Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney love their Citizens United cash
This doesn't come as a shock, but it's still nice to see numbers validate what was obvious to anyone who paid attention to the
Citizens United ruling:
a new study shows that while the amount of advertising so far in the Republican presidential primary is on the same level as 2008, a much larger portion of it is now being funded by outside groups.
According to the study, featuring data from Kantar Media/CMAG and analysis from the Wesleyan Media Project, 69,871 television ads have aired on national cable and local broadcast on behalf of Republican primary candidates thus far in the 2012 cycle. Total cost: $28.9 million. Through the same point in 2008, roughly the same number of ads had run—68,839, although the cost was much higher: $49.8 million. (Note that these numbers do not include local cable.)
Aside from the lower ad rates, the big change between 2008 and 2012 is that in 2008, 97.4 percent of the money was spent by campaigns themselves—just 2.6 percent by outside groups. In 2012, 56.4 percent of the money was spent by campaigns—43.6 percent by outside groups, a nearly 17-fold increase for outside groups as a share of total ad spending. Even though total spending decreased by 42 percent, spending by outside groups increased 1,281.8 percent.
Although these numbers don't capture all ad spending, they do provide an apples to apples comparison for local broadcast and national cable, and they show that rather than giving more citizens a voice in the political process, Citizens United has merely allowed campaigns to rely on a smaller group of elite funders to pay for their campaigns. Instead of raising $100 from 10,000 individuals, now all Mitt Romney needs to do is ask one of his old Bain buddies to drop a $1 million check into a Super PAC. (He's allowed to help them fundraise.) The same amount of advertising is going on the air, but a dramatically smaller number of people are funding it, and because much of the advertising is going through Super PACs, candidates can avoid taking full responsibility for some of the least defensible stuff said on their behalf.
Despite evidence like this, most Republican politicians defend Citizens United in the name of promoting liberty and freedom. I do not think they know what liberty and freedom truly mean.