given to both Republicans and Democrats; Wexner, the wife of the CEO of L Brands; and Rastin, an executive of the Ariel Corporation, an industrial manufacturing company based in Mount Vernon, Ohio, all hail from in-state. The California-based Wendt Family Trust was a donor to the pro-Romney Restore Our Future.

Ben Carson and George Pataki each have super PACs backing them, but no donors to those groups gave more than $75,000.