In the long debate over the changing nature of election advertising, one thing is now clearer than ever: Outside groups that can raise and spend unlimited money – sometimes without disclosing the sources of their funds – make up a larger portion of election spending than at any point in the last 16 years, by far.
A new study co-authored by the Wesleyan Media Project and the Center for Responsive Politics provides the first ever analysis of ad-buy data from 2000 to the present cycle, tracking more than 700 ad sponsoring organizations, all of which have been standardized and coded according to their type and level of disclosure.
The term “outside group” generally refers to organizations that spend money in elections without coordinating their activities with the candidates themselves.
Independent groups are not new, but they haven’t always been prominent ad buyers. In 2000, for example, voters saw fewer than 80,000 ads run by outside groups in federal elections – a total that made up only about 10 percent of all of the ads run that cycle. By 2012, the total had ballooned to more than 880,000, more than a fourth of all of the ads run in that election.
While candidates have always been, and still are, responsible for the majority of ads run in a particular cycle, that majority is being whittled away with each passing election. That’s evidenced, the study notes, by the fact that some competitive House and Senate races are already seeing instances where outside groups, not candidates, are running the majority of ads “that mention or picture the candidates on the ballot.”
The two main proponents of the growth in outside groups’ overall share of election advertising are super PACs and politically active nonprofits. The former only came into existence in 2010, and since then has come to dominate the field, accounting for more than 72.7 percent of all outside group advertising so far in the 2016 cycle.
Politically active nonprofits, on the other hand, have been active in every cycle going back to 2000, but what may be the same in quality is not the same in quantity. These groups – primarily 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations and 501(c)(6) trade associations – are the driving force behind the growth in “
The groups responsible for this growth in secret money are not primarily the more established nonprofits like the More than half of Crossroads GPS’ ads have been run outside of FEC reporting windows and, as such, have often gone unreported to the Federal Election Commission. This is an
The study released today shows that, for years, nonprofits have focused the bulk of their spending during that period, providing maximum impact with the least reporting. Some of the most prolific groups, like Americans for Prosperity – the flagship group backed by the donor network headed by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch – ran more than 90 percent of their ads outside of these windows.
And once each election is over, most of these groups fade away. Just under 80 percent of the groups sponsoring ads in federal elections are only active in one cycle, though the operatives who run them often reappear as the captains of new outside groups in the next campaign cycle.