Democrats finally caught up to Republicans in the super PAC battle, but it didn’t matter, partly because they got crushed in the overall big-money war.

New reports to the Federal Election Commission show that Democrats, who had been leery about embracing the new big money politics until recently, far outpaced Republicans in the fundraising by super PACs, which are required to report their contributors’ identities.


But voluntary disclosures by other outfits suggest Republicans more than made up for the disparity through their dominance of secretive non-profit groups that do not disclose their donors.

The six biggest-spending super PACs spent $177 million boosting Democrats and only $80 million boosting Republicans, according to a POLITICO analysis of the FEC filings, which cover roughly the three weeks before Election Day, plus the three weeks afterward.

They show a major push by both sides’ richest partisans in the run-up to the election, with 38 liberals giving $100,000 or more to the three biggest Democratic super PACs – led by hedge funder Jim Simons, who gave $4 million – for a total of $15 million. Interestingly, Tom Steyer – the liberal hedge fund billionaire who was the election’s single biggest disclosed giver at $74 million or more – didn’t contribute a dime in the final weeks to the super PAC he founded to elevate the issue of climate change.

On the other side, 31 conservatives reached or crossed the six-figure mark in the election’s stretch run – led by industrialist Charles Koch’s $3 million check – for a combined total of nearly $14 million.

“What we did was kind of level playing field,” said Ronnie Cameron, who donated $1.25 million in the last few weeks of the midterms to two of the three biggest conservative super PACs. The donations, which he made through his Arkansas-based Mountaire Corp. poultry company, went to the Karl Rove-conceived American Crossroads ($250,000) and the Koch brothers-backed Freedom Partners Action Fund ($1 million), and brought his combined totals to those groups to $3.5 million for the cycle.

The groups – along with a third super PAC, the Joe Ricketts-funded Ending Spending Action Fund – spent $21 million in the campaign’s final three weeks assailing Democratic Senate candidates in key states including Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa and North Carolina where Democratic super PACs had bombarded the airwaves early on trying to define GOP candidates.

“There was so much political advertising, that it may have had minimal impact, because most people were just numb to it, but that is a whole lot better than having it be all one sided,” said Cameron. He said he wanted his money to be used mostly on positive ads, but recognized the political wisdom behind contrast ads linking Democrats to President Barack Obama and Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid.

“It helped educate people that their local guy is part of the national party and that, if you don’t like Harry Reid, you need to replace the person who is allowing him to remain as majority leader,” said Cameron.

Republicans won almost all of the key Senate races en route to capturing the Senate, and their operatives credited the late big-money blitz with helping seal the deal.

Freedom Partners’ donors were fired up by the chance to send a message to Obama, said James Davis, a spokesman for Freedom Partners Action Fund. “As a result, Freedom Partners Action Fund received donations from people all over the country that said ‘enough is enough’.”

The top three Democratic super PACs – the Harry Reid-linked Senate Majority PAC, the Nancy Pelosi-backed House Majority PAC and the Steyer-led NextGen Climate Action – in the last three weeks spent nearly $30 million on ads fighting back against an electoral wave favoring Republicans.

And liberal groups insisted the spending helped keep key races close, but they also pointed out that the right had an overwhelming advantage in undisclosed non-profit spending.

“Despite the lame, and false, ‘ woe is me’ pining from Karl Rove and others, the fact is, from day 1, Republicans had the outside money advantage, with bulk of the funding coming through the Koch brothers’ dark money network and eventually being supplemented by the myriad of conservative super PACs,” said Ty Matsdorf, a spokesman for Senate Majority PAC.

FEC filings don’t paint a complete picture of that non-profit spending. They do show that the six biggest-spending non-profit groups spent $82 million on ads supporting Republicans and only $19 million supporting Democrats. But those filings don’t take into account huge swaths of spending primarily by non-profit groups registered under a section of the tax code – 501(c) – that doesn’t require donor disclosure. Those groups, which are required by law to spend the majority of their cash on apolitical purposes, were granted new flexibility to spend money in politics by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which enabled secret-money groups to spend on ads urging viewers to vote for or against certain candidates.

While liberal 501(c) non-profit groups have engaged in political spending, anecdotal evidence suggests that conservative groups have more fully embraced the technique.

For instance, FEC filings show that Americans for Prosperity – the most robust group in the Koch brothers’ network – spent only $6.4 million on ads in the midterms. But the group has told POLITICO that its 2014 budget was roughly $130 million. Likewise, only $35 million of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s election spending shows up in the filings, but the group says it spent twice that amount in the midterms.

The discrepancy stems from those groups’ early advertising or mailings that technically focus on issues, rather than elections, which do not trigger FEC reporting requirements. While such-issue based ads can be quite hard-hitting and often indistinguishable from election ads to the average viewer, they also serve a legal purpose for the non-profit groups, which often classify them as the type of apolitical activity on which they’re required to spend the majority of their cash. Operatives view those requirements as restricting the flexibility of cash raised into such non-profits. Super PACs, on the other hand, can spend all their cash on election ads.

It can be worth the trade-off for donors wary of having their names publicly disclosed by super PACs. Rich conservatives in particular have opted for non-disclosing groups, with some expressing concerns about being targeted by the Internal Revenue Service, the media or by backlash against their businesses.

Yet, towards the end of the 2014 cycle, some conservative donors like Cameron for the first time decided to give to super PACs that were required to disclose their names.

“I just felt like it’s time to stand up and put my money where my mouth is,” Cameron said in October, not long after giving his first donations to super PACs that reported his donations to the FEC.

Asked Friday if he would continue his big giving headed into 2016, Cameron was non-committal.

“I’m not a Tom Steyer or a George Soros. I’m giving what I make and this was an excellent year for me,” he said. “As to whether it would be as much as this or whether I would have as much, that’s up to the Lord.”