The Koch-backed group AFP fills a critical void nine months out from Election Day. | AP Photos Koch brothers bombard Senate Dem

The Koch brothers have a seemingly bottomless pot of cash this election year — and no one knows it better than Sen. Kay Hagan.

Americans for Prosperity, a group co-founded by the conservative billionaires, has already dropped $8.2 million on TV, radio and digital ads in an effort to defeat the North Carolina Democrat. According to sources tracking media buys, the group has so far spent more in North Carolina than all Democratic outside groups in every Senate race in the country — combined.


And while AFP won’t predict the amount it will ultimately spend in North Carolina, if the conservative group keeps the same pace, it’ll spend more than $27 million by Election Day in the Tar Heel State. That’s more than twice what any outside group has spent in the past dozen years in North Carolina congressional races.

The staggering figures make North Carolina ground zero in the unprecedented TV war expected to define the 2014 midterm elections. Powerful outside groups like AFP can now raise and spend unlimited money, empowering big donors to single-handedly reshape a race and even determine which party controls the Senate for the final two years of Barack Obama’s presidency.

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“It concerns me; it ought to concern anybody,” said Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in Washington. “It’s just not fair to have two folks in the country potentially determine the outcomes of these Senate races in states where they don’t even live.”

With Republicans eyeing at least six seats to take back the Senate, North Carolina has emerged as one of their best shots, with Hagan vulnerable from the onslaught of televised attacks over her support for Obamacare and with the state showing big swings in public opinion since Obama won the state six years ago.

With Republican candidates and its main party committee still behind many of their Democratic counterparts in the money chase, AFP is filling a critical void nine months out from Election Day.

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The Koch-backed group, a nonprofit that does not have to disclose its donors, has no plans to let up. Through last week, AFP had spent more than $12 million in the country’s six closest Senate races, amounting to two-thirds of total money spent by GOP groups nationally, according to media trackers. The Koch group’s spending exceeds the $7.6 million-plus spent by all Senate Democratic groups combined in the competitive races, including less than $4 million that Democrats have so far spent in North Carolina media markets — some of the country’s most expensive.

Hagan and her campaign now are trying to tie the Kochs’ conservative agenda to one of her potential opponents — state House Speaker Thom Tillis, arguing he championed through the Legislature the group’s controversial far-right agenda on issues ranging from slashing unemployment benefits to cutting teacher tenure.

“The people of North Carolina need to know what their agenda is,” Hagan said in an interview of David and Charles Koch, the owners of the multinational manufacturing firm Koch Industries. “They want to have tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy and, at the same time, put that burden on the middle class and the poor. They want to cut Medicare, Social Security. All of these issues are so, so important to the middle class.”

But in an interview, AFP President Tim Phillips said the group’s agenda rests strictly on one thing: Repealing Obamacare. And already this election season, it has spent $28 million blasting both Democratic Senate and House candidates since last August for their support of the controversial law.

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A top priority of the group for years, North Carolina was one of the first states where it set up local chapters, helping build what Phillips says is one of its “deepest state infrastructures,” with more than 130,000 activists that helped defeat a Medicaid expansion in the state Legislature last year and now is singularly focused on defeating Hagan.

“We’ve been engaged in the state for a decade,” Phillips said. “That preceded Sen. Hagan coming into office, and I suspect Americans for Prosperity will be healthy and vibrant in North Carolina long after she is no longer in the U.S. Senate.”

Hagan’s popularity has taken a hit just as the onslaught by the Koch group has intensified, with a solid lead dropping her to about even with her prospective foes in the polls. Hagan still has hopes that a messy GOP primary will damage the leading GOP candidates — Tillis, obstetrician Greg Brannon or Baptist pastor Mark Harris — and that their far-right positions will be rejected by voters in a state that has seen sharp shifts in public opinion. Her campaign has about five times more money than the most well-funded GOP candidate, Tillis, giving Democrats hope that the eventual GOP nominee will be easy to define in the eyes of voters as the election draws nearer.

“No one in the country has gone to the mat for the Koch brothers the way Thom Tillis did in the North Carolina Legislature,” said Matt Canter, a DSCC spokesman.

Tillis spokesman Jordan Shaw said his boss had a “record of achieving results,” unlike Hagan, who has amassed “a record of rubber-stamping the Obama agenda.”

After Hagan won her 2008 race in a year when Obama narrowly won the state, North Carolina has shifted rapidly to the right, electing both a GOP Legislature and governor for the first time since Reconstruction. After Obama lost the state in 2012, the conservative state government has pushed through a far-right agenda that the GOP says is a sign of the Tar Heel State’s growing disdain for Obama and Democrats like Hagan who have backed his agenda.

Hagan has benefited from some air cover recently. The nonprofit Patriot Majority USA began running TV ads this week in North Carolina. Last fall, the Democratic super PAC Senate Majority PAC ran a TV ad targeting AFP in the state.

But that’s been far outpaced by AFP’s deep pockets, including a $1.4 million buy the group unveiled last week featuring a woman saying, “Obamacare doesn’t work, it just doesn’t work.”

“I think the early defining of candidates that we’ve seen historically has been crippling,” said Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.). “I think if one takes a snapshot today of the latest polling, what you could assess is they’ve [made] her numbers and the Obamacare numbers one and the same.”

But Democrats believe Republicans are making an ill-advised bet. Running a single-issue campaign against Obamacare, they say, is not enough to win an election — particularly since the state Legislature has pushed through a laundry list of controversial measures, ranging from clamping down on abortion clinics to imposing voter ID laws. Other senators who are getting whacked by AFP — like Mark Begich in Alaska, Mark Pryor in Arkansas and Mary Landrieu in Louisiana — also argue that the outside attacks will be rejected by voters, as they have been in some recent elections.

“Just the fact that billionaires try to buy elections should be concerning to everybody,” Begich said.

Because of the AFP’s influence, the 2014 midterm season could shatter many records for outside spending.

In 1984, when Sen. Jesse Helms won reelection against Gov. Jim Hunt in what was then the most expensive Senate race in United States history, a combined $22 million was spent. And in 2008, when Hagan won her first race against incumbent GOP Sen. Elizabeth Dole, the DSCC spent $12 million to help her campaign, the most of any outside group in the past dozen years, according to the group Center for Responsive Politics. It’s only a matter of time before AFP exceeds both, according to people involved in the race.

“We’re really in uncharted territory as far as the amount of money that is going to be spent here,” said Thomas Mills, a North Carolina-based Democratic political consultant.

John Bresnahan contributed to this story.