Effects of Campaign Spending
CPI: Sanders spent $9 per vote in New York. Trump? About 13 cents.
Michael Beckel
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders faltered in New York despite outspending front-runner Hillary Clinton on the television and radio airwaves.
Sanders won about 750,000 votes in New York — or 42 percent — while spending more than $6.8 million on TV and radio ads…
Clinton, meanwhile, bagged more than 1 million votes while spending about $3.8 million on TV and radio ads — about $3.62 per vote.
BuzzFeed: Democrats Pump Millions Into Pennsylvania Primary — But Their Big Bet Might Not Pay Off
Tarini Parti
“The race sounds more like a Republican primary — the kind where party leaders and party money lines up behind the preferred choice, but voters prove to be more stubborn.
Party leaders actively recruited an alternative to Sestak, a former congressman and Navy admiral who has a reputation for being gaffe-prone and a trouble maker within the party. And are now spending big money against him, insisting it’s not about personality and more about electability.
Independent Groups
Wall Street Journal: Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz Rake In Donations.
Rebecca Ballhaus
A super PAC backing Mrs. Clinton, Priorities USA Action, raised $11.7 million last month—more than double its February haul—and had $44.6 million left to spend at the end of March, according to its FEC filing. The group has conserved much of its funds for the likely general-election fight against the Republican Party.
The PAC’s haul will supplement strong fundraising by Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, which ended March with $29 million in the bank…
Mr. Cruz, a Texas senator, had $8.8 million in the bank at the end of March. He raised $12.5 million during the month, nearly three times as much as Mr. Kasich…
Mr. Cruz is also backed by a growing network of super PACs that raised at least $10 million last month and had more than $21 million left to spend. The super PAC backing Mr. Trump, which launched a $1 million ad campaign on his behalf last month, had not yet filed with the FEC.
Washington Post: They got Donna Edwards elected. Now they want to kick her out.
Rachel Weiner
The Service Employees International Union spent more than $1 million supporting Edwards in 2008, helping her topple the incumbent, Rep. Albert R. Wynn, in the Democratic primary. About a quarter of that money came from SEIU 1199, a Baltimore affiliate representing health-care workers.
Now, Committee for Maryland’s Progress, a super PAC largely funded by 1199, has spent close to $500,000 to try to defeat Edwards in her neck-and-neck primary for the Senate against Rep. Chris Van Hollen. The seat is being vacated by Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D), who is retiring after five terms.
“We’re disappointed that, instead of the fight for a $15 [minimum] wage, SEIU 1199 is spending their hard-earned member money to defeat a woman their own organization rates as 100 percent on the issues that matter to working families,” Edwards spokesman Benjamin Gerdes said in a statement.
IRS
Daily Caller: GOP Congressman: IRS Too Busy Spying On Americans To Do Its Job
Kathryn Watson
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen admitted in December his agency purchased and used Stingray technology to track 37 phones in 11 grand jury investigations. The IRS had one Stingray device last year, but was in the process of purchasing another, Koskinen said. The technology mimics a cell tower to force nearby phones onto its network instead of the carrier’s network, allowing the phones’ locations to be tracked. Some of the Stingray devices can also record calls.
“So the very agency that has a $385 billion tax gap can’t even do half of the recommendations GAO says you should do to accomplish your fundamental mission, [but] has time to target people for exercising their First Amendment liberties,” Jordan said during the hearing.
Wisconsin ‘John Doe’
Wisconsin Watchdog: Chisholm invokes his illegal John Doe probe in re-election campaign
M.D. Kittle
Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, the Democrat who brought Wisconsin the infamous John Doe investigations, is campaigning on the unconstitutional probe.
And he’s taking a shot at the John Doe judge and members of the state Supreme Court that shut down the Chisholm-launched witch hunt into Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign and dozens of conservative organizations.
“The partisan forces who shut down the John Doe investigation are already out in force trying to stop our progress and defeat me in a low-turnout election,” the district attorney declares in a campaign email announcing his re-election.
Citizens United
San Diego Tribune: Americans need a government that works for all
Liz Kennedy
But the fact is that a majority of Americans support the same basic policies — including government action to fight income inequality and improve wages, to regulate banks and the financial sector, to make college more affordable and to deal with climate change.
Unfortunately, wealthy and special interests keep government from being responsive and accountable to the people…
Democracy isn’t supposed to mean someone can overwhelm other voices by spending unlimited money advancing their political and economic self-interest. But since Citizens United, special interests have exploited loopholes for secret political spending. Now we face unlimited dark money being used to poison the political decision-making process, with no accountability for secret spenders and their hidden agendas.
Article V Convention
Baltimore Sun: Switchbacks on the road to campaign finance reform
Doug Miller
Reversing the damage done by these Supreme Court rulings and re-establishing the power to regulate how much money can be raised and spent in political campaigns will require an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Common Cause and other groups continue to lobby Congress on that front, but expecting creatures of this system to change it smacks of wishful thinking.
Article V of the Constitution, however, provides for another path to an amendment. If two thirds of the legislatures call for a convention of the states to draft an amendment on a specified topic of public import, Congress is obliged to assemble it.
So far, Vermont, California, New Jersey and Illinois have called for an amendment convention aimed at overturning “corporate personhood” and the other rulings that have neutered campaign finance law. For the past three years, Get Money Out-Maryland has worked to add our state to that list.
Activism
Media Matters: Broadcast Networks Ignored Democracy Awakening, Democracy Spring Protests.
Cristiano Lima
Evening Broadcast News Programs Devoted Less Than Half A Minute To Demonstrations. A Media Matters analysis found that of the four broadcast network evening shows — ABC’s World News Tonight, CBS’ CBS Evening News, NBC’s NBC Nightly News, and PBS’s PBS NewsHour — only PBS NewsHour devoted any airtime to covering the Democracy Awakening and Democracy Spring protests in Washington, D.C., from April 11 to 18. The coverage on PBS was scant, however, with only two segments totaling 29 seconds devoted to the demonstrations.
Weekend Network Programs Entirely Ignored The Protests. The analysis found that the five network weekend programs — ABC’s This Week, CBS’ Face the Nation, NBC’s Meet the Press, Fox Broadcasting Co.’s Fox News Sunday, and PBS’ PBS NewsHour Weekend — entirely omitted coverage of the demonstrations and sit-ins in Washington, D.C., during their April 16 and 17 broadcasts.
USA Today: ‘Democracy Spring’ branching out after D.C. protests
Shakeeb Asrar
“Democracy Spring” plans to ask all candidates running for government positions, from president to the city council, to sign “Equal Voice for All” declaration, asking, among other things, to overturn Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision and restore protections against voter discrimination previously afforded under the Voting Rights Act. Those who sign the statement will receive support from the group. Protesters plan to disrupt campaign and fundraising events of candidates who oppose it.
Candidates and Campaigns
CPI: $1 billion spent in 2016 presidential race — and other numbers to know
Dave Levinthal, Michael Beckel, and Carrie Levine
Household names such as Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz account for much of this spending. But a gaggle of obscure and moneyed super PACs have likewise helped rocket campaign expenditures to mesospheric levels — ones unthinkable even four years ago.
Here’s a rundown of the more telling — and curious — statistics to emerge from a new round of political campaign disclosures:
Vanity Fair: Trump Humbly Takes Credit for Breaking Jeb Bush
Tina Nguyen
“I think Jeb would have been the nominee had I not gotten in, but I was able to define Jeb early,” Trump told Times reporters Ashley Parker and Maggie Haberman. Indeed, everyone thought that the former Florida governor would be the front-runner in the lead-up to the presidential election, thanks to a $116 million super-PAC backing his bid, a somewhat popular last name, and an appealingly multi-ethnic family.
Trump’s genius was to turn all of those assets into liabilities—and it worked, especially once voters watched Jeb! repeatedly crumple in the face of Trump’s repeated verbal abuse during debates and on the campaign trail. “Don’t forget I’m the one that, when Jeb would say, ‘The country was safe when my brother was president,’ I said, ‘Excuse me, the World Trade Center came down,’” he told the Times. “Do you know, nobody thought of that? It’s like the paper clip. Nobody thought about the paper clip except for the guy that thought of it, and he became rich. And everyone else said, ‘Why didn’t I think of that idea?’”
BuzzFeed: How Bernie Sanders Raises All That Money
John Templon, Evan McMorris-Santoro, and Tarini Parti
When the 2016 election began, the idea was that big money from big donors would dominate the election. Instead, many candidates with robust super PACs have failed; Donald Trump has loaned himself money; and Bernie’s raised more than $112 million (accounting for 82% of contributions to his campaign) through ActBlue, an online donation service for Democrats, specializing in small donors.
There is no precedent for Sanders’ online fundraising. It’s almost like a soda fountain — he presses the lever, and money comes flowing out. It may be the new standard for Democratic fundraising, or it may be a once-in-lifetime thing, that only a candidate who so thoroughly positions his candidacy against big money in politics.
Medium: On Becoming Anti-Bernie
Robin Alperstein
What Sanders does is very devious: he trades on legitimate and widely shared concerns about the role of big money coming from the wealthy, including billionaires like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson, to then suggest that individual contributions from anyone in any industry he doesn’t like are part of a coordinated industry/billionaire attempt to avoid regulation and to further enrich the one percent, and then he insinuates that Hillary must be bought and sold by those industries because of those individual contributions. That way, anyone who supports her is part of the problem. And then it becomes an act of immorality to vote for her, and a symbol of one’s own moral purity, indeed a rejection of corruption itself, to vote for Sanders. Clever. Intellectually dishonest, McCarthyite, and gross, but clever.
The States
Capital New York: De Blasio fundraising probe increases scrutiny of campaign finance tactic
Laura Nahmias and Bill Mahoney
Combined, the committees in Putnam, Ulster, Monroe and Nassau Counties brought in $304,600 from CWA District One in the fall before the election, $127,300 from 32BJ SEIU, $200,000 from 1199/SEIU, $120,000 from the New York Nurses Association and $100,000 from the United Federation of Teachers…
The county committees then gave similar amounts to candidates for state Senate, who would have been barred from receiving such contributions directly — a tactic that is now reportedly under scrutiny by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, as part of a wide-ranging probe into the fundraising of Mayor Bill de Blasio.
