Restore Our Future has hit a fundraising milestone: The super PAC supporting Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has clocked $100 million in contributions since it was organized just two years ago this month.
That puts the pro-Romney super PAC far ahead of the rest of the PAC pack when it comes to fundraising, Sunlight's Follow the Unlimited Money tracker shows, though just how wide a lead it enjoys won't be possible to determine until the rest of the campaign committees file their latest reports with the Federal Election Commission. Committees that report monthly to the FEC -- a group ...
Continue readingPro-gay marriage group pushes for ad removal
A gay marriage referendum on Maryland ballots Nov. 6 has set off a behind-the-scenes fight over a television advertisement, a dispute uncovered by Sunlight's Political Ad Sleuth.
A letter discovered on the database, which tracks political ad filings that local stations are required to post with the Federal Communications Commission, reveals that Marylanders for Marriage Equality has been pressing station managers to take down "Question 6 Doesn't," an ad produced by the Maryland Marriage Alliance, a group on the other side of the debate over same-sex marriage.
Marylanders for Marriage Equality raised a number of complaints about the ...
Continue readingRepublicans in tight House races on top in the money game
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Republicans vying for House seats have the money edge in tossup races as the campaign enters its home stretch. The latest campaign finance reports filed with the Federal Election Commission show that GOP candidates have at least $5.65 million more than the Democrats in 23 tossup races as identified by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. Republicans in the group had about $17.64 million cash on hand, compared to the Democrats' $12 million.
The report, which covers the third ...
Outside political spending continues to skyrocket
Of the $810 million in outside spending that Sunlight's Follow the Unlimited Money has tracked since the beginning of the campaign cycle, more than half has been laid out in the last six weeks.
Continue readingSurprise! Corporations funded Democrats’ convention
Though the party conventions are long over, the special interests that paid for them were only revealed to the public yesterday. It’s not a surprise that, despite a self-imposed ban on corporate cash to fund their Charlotte convention, the Democrats relied on plenty of it.
For their bash in Tampa, Republicans brought in donations from super PAC donors, an oil industry trade group that's running its own political ads, and some of the same corporate donors who underwrote the Democrats' convention.
MORE: See the largest donors to the Democratic and Republican host committees below
The Charlotte host committee ...
Continue readingDavis deletes 13 consecutive tweets following debate
Republican Rodney Davis, in a tight race with Democrat David Gill for Illinois' 13th Congressional District, deleted 13 consecutive posts from his Twitter account Thursday, hours after they were posted to his account during the congressional candidates' only debate of the campaign.
The debate highlighted many of the candidates' differences and provided insight into many of their positions including...their stance on Twitter? Both candidates' teams were actively tweeting during the debate; however Team Davis, which posted 17 tweets during the course of the debate, deleted 13 consecutive posts less than a day later. Politwoops, the Sunlight Foundation's database ...
Continue readingStealthy Wealthy: Franklin Haney built real estate empire with government help
Longtime Democratic donor Franklin L. Haney, who with his wife Emeline has poured $1.1 million into the effort to reelect President Barack Obama, has built his business around developing government-supported real estate projects and acting as a government landlord.
He survived investigations in the 1990s by the Justice Department on campaign finance violations and by Congress for using his monied influence to secure a lucrative government lease. During the latter, he was nearly found in contempt of Congress for failing to supply requested documents.
The onetime champion Bible seller and would-be governor of his home state of Tennessee has ...
Continue readingWho leases office space to the feds remains a mystery
After deciding to profile Franklin L. Haney as part of our Stealthy Wealthy series, an obvious question soon posed itself: Exactly how much have Haney's companies collected over the years in leasing office space to the federal government?
The answer -- or rather non-answer -- to the question says less about Haney than it does about the limits on what the public can know about how its tax dollars are being spent.
News reports stated that his company, through a variety of limited liability corporations and real estate partnerships, had leases for office space worth many millions of dollars dating back ...
Continue readingHaney campaign contributions hard to follow
Franklin L. Haney is a case study on how hard it can be to get a comprehensive picture of the campaign contribution clout of a particular individual or company given the limits of state and local level disclosure.
The influential developer, who bid unsuccessfully to become the owner of the Washington Nationals baseball team and helped bankroll the political career of fellow Tennessean Al Gore, has long been known as a major Democratic donor. But he leaves a surprisingly small footprint on Sunlight's Influence Explorer. The totals show $1.2 million since 1989 to federal candidates and parties and ...
Continue readingRepublican groups swamping Democrats in outside spending
As the campaign heads into its final weeks, Republican outside interest groups are outspending their Democratic counterparts two-to-one, Federal Election Commission reports tracked this week by Sunlight's Follow the Unlimited Money show.
As Sunlight reported last week, outside spending has accelerated since Sept. 7, when federal law requires that all outside groups making political expenditures disclose them to the FEC. Expenditures hit $102 million between Oct. 5 and Oct 11, with House races getting the most attention from the outside spenders, and GOP candidates only having a slight advantage.
But so far this week, Republican groups have outmatched Democratic ...
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