The stunning $114-million fundraising haul announced Thursday by Jeb Bush’s team did more than firmly establish his place at the front of the pack of GOP presidential hopefuls.

It officially ushered in the super PAC era of presidential politics.


Any lingering doubts have been erased about whether the lure of seven-figure checks would be powerful enough to offset concerns about a patchwork of recently gutted — and loosely enforced — laws intended to restrict the effectiveness of unlimited political spending.

In this new reality, there’s less incentive for prospective commanders in chief to invest time and money in building an army of small- and medium sized donors for their campaigns, and more incentive to cultivate a handful of billionaire backers to pour cash into supportive big-money vehicles like super PACs.

The super PAC supporting Bush, Right to Rise USA, raised more than $103 million. His official campaign committee, on the other hand, which is limited to maximum donations of $5,400 per person, brought in only $11.4 million – or about 10 percent of the total haul.

The numbers validate the Bush team’s pioneering strategy of using the super PAC as a central vehicle to test the waters for his prospective candidacy. But they also raise concerns that billionaire-funded, big-money groups may erode the power of the political parties and even the candidates themselves.

Super PACs – created partly by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision – “have changed all the rules,” said former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer. “Instead of saying ‘I can raise a couple thousand dollars from a couple thousand people,’ candidates now try to see if they can get someone to put in $1 million or $2 million. It’s an unfortunate change in priorities,” said Fleischer, who studied the side effects of super PAC growth as co-chair of the Republican Party committee that conducted a forensic examination of the 2012 election.

In that race – the first since super PACs were created – the super PAC-to-campaign fundraising ratio posted by President Barack Obama and his GOP rival Mitt Romney was the inverse of the ratio Bush announced Thursday. Obama’s campaign and party committees combined to raise $1.1 billion, while his super PAC allies raised $79-million; Romney’s campaign and party pulled in $1 billion versus $154 million by a supportive super PAC.

Super PACs were treated as a novel – and somewhat unseemly – phenomenon back then.

Often created on the sly, they focused mostly on the dirty work of airing attack ads with which candidates did not want to be associated. Obama, a career-long critic of big money in politics, kept his allied super PAC at arms’ length, never deigning to help it raise cash, while Romney’s appearances at super PAC fundraisers were kept quiet.

That cautious approach looks downright prudish compared to the lusty embrace of super PACs by this year’s crop of would be commanders in chief and their teams.

Allies of every major presidential candidate – and even those most second- and third-tier prospects – set up super PACs early, often well before they created official campaign committees and entered the race.

Only weeks after the 2012 election, Hillary Clinton’s allies created or relaunched three separate super PACs to lay the groundwork for a possible presidential campaign. And last week, the two surviving super PACs announced they had combined to raise $24 million from a relatively small group of wealthy partisans, including $2 million each from billionaires George Soros and Haim Saban.

Former president Bill Clinton is expected to begin fundraising in the fall for the lead super PAC supporting his wife’s campaign, while some of the GOP’s leading presidential prospects including Bush and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker have actively participated in the fundraising efforts of super PACs supporting them.

Right to Rise began aggressively courting very wealthy Republicans in February — long before Bush officially announced his candidacy last month. That helps explain why his official campaign committee lagged so badly in fundraising behind the super PAC.

But his team’s early super PAC focus also underscores the importance of the big-money operation to his strategy; they envisioned it playing such a central role in any eventual campaign, that they set out to test the generosity of super-rich supporters before endeavoring to build a fundraising operation for the campaign itself.

And Bush is not alone. Several of the leading campaigns, including Clinton’s, are relying on super PACs and other non-campaign vehicles to train surrogates, do rapid response, contact voters and build email lists – all core campaign functions that, until this year, were mostly handled by official campaign committees.

“The super PACs are where the action will be,” said Bob Biersack, a former official at the Federal Election Commission, who works with the non-partisan campaign money watchdog Center for Responsive Politics.

He predicted that 2016 will test the limits of rules intended to prevent campaigns from coordinating their strategies with super PACs and other groups that can accept unlimited contributions.

Those rules — which the Supreme Court left in place in Citizens United and actually cited as part of the rationale for legalizing big money spending — are intended to ensure that unlimited money groups like super PACs remain independent from the candidates’ campaigns. Such independence, the thinking goes, prevents candidates from being corrupted by huge checks, and also makes smaller donations made directly to candidates more valuable, because the campaigns can directly control its spending.

But in practice, Right to Rise and other super PACs have begun to function essentially as campaign adjuncts, run by close allies, depending on the candidate for fundraising help and even using Twitter and their websites to share polling and other information without triggering the coordination rules.

“The consultants in 2016 are going to innovate different ways to coordinate without coordinating, so the campaigns are really going to be networks of organizations,” said Biersack.

And within those networks, it’s becoming increasingly clear that not just the money, but also the power and clout are migrating to the super PACs and away from the campaigns and especially the party committees. The parties had been the preferred vehicle for unlimited contributions until they were barred from accepting them by a 2002 law that perhaps ironically was intended to reduce the flow of money into politics and make it more accountable.

Fleischer said “the more seasoned and experienced political people would prefer to work for the super PAC because it’s easier. Campaigns have the most brutal demands. … Super PACs are a little bit more organized, better hours, easier to raise money.”

The preeminence of super PACs in 2016 is going to be lucrative for the political consultants running them, Biersack predicted. “A lot of people are going to get rich, and in the end somebody is going to get elected.”