Super PACs are now the de rigeur accessories for every candidate’s campaign, and not just presidential ones. In fact, in the 2014 midterms, 102 single-candidate super PACs spent $52.5 million trying to get candidates elected.

The key for campaigns and their matching super PACs, though, is that they can’t match too much — though identifying what’s considered forbidden coordination between the two under the Federal Election Commission’s detailed rules can be difficult: For instance, a candidate’s campaign and a super PAC supporting her can’t jointly pay a company to produce an attack ad against her opponent, or pay to air that ad — but they can both hire the same ad production company and media buyer to run their own separate ads.

OpenSecrets.org has analyzed the 2014 data and found 92 instances in which a candidate’s campaign and a single-candidate super PAC hired a common vendor. Some of the expenditures were small; others involved payments to the same airline or another unexceptional vendor. At the other end of the spectrum was spending in the hundreds of thousands of dollars by both campaign and super PAC on political consultants, pollsters, ad-buyers or lawyers.

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The candidate whose campaign and super PAC overlapped the most was Republican Elan Carr, who ran and lost in California’s 33rd Congressional District. His campaign paid an Alexandria, Va.-based ad-buying firm called Smart Media more than $729,000 to make ad purchases — 29 different buys between April and November last year, according to FEC records. Meanwhile, a super PAC called Bold Agenda PAC, formed less than a month before the Nov. 4 election, also hired Smart Media, paying the firm $145,000 on Oct. 16 to purchase ad time for a non-specific ad promoting a new generation of GOP candidates (Carr was running for federal office for the first time). That same day, the Carr campaign paid Smart Media $16,000, and paid the firm again the following day Oct. 17.

John Thomas, Carr’s chief strategist and a media consultant for the campaign, said that the campaign had no communication with the super PAC, but said that Smart Media is simply a large popular media firm.

“Smart Media one of the nation’s largest Republican media firms, they handle a lot of different races,” Thomas told OpenSecrets Blog. “This is news to me.”

More super PACs means more clients for firms like Smart Media, Thomas said.

“With super PACs being more and more common and there are only so many buying firms out there, you’re probably going to bump into this more and more,” he said.

FEC records show Bold Agenda super PAC paid another firm called Del Cielo Media LLC, which uses the same address as Smart Media, $253,000 on Oct. 17 to run ads supporting Carr. Smart Media did not respond to requests for comment.

Our analysis shows this is not particularly unique. A total of 46 single-candidate super PACs hired the same vendors as their matching candidates; combined, they paid some 73 vendors more than $6.4 million. A number of the campaigns and super PACs paid multiple common vendors and some races seemed rife with the practice.

In the case of the Kentucky Senate race, in which now Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell squared off against Democrat Allison Grimes, both candidates shared vendors with the super PACs set up exclusively to back them.

McConnell’s campaign, for instance, paid law firm Holtzman Vogel Josefiak (known for its work with secretive dark money groups) approximately $58,000 and Kentuckians for Strong Leadership, a super PAC with ties to Karl Rove, also paid the firm $102,000 for legal work. The campaign and super PAC also shared a fundraising consulting firm (Integrated Campaign Solutions), a political consulting firm (Deep Root Analytics, which is listed as having done strategy consulting for the super PAC and polling and research for the campaign), and at least one strategist.

McConnell’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

Grimes campaign and the We Are Kentucky super PAC both paid the same voter outreach firm, Chism Strategies.

So how is it possible that a campaign and a super PAC — which legally can’t coordinate their spending — can both hire the same people to work for them and not run afoul of the coordination rules? Clearly, the fact vendors are shared indicates common interests and perhaps common strategies, even if there’s no official consultation between the campaign and super PAC. And in some cases the line may be crossed.

But there are scenarios where it is permissible for the two sides to share vendors, and those likely account for a number of the instances found in the OpenSecrets.org analysis.

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For starters, the rules prohibit sharing a vendor only for certain types of work — preparing ads, selecting audiences for the ads, media-buying, polling, voter identification and fundraising.

In addition, timing matters. If there’s a four-month gap between a vendor’s work for a campaign and for its supporting super PAC — a cooling-off period of sorts — there’s not a problem, according to the FEC. There are plenty of examples of vendors working for both, but not at the same time. For instance, the campaign of then-Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) spent $403,000 on polling research from Lake Research; and Put Alaska First super PAC, which did nothing but support Begich, hired the firm as well, paying it $18,350. But, according Lake Research, the firm did work for the super PAC after the election was over, a fact that FEC records seem to bear out.

Still, many of the common vendors identified in the OpenSecrets.org analysis appear to have done work — a great deal of it — for both sides at the same time. In those cases, the standard way for vendors to try to avoid trouble with regulators is by establishing what’s known as a firewall — an internal barrier prohibiting discussions between employees working for one client and those working for the other.

Majority Strategies, a prominent conservative direct-mail firm, was hired by both Sen. Tom Osborn (R-Neb.) and Freedom Pioneers Action Network, a super PAC that supported Osborn, and was paid nearly $400,000 combined. No problem, said Brett Buerck, a principal at the firm.

“Because Majority Strategies is the top GOP direct mail firm with a large staff and the most horsepower in the industry, we have a legal firewall policy in place,” Buerck said. “We create internal staff and information silos that ensure no coordination between our work for a campaign and for an outside group.”

David Keating, president of the Center for Competitive Politics, a nonprofit that opposes most campaign finance regulation, said that the possibility of coordination is not new, and for a thriving firm, it’s sometimes necessary to work for both sides of a potential conflict.

“If you’re a vendor looking to build a business, that’s one way to do it, to work for many different candidates and campaigns,” he said. “But then you have to put in these internal firewalls so people are not sharing information with each other.”

A firewall must be a written policy that prevents a flow of information, said Paul S. Ryan, senior counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a campaign finance watchdog group — and while there’s no specific guidance on how to do it, he said the FEC requires it must be more than a piece of paper.

“The firewall has to be described in a written policy that is distributed to employees,” Ryan said. “And the rules say it has to be implemented, it’s not enough just to say you have it, or simply write it down.”

But, Ryan noted, any investigation into a common vendor or whether proper firewalls were in place would have to come at the behest of the FEC, which hasn’t shown much enthusiasm for the subject. Or any at all.

“This Federal Election Commission seems entirely disinterested in enforcing the coordination laws or most of our other enforcement laws,” Ryan said. “And even if there was a greater appetite, it would be tough for the FEC to catch a violation of a firewall, if (the sharing) was done verbally and there were no witnesses wiling to attest the firewall had been breached.”

In fact, the FEC has never voted to begin an investigation of alleged coordination. The only coordination case to have been pursued by the government was instigated by the Justice Department: In Feburary, GOP operative Tyler Harber pleaded guilty to criminal charges relating to his simultaneous work as the campaign manager for Chris Perkins, who was running for a congressional seat in Virginia in 2012, and as the head of a super PAC supporting Perkins. Observers said, however, that the Harber case was exceptionally clear-cut.

The less formal situations will always be an Achilles heel of any attempt to enforce separation when it comes to shared vendors, Ryan said. “What happens if staff of a common vendor are hanging out after work, grab a couple drinks and talk about their client?”

But, he added, cracking down too hard on shared vendors might stymie legitimate activity. “In some geographic locations, in some states, and some cities, there are really only a tiny handful of people who provide a particular service,” Ryan said.

Keating said the current regulations are tough enough.

“I don’t think the regulations are too tough, i think they have the right balance,” he said. “I know there are some people who want to define coordination so you can never use the same person for X number of years, some of the proposals, are ridiculous. You could imagine that they would easily make it impossible for people to get help.”

A full listing of shared vendors between candidates’ campaigns and single-candidate super PACs can be found here.



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