McIntyre delivers his victory speech in Lumberton , N.C., in 2010. New normal: $9M for rural House seat

The Billion-Dollar Buy: About this series

Like never before, big dollars are having a big impact on politics and governance. This series examines how the new wide-open fundraising landscape will affect the 2012 campaigns.

See also: Inside Koch world | GOP groups plan record $1 billion blitz | Rove hits big: Birth of a mega-donor | Myth of the small donor | Sheldon Adelson: Inside the mind of the mega-donor | IRS's 'feeble' grip on big political cash | Secret money funds GOP door-knockers | The billion-dollar bust?



HAMPSTEAD, N.C. — Mike McIntyre’s first congressional race in 1996 cost $450,000, which he got mostly from friends, neighbors and a loan.


Then came the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision.

( PHOTOS: 2012 mega-donors)

Just two years later, nearly $9 million has been spent on the race for the conservative 7th District and the 733,500 residents represented by McIntyre in the southeastern corner of North Carolina.

GOP-allied super PACs are spending more on the airwaves than both candidates combined, and you can’t turn on the TV without seeing their ads linking Blue Dog Democrat McIntyre to President Barack Obama or House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi. The Koch brothers-backed nonprofit Americans for Prosperity has been spending big to mobilize conservative voters here with bus tour rallies, phone banks and door knocking.

This is the new normal in congressional politics, where money, power and control have shifted away from party committees and candidates to deep-pocketed outside groups that — thanks to Citizens United and other recent court decisions — aren’t restricted by contribution limits.

Benefiting from the outside cash is McIntyre’s GOP challenger David Rouzer, a state lawmaker who has been far outraised by McIntyre and who, on his own, would lack the resources to compete vigorously across the sprawling district.

“It’s turned what otherwise would be a slam-dunk win for McIntyre against a very, very weak opponent into a hotly contested race,” said McIntyre’s main strategist David Heller.

To stay relevant in the new landscape, congressional candidates and their party committees are trying to raise more cash from larger donors, including special interest political action committees, and adjusting their spending strategies to complement the super PACs and nonprofits, with which they are legally barred from coordinating.

The change is most pronounced on the right, where a loose network of GOP-allied super PACs and nonprofits intends to spend more than $1 billion before Election Day trying to defeat Obama, capture the Senate for Republicans, expand the GOP House majority and advance conservative causes generally.

With those groups anxious to prove to billionaire backers that their record donations weren’t wasted, House races have increasingly emerged as a platform upon which the groups are jockeying to show tangible results. It’s simply far more expensive — and harder to claim credit — playing on a presidential battlefield anchored by expensive media markets than it is to try to swing House races in backwater media markets where a couple million bucks can lift a challenger who might otherwise have no chance.

Which leads directly to North Carolina.

McIntyre was considered especially vulnerable after the district was redrawn in the wake of the 2010 Census to include many more Republicans. It’s now the second most GOP-leaning district represented by a Democrat (the first, a Utah district represented by fellow Blue Dog Jim Matheson, has also seen a deluge of outside spending). Polling in McIntyre’s race is all over the map, with a conservative group last week putting Rouzer up six percentage points and private polling shared with POLITICO showing McIntyre with a lead just beyond the margin of error.

Rouzer sees the influx of outside cash into the race as a sign of its national importance. “If we prevail in this, this seat will be very difficult for ’em to take back in the future and really cuts off one of their antennas into the South,” Rouzer said during a break in campaigning late last month. “Blue Dog Democrats are becoming more and more rare. And so you might view this as one of the last Democratic strongholds in the South.”

One thing’s for sure: As long as GOP-allied outside groups can continue raising big checks from supportive billionaires, they are going to keep gunning for McIntyre until they’re successful, or he tires of having to raise increasing sums of cash, and retires.

( Also on POLITICO: Full series: The Billion-Dollar Buy)

Through Oct. 17, McIntyre had raised nearly $2 million — already more than his fundraising high of $1.3 million in 2010, when he got his first taste of outside attack ads. More telling than the overall cash tally, though, is that Federal Election Commission filings show he’s raising a larger portion of it than ever — 56 percent — from special-interest political action committees of the sort that dominate Washington fundraising and upon which incumbents have increasingly relied to fend off super PAC attacks.

Most of his cash — $1.2 million — has gone straight into ads. While that’s almost twice the $633,000 Rouzer’s campaign has spent on media, it’s dwarfed by the $2 million in television and radio time reserved by a pair of super PACs affiliated with Republican congressional leaders John Boehner and Eric Cantor. Their ad buys have been supplemented by $222,000 in online ads and direct mail from the Boehner-linked super PAC and a secret-money group connected to Cantor.

The traditional party vehicles — the National Republican Congressional Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — have essentially canceled each other out, with each spending $1.8 million in spending on the race through Nov. 1.

That’s made the GOP super PACs the dominant financial force in the race — highlighting an increasingly common phenomenon in competitive House races across the country, where big money groups are challenging the preeminence of candidates and their parties.

In 25 toss-up House races, including the McIntyre-Rouzer tilt, outside groups through the end of September had spent $24.8 million, compared with $24.9 million spent by the DCCC and NRCC, according to an analysis by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. And that doesn’t include lots of advertising and field organizing spending by secret-money nonprofit groups.

Perhaps as important as the overall outside spending is the ability of the strategists steering it to tailor their messages and efforts to complement — and sometimes, seemingly, guide — those of the campaigns and the parties. They’ve basically become de facto adjuncts of the official party apparatus.

Take the advertising boosting Rouzer by the Boehner-linked Congressional Leadership Fund and the Cantor-affiliated YG Action Network. Their ads hit McIntyre for voting for Obama’s stimulus and for supporting Pelosi to be House speaker four times and voting with her as speaker 90 percent of time. They’ve aired primarily in Raleigh’s media market, which includes new areas of the district where McIntyre has lower name identification, and is also where the NRCC has focused its ad campaign tying McIntyre to Obama, Pelosi and the stimulus.

“We invested where we believe it was most effective to accomplish our goals,” said YG’s Brad Dayspring. Congressional Leadership Fund spokesman Dan Conston said. “Based on our analysis of the polling and structure of media buys, we wanted additional weight of message in the Raleigh market.”

That’s freed Rouzer’s campaign to narrowly focus its more limited budget on the less expensive Wilmington media market, where McIntyre is strong and Rouzer isn’t as well known.

McIntyre’s campaign strongly suggests that the spending patterns show evidence of illegal spending coordination between Rouzer and the outside groups, but Rouzer said he’s not doing anything differently because of the super PAC ads.

( LIST: Republican mega-donors)

“We’re going about the things that we need to do on a daily basis to raise money for our campaign to get out the vote, assuming that we’re not going to have and we don’t have any outside help,” Rouzer said in an interview on the day Congressional Leadership Fund reserved $575,000 of advertising in the Raleigh media market, accusing McIntyre of being a Pelosi puppet.

That ad was placed about a week after Boehner appeared at a fundraiser for Rouzer in Wilmington.

When POLITICO asked Rouzer whether there was any connection between the ad campaign and Boehner’s visit, the challenger’s handler John Connell jumped in, explaining the visit “had been on the books for months — it pretty much got scheduled right after the primary.”

Connell — on leave as chief of staff for Rep. Todd Young (R-Ind.), where he worked in the House Republican conference alongside the operatives running the Boehner and Cantor super PACs — had been helping with Rouzer’s campaign and others in the region through the state party. In 2010, he took leave from the Hill to work for a GOP candidate in a toss-up Kentucky congressional race that was an earlier test case for outside spending.

During POLITICO’s interview with Rouzer at Carolina Café on the Olde Point golf course outside Wilmington, Connell interjected occasionally when the subject turned to outside spending — explaining that the Congressional Leadership Fund’s $575,000 buy covered two weeks — and to steer Rouzer back to the Pelosi talking points being pushed by Boehner, the NRCC and the super PACs.

McIntyre “voted with Nancy Pelosi when she was speaker 90 percent of the time,” Connell said, prompting Rouzer to repeat, “He voted with Nancy Pelosi when she was speaker 90 percent of the time.”

The talking point glosses over the fact that McIntyre voted for Rep. Heath Shuler, a fellow North Carolina Blue Dog, over Pelosi for minority leader after the 2010 midterms, as well as his record of bucking his party on some big issues. He voted against Obama’s health care overhaul in 2010 and Pelosi’s climate change bill in 2009. He also opposes gay marriage and abortion rights.

Still, the sustained effort by Rouzer, the NRCC and the super PACs to link McIntyre to Pelosi and Obama could pay dividends in the voting booth, where McIntyre is counting on his constituents to split their tickets. Polls show both Mitt Romney and GOP gubernatorial candidate Pat McCrory leading by double digits in the district, and voters across the state have been bombarded by campaign and outside group ads and field organizing efforts in both races.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon late last month, a pair of Americans for Prosperity staffers encountered plenty of anti-Democratic sentiment as they knocked on doors in Wilmington’s blue-collar suburbs, asking residents how they thought Obama’s agenda was impacting the economy.

“Are you out of your mind, asking a question like that?” Fred Tedesco, a 75-year-old retiree, told the canvassers, whose approach awakened him from a nap in his front porch rocking chair. “If that guy wins again, we’re down the tube,” Tedesco, a registered independent, concluded, barely opening his eyes.

Tedesco told POLITICO later he’s opposed to the stimulus, and, though he’s been voting for McIntyre for years, he planned to cast his ballot for Rouzer.

“I like Mike McIntyre, don’t get me wrong, but I think he’s been there long enough,” Tedesco said. “We’ve got to put a stop to these guys.”

( LIST: Democratic mega-donors)

McIntyre and his allies have pushed back by accusing Rouzer of supporting outsourcing to China and wanting to end Medicare — echoing charges leveled in ads attacking Republican candidates across the country by the DCCC and the Pelosi-supported super PAC House Majority PAC.

While McIntyre’s getting plenty of help from the DCCC, which has reserved airtime through Election Day, he didn’t get nearly as much big money air cover as Rouzer. House Majority PAC has spent $187,000 on ads against Rouzer, and last reported paying for ads in September. “McIntyre looks to be in solid shape,” a spokesman said last month.

But McIntyre’s supporters grumble that the super PAC hasn’t invested enough in his race, with some suggesting the group’s wealthy donors might rather not support a conservative Democrat like McIntyre, despite its big-budget ad campaigns boosting Matheson and another vulnerable Blue Dog, Georgia’s John Barrow.

“Where do super PACs get their money ?” asked McIntyre’s strategist Heller. “From ideological donors.”

McIntyre’s campaign and congressional staff repeatedly declined to make him available for an interview, to answer written questions about his stance on outside spending, or even to provide his schedule , and, on a recent weekend, he did not appear to make any public campaign appearances. The light schedule could allow him more time to raise cash, and it also has frustrated Republican trackers of the sort who helped end the career of neighboring Democratic Congressman Bob Etheridge in 2010, when their video of his outburst became the centerpiece of a $360,000 ad campaign by a GOP-allied nonprofit group.

In their first debate, though, McIntyre tried to turn Rouzer’s super PAC support against him. “My opponent is supported by a Las Vegas billionaire casino operator who is paying for most of these negative ads you’re seeing on TV,” McIntyre declared last month, referring to Las Vegas Sands CEO and Chairman Sheldon Adelson, whose family has donated a total of $10 million to YG Action and Congressional Leadership Fund.

Rouzer told POLITICO he wouldn’t be beholden to the super PACs, Boehner or Cantor if he won, and suggested politics would be better off without outside spending of the sort that’s dominated the race.

“I think every candidate would say , if it was permissible, take the amount of money that a group wants to spend and let ’em write you a check and you control the message completely,” he said. But when asked if that meant removing limits on campaign contributions to candidates, his aide Connell jumped in again.

“You haven’t thought too much about this,” Connell told Rouzer. “Yeah, well, I know, but I think it’s one of those things where if the candidates can stand on their own two feet, that’s — I think it would make things better all around,” Rouzer said.

Rouzer won’t get much argument from Cordelia Lewis, a 68-year-old retiree who moved in September from Tennessee to the Monkey Junction neighborhood outside Wilmington, where Americans for Prosperity canvassers knocked on her door and gave her an anti-Obama door hanger.

Moments after AFP left her stoop, she said that although she hadn’t made up her mind between McIntyre and Rouzer, she did plan to vote for Obama — and, she said, she intended to throw away AFP’s literature.

“I don’t trust them,” she said, adding she feels the same way about most television ads. “There is an iota of truth and a whole lot of untruth.” Lewis added she missed living in a non-swing state: “In Tennessee, I was not bombarded with this crap. I will be so happy when it’s all over.”