Of the nearly $10.7 million dollars in super PAC spending dumped on the super Tuesday states over the last two weeks, three — Ohio, Tennessee and Georgia — account for nearly all of the spending and almost half of the available delegates.
According to Sunlight's super PAC tracker, the race for Ohio and its 66 delegates leads the spending spree with nearly $4.5 million, nearly half of all the super PAC money spent in the past two weeks on super Tuesday states. The biggest spender has been Restore Our Future, which supports former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. That super ...
Continue readingSuper PACs make Super Tuesday even more… Super
Heading into super Tuesday, when voters in 10 states go to the polls, super PACs supporting Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have dumped nearly $10 million into those races. Following the money reveals that half are key battlegrounds.
According to our Super PAC Tracker, total super PAC spending topped $67.5 million as of Friday, as expenditures continued to mount in Super Tuesday states. The pro-Romney Restore Our Future has spent slightly more than $5.1 million in five of them: Georgia, Massachusetts, Ohio, Oklahoma and Tennessee. That compares to nearly $3.3 million dropped on five states ...
Continue readingOn eve of Netanyahu visit, a look at Israel’s lobbying
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday begins a visit to the United States amid tensions surrounding Iran's nuclear program and a report President Obama will urge his Israeli counterpart to postpone a preemptive strike. In addition to Obama, Netanyahu will call on another U.S. power political player, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
AIPAC, which has been sounding the alarm on Iran, is the largest pro-Israeli lobbying operation, with $2.8 million in lobbying expenditures last year, according to Senate reports, AIPAC will draw top politicians from both countries to its 2012 Policy Conference. Besides Obama ...
Continue readingFEC deadlocks on supersizing corporate and union PACs
A lawyer who has already successfully fought to loosen campaign finance regulations says he'll probably go back to court to continue his crusade after the Federal Election Commission today deadlocked over allowing corporations, unions and other organizations with political action committees to create super PACs within them.
The six commissioners divided along party lines over attorney Dan Backer's proposal to allow corporations, unions and other associations to create segregated "independent expenditure" accounts within their traditional political action committees, using the same name and brand they currently employ. Backer, of DB Capitol Strategies, was the winning attorney in Carey ...
Continue readingBig Super PAC donors: Same old guns, just more money
If there were any doubts about how much the political landscape has changed post-Citizens United, here's one leading indicator: An analysis by Sunlight's Reporting Group shows that the biggest donors to super PACs are giving more political donations earlier in the campaign than they have in the past.
In the first 12 months of the 2012 election cycle, 37 individuals and 9 organizations each gave $500,000 or more to super PACs, for a total of $48 million. The same individuals and organizations gave a combined $64 million to a range of state and federal candidates during the ...
Continue readingDid lawsuit factor in Olympia Snowe’s departure?
Last August, while Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, was in the midst of an intensive round of fundraising for her 2012 reelection bid, a four-year-old civil lawsuit alleging fraud by an education company in which she and her husband are heavily invested became public.
Nationally, most of the coverage of Snowe's decision to drop her reelection bid has focused on the centrist Republican's frustration with the polarized politics on Capitol Hill. But in Maine, a few newspapers have speculated that her husband's legal entanglements had a role in Snowe's sudden and surprising decision, which left her with ...
Continue readingLawmakers demanding LightSquared docs got campaign money from company’s adversaries
The three GOP House lawmakers who yesterday demanded that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) cough up documents detailing its actions and relationship with wireless telecommunications company LightSquared have gotten ample campaign contributions from the embattled firm's corporate adversaries.
The ongoing saga surrounding LightSquared's efforts to launch a satellite-based 4G network demonstrates that when it comes to spectrum wars, there are monied interests on all sides pushing lawmakers, complicating President Barack Obama's campaign promise to expand the reach of broadband.
AT&T and Verizon figure prominently among the top donors to the three lawmakers who are demanding documents ...
Continue readingOlympia Snowe: A red-meat Republican after all?
Many people in Washington will miss Olympia Snowe, the Maine Republican and bipartisan bridge-builder who announced Tuesday evening that she has decided not to seek a fourth term in the U.S. Senate. But perhaps none more so than Charlie Palmer.
Though the confirmed centrist hardly fits the image of a "red-meat Republican," the Charlie Palmer Steakhouse, a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol, appears to be one of her favorite venues. Records compiled by Sunlight Foundation's Political Party Time show that the GOP lawmaker held 27 fundraisers there between May and December of last year. On three ...
Continue readingSuper PACs fund final push in Michigan
Voting in today's Michigan primary follows a week in which super PACs spent more than $2.7 million to influence the contest. And nearly all of that money was spent either in support of or in opposition to Rick Santorum.
Since Feb. 21, Mitt Romney's Restore Our Future super PAC spent $1.67 million opposing the former Pennsylvania senator, while Santorum's Red White and Blue Fund spent $773,700 in his support.
The filings provide some insight into who is perceived by Romney backers as the former governor's biggest threat. In the last week of January ...
Continue readingInfluence at the Oscars
Update: The contribution amounts coming from George Clooney and Kathleen Kennedy have been corrected.
It's Oscars weekend in Hollywood, a place that -- when it comes to money and influence -- isn't as far from Washington as it appears on a map. In honor of the occasion, Sunlight has decided to take a look at who among this year's Academy Award nominees are playing the political field. The results of our inquiry do absolutely nothing to dispel the notion that the Hollywood hills are a Democratic stronghold.
The envelopes, please.
Three movies from DreamWorks Animation -- "War Horse," "The Help ...
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