It’s official. Today, spending by “dark money” organizations on congressional elections surpassed that of all previous cycles.

At $169.2 million so far, money spent by these groups that don’t disclose their donors handily outpaces 2010’s previous record for a midterm election, where dark money spending topped out at $135 million. It even, albeit barely, tops the $168.6 million spent in congressional races in 2012.

Though spending by conservative dark money groups makes up the majority, 73 percent, of all reported dark money spending, the overall total is down considerably from 2012 and is comparable to what they spent in 2010. Still, the $124 million in reported spending by conservative dark money organizations in 2014 is more than the combined spending of all liberal dark money groups going back to 1990.

The majority of the increase this cycle is made up of spending by liberal dark money groups, whose outlays have more than tripled since 2010, from $10.7 million to $33 million.

In 2010, only one of the top 10 most active dark money groups was a liberal group, VoteVets.org, and only three liberal groups had reported spending more than $1 million. In 2014, two liberal groups — Patriot Majority USA and the League of Conservation Voters — are among the 10 biggest spenders, and six liberal groups reported spending more than $1 million in congressional races around the country.

More evidence that Democrats have cannonballed into the outside spending pool: The largest disclosed contributions this cycle have gone to super PACs that support Democrats, and the largest growth in dark money spending has been on the left.

Nonparty outside spending as a whole, however, still leans heavily to the right, with nearly $300 million spent by organizations supporting Republicans, compared to just under $217 million spent by pro-Democratic groups. That roster of this cycle’s top donors would look far more conservative if the names of those fueling the political expenditures of dark money groups were disclosed to the public.

And that’s only what the FEC reports say. There’s a lot more dark money spending that goes entirely unreported to the FEC. This important not only because it leaves huge holes in the data, but it’s also what makes it possible for these groups to operate as 501(c) organizations, rather than openly political organizations like super PACs, which have to disclose their donors.

Issue no. 1: Making sure you lose



Hidden from the stats is a pattern having to do with how these groups operate inside and outside the Federal Election Commission’s reporting “windows.” The term refers to a time period — within 60 days before a general election, or 30 days before a primary — during which any ads discussing issues and also mentioning candidates for office must be reported as expenditures to the FEC, even if they don’t ask the public to vote for or against the candidate. There’s no reporting requirement for any ads that run before that time, meaning any official tally of how much is spent is hard to come by.

Most organizations that make issue ads outside of the FEC’s reporting windows aren’t seeking to influence an election or circumvent well-established disclosure rules for political activities. These groups usually spend a small amount of money on an effort clearly linked to their mission as an organization, and once the FEC’s electioneering windows open, they don’t show up as big spenders in the data.

But a relative handful of nonprofit organizations spend heavily on politically charged ads, using the FEC reporting window as a shield for the activity — both as a means to obscure the activity from oversight and to keep their donors secret.

Here’s how it works.

January 2014 opened with new ads from a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization called Americans for Prosperity — the flagship organization in the Koch brothers donor network. The ad, running in North Carolina, showed a woman in front of a plain white background saying “people don’t like political ads” then jumped into an explanation of the shortcomings of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — popularly referred to as Obamacare — as the camera slowly tightened on her face. The ad ends with Senator Hagan’s phone number and a call for viewers to “tell Senator Hagan to stop thinking about politics and start thinking about people.”

As the months went by, this same ad was run in Arkansas, in Colorado, in Louisiana, and elsewhere — each time encouraging voters to call the corresponding fill-in-the-blank Democratic senator who just so happened to be in a very contentious race to keep his or her seat. Though the ads were structured as a discussion about the issues, independent fact-checkers rated the claims made in the ad as “false.”

This ad was the first of many “educational” ads that would run in states with embattled Senate Democrats. From Alaska to New Hampshire and in between, the ads ran throughout the spring and summer, without any of the spending in these states being reported to the FEC. All of the ads ended with a phone number and encouraged voters to call the politicians featured in the ads.

But AFP’s ads didn’t just portray Democratic senators. The group also ran upbeat ads featuring GOP congressmen running, who happened to be running against the Democrats in the group’s negative ads.

One such ad that appeared in late May featured Rep Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who is running to unseat Senator Mark Pryor. The ad discussed no single issue, but simply discussed Cotton’s opposition to moves by “Washington” to “burden farmers with red tape,” as well as his stands against the debt ceiling increase and Obamacare. It closed with a call for viewers to “thank him for standing with Arkansas.”

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Another ad run the same month in Colorado praised Rep Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) generally for his positions on everything from energy to healthcare and government spending. Gardner is currently running to replace Sen. Tom Udall (D-Colo.), who has been the subject of many of AFP’s negative ads. AFP’s efforts mentioning Gardner and Cotton were made easier by the fact that both are currently lawmakers in the House looking to move to the Senate. The ads, therefore, are framed not as support for their Senate campaigns but general congratulations for the work they’re already doing in the House.

AFP ultimately ran ads like these in nine of this cycle’s 10 most contentious Senate races. Most followed the same pattern of negative — and generally false or misleading — ads about Democratic senators interspersed with ads showing amorphous appreciation for GOP congressmen who were seeking to oust them.

On Sept. 4, when the FEC’s reporting window opened — requiring all future spending on such ads to be logged with the agency — the Wesleyan Media Project, in partnership with the Center for Responsive Politics, published a report showing that Americans for Prosperity had already run more than 33,000 ads in races around the country, more than any other outside group. Up to that point, and for nearly a month thereafter, the only filings Americans for Prosperity had filed with the FEC were two electioneering communication reports in Kansas.

This isn’t entirely new. Americans for Prosperity has run politically charged ads outside of the FEC’s reporting windows in the past. As the Wesleyan report shows, AFP had bought 8,198 ads through the end of August 2012, but that’s only about one-fourth of its 2014 total over the same period.

And once the FEC’s reporting window opened? AFP began running ads explicitly advocating for and against the same candidates who had been the subject of its supposedly educational ads for the previous 10 months. Again, in 9 of the 10 most contentious Senate races, AFP began to directly oppose candidates in the race; across the board, those candidates were Democrats.

The push came partly in the form of a series of web ads telling voters to “fire” these incumbent Democrats. The ads recycle the same false claim about Obamacare used in AFP’s earliest “educational” ads.

But it’s not just ads. AFP’s expenditures show the organization has been taking its message house to house, hiring canvassers and phonebank operators. Still more, they are sending mailers and putting up billboards, according to FEC reports.

This visualization shows how the timing works at its most basic level:

A different profile for liberal spending

On the left, the groups that are spending more than ever this cycle have also been spending for months, and as we’ve noted before, their efforts often result in the same kinds of misleading or outright false ads groups like Americans for Prosperity has run. Patriot Majority, in particular, which has spent more than $10 million primarily opposing candidates in the same senate races Americans for Prosperity has focused on. The League of Conservation Voters isn’t far behind with just under $9.5 million in much the same list of races. On paper — at the FEC — both of these groups have spent more than Americans for Prosperity.

However, the principal difference is that spending by these groups — which makes up nearly two-thirds of all liberal dark money reported to the FEC — was reported to the FEC much earlier than was the spending by Americans for Prosperity. Patriot Majority’s first FEC filings in North Carolina date back to February of this year, compared to Americans for Prosperity’s first report in October, despite the fact that both groups were running politically charged ads during roughly the same time. Likewise, in Arkansas, where Patriot Majority has been taking liberties with the truth for quite some time, its ad buys appear to track with its FEC reports, which go back as far as June 2013. And FEC reports from other top liberal dark money groups like the League of Conservation Voters and VoteVets.org for their spending in the top Senate races align with the actual timing of their ad buys.

Americans for Prosperity, however, isn’t the only organization that uses issue ads as a loophole to understate political activity. In the Wesleyan report from early September, Crossroads GPS, another 501(c)(4) linked to GOP political strategist Karl Rove, was second only to Americans for Prosperity in ad buys by nondisclosing groups, with 16,423 ad buys in 10 contests, six of which were top Senate races. None of that spending had been reported to FEC.

Since the FEC reporting window opened, GPS has spent more than $26 million against Democrats. Most of that spending has been directed at eight of the 10 most contentious Senate races this cycle; in six of them, GPS had already run ads before the reporting window opened.

One of the Senate races Crossroads added to its roster after the FEC window opened, Kentucky, was the only top Senate race Americans for Prosperity hadn’t touched. That race was the sole focus of another group, one of the most notable dark money organizations of the 2014 cycle — which also has close ties to Crossroads GPS.

The Kentucky Opportunity Coalition is a 501(c)(4) social welfare group — as are Americans for Prosperity and Crossroads GPS — whose sole social welfare function appear to be getting Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) re-elected. KOC first reported spending to the FEC in early June, but the group sprang to life much earlier than that.

In fact, as early as May 2013, KOC was making ads touting Mitch McConnell’s leadership in the fight against Obamacare. In February 2014, the group ran radio ads warning of President Obama’s War on Coal, saying McConnell has been “fighting Obama’s anti-coal agenda at every turn.”

KOC’s story, as the Center for Public Integrity, laid out in detail recently, is quite extraordinary. Founded in 2008, the day to day operations are handled by Scott Jennings, who has twice served in high-level positions in McConnell re-election campaigns. According to CPI, only the McConnell and Grimes campaigns have run more ads than KOC, and every single one of the 12,000 ads KOC has run in Kentucky — along with all of the ads on the group’s Youtube page — mention either McConnell or Grimes.

All this despite the fact that KOC has never previously raised enough money — $50,000 — to be required to file a detailed tax return with the IRS. So far in 2014, it’s FEC-reported spending alone is more than $7.5 million.



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