Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi's digs against outside groups bely their party's advantage. | AP Photos Dems getting outspent? Not so fast

To hear top Democrats tell it, the party is being wildly outgunned this year in the fight for campaign cash as Republicans rely on outside groups to funnel money to GOP contenders.

But the numbers tell a different story.


It’s true that conservative third-party groups are outspending their Democratic rivals. But the Democrats still have a sizable cash advantage in their party committees – making this year’s elections a lot more of a fair fight than Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi let on.

So far, the latest figures show that the Democratic Party machinery has outraised its Republican counterpart in this campaign cycle by almost $270 million.

And even when outside spending on television advertising and direct mail is added to the mix, Republicans still haven’t closed the gap.

The money race totals come to $856 million for the Democratic committees and their aligned outside groups, compared to $677 for their Republican adversaries, based on figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Included in that total: conservative groups have spent $169 million on ads attacking Democratic House and Senate candidates, compared to $80 million by liberal-leaning groups, based on figures as of Tuesday morning.

Of course, plenty more will be spent in this final week of the campaign.

The GOP-leaning outside groups have vowed to invest about $325 million this cycle, a sum that could be difficult to achieve with just seven days to go to Election Day. Liberal groups and unions also have pledged tens of millions of dollars more in spending.

But the David-and-Goliath tone of some Democratic messaging hardly reflects the party’s own financial strength and ability to defend itself, at least tactically.

“When you look at the national party committees coupled with the state party committees, the Democrats are whopping the Republicans,” said Dave Levinthal, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics.



“It’s when you get into the realm of outside spending that you see the opposite is very much true, with conservative-leaning groups effectively obliterating the left-leaning groups,” he said.

Hari Sevugan, the Democratic National Committee spokesman, said his party’s complaint with the outside groups isn’t just about the fundraising totals, but about how the money comes in.

“If you take in the sum what will be spent by the candidates, the outside groups, and the party, there will certainly be a lot of money on both sides,” said Sevugan.

But the decision by some of the GOP groups to organize under tax laws allowing them to keep their donors secret raises the question of “who will these candidates be beholden to in the end?” he added.

Sevugan said Democrats “may never know” if they are outspent in the 2010 midterms because some of the conservative outside groups, such as Crossroads GPS, organized under a tax code that will never require them to make a full public accounting of their activities and donors. Some of those groups are spending money on turnout operations, which is much more difficult to track than advertising.

“Maybe our party structure is in better shape than their party structure, but this isn’t an exercise where we can silo off party structure. Their outside groups are pouring money into this at a faster pace than ours,” he added.

For instance, federal candidates on both sides also could benefit from money being spent on gubernatorial races from the Republican Governors Association ($60 million raised this year) and the Democratic Governors Association ($27 million.)

And then there are individual candidates. One Republican running for governor, Meg Whitman in California, alone has spent $163 million in her race against Democrat Jerry Brown. Florida Republican Rick Scott is spending more than $60 million in personal and family money in his race against Alex Sink.

According to data at the Center for Responsive Politics, the Democratic committees – including state party coffers – raised $776 million thus far and had $90 million in cash for the final month, compared to $508 million collected by the Republicans who had $55 million available for the last lap of campaigning.

For now, the official party committees are still dominating the ad wars nationally. The National Republican Congressional Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee currently rank as the top spenders on independent advertising. The NRCC has doled out $44.5 million compared to the DCCC’s $42 million.

Democrats are increasingly stepping up their charges that conservatives effectively spent their way to big gains in Congress and in the statehouses through the spending by outside groups.

The argument seems designed to achieve two ends: insulating Democrats from blame that they gave up big losses in the House and Senate a mere two years after President Barack Obama’s historic win, and suggesting that the Republican wins have an unseemly edge, fueled by the secretive groups. “Everything was going great and all of a sudden secret money from God knows where – because they won’t disclose it – is pouring in,” Pelosi recounted at a recent fundraiser.

The huge fundraising gap between the two parties was one of the reasons GOP activists earlier this year began assembling an array of new groups and reconstituting old ones so they could raise money fast and spread it around the campaign battleground. The Supreme Court ruling unleashing corporate giving accelerated those plans.

Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for American Crossroads, which was founded with help from former Bush advisers Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie, said “there was a significant gap that conservative-leaning outside groups had to make up in order to really leverage the conservative voter intensity that was out there and effectively add gasoline to it.”

Some of the Democratic edginess also may stem from frustration that they’ve lost a key advantage.

Noting that the bad economy is the top issue on voters’ minds, Anthony Corrado, an expert on campaign finance at Colby College, said it appears the Democrats “were hoping to spend their way out of that problem, and now they’ve found that the big advantage they thought they would have has disintegrated in the wake of increased activity by outside groups.”

Of course, money only gets a political party so far.

In 2006, the parties’ positions were essentially reversed: Republican Party committees raised nearly $800 million compared to $600 million collected by their Democratic adversaries, and the GOP incumbents entered the cycle with their own brimming war chests.

The Republicans still wound up losing their House majority.

Beyond the secret donors, what distinguishes the outside spending in this cycle is where it’s being invested: Almost all of it appears to be going to television ads and direct mail flyers attacking candidates.

A similar effort by Democrats in the 2004 presidential race to create essentially a shadow party operation provided help through advertising, voter registration and voter turnout operations.

The Republicans do have a turnout arm, American Crossroads GPS, but the vast majority of the conservative money is being used to communicate with voters through television, radio and direct mail.

That consolidation of resources in a midterm rather than a presidential year is what is rattling the Democrats, some of whom would not be nearly so endangered if the groups had not engaged in their districts.

For instance, the war on the airwaves in the district of embattled Democratic freshman Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick in Arizona is essentially between Kirkpatrick and three outside groups who have spent a combined $1.4 million attacking her. Her opponent, Paul Gosar, has only put up $200,000 worth of ads.

“Fact-checking our opponent is a full-time job, but we’ve spent even more time fact-checking his special interest backers,” said Carmen Gallus, Kirkpatrick’s campaign manager. “These outside groups are not being held accountable for coming in and lying to the folks in our district.”

The Democrats are dipping into their party committee funds to provide some cover.

The DCCC and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee both invested millions in ads for their members this week, which moved the disparity in spending from a $38 million Republican advantage to just $23 million, according to the Sunlight Foundation, another site that tracks political money.

“In some races, will all this outside spending matter on the margins? Of course it will,” said Corrado. “But it’s not the special interest money that is driving this election. It is public concern about the economy.”