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Seriously, if you have the means and value transparency, please consider donating — they do not seem to have sufficient staff to keep everything exactly up-to-date — am bumping into a number of inconsistencies.
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In looking at the stark difference in funds raised from various sources, and given how much power and access to voters having wads of cash can be, that Bernie remains within striking distance of the Democratic nomination is a truly remarkable feat!
NOTE: the money results I found are down toward the bottom of the diary...
It’s not easy to calculate all the money going into our presidential election this year because there are myriad ways to take money under different names and rules, making it very difficult to find all of the vehicles, let alone compare apples to each other or to other fruit, as it were. (And that’s before even looking at dark money contributions which are completely opaque to me.)
My support throughout this primary election cycle has been clear, and in the name of transparency, I begin with explaining what prompted me to want to make sense of this. When people speak of Hillary Clinton’s connection to the SuperPAC world, it’s generally in the singular, i.e., Hillary Clinton’s SuperPAC. Written this way, the term is something of an abstraction, and clearly, these organizations are anything BUT abstractions. They are very specific entities with specific dollar amounts in receipts which are reported and their spending is intended to win hearts and minds.
Clearly Hillary has more than just one SuperPAC (or mostly more correctly stated, more than one supports her). Bernie also has more than one organization supporting him. There are, however, substantial differences both in funding levels and who drives them. The first difference is that the groups supporting Bernie are from particular organizations which want to support his candidacy. Hillary has groups doing the same, as well, and she also has groups which are not affiliated with other groups but whose sole purpose is to get her elected. At least two of these groups are clear that they are coordinating with the campaign (one of them also with the DNC) in support of her, which they claim they are free to do because they are not ‘purchasing’ advertising (Correct The Record makes no bones about having pitched anti-Bernie ‘news’ stories which have been carried by major newspapers, so that they deny ‘paying’ for advertising rings quite hollow).
David Brock says he does the media’s homework for it.
There are levels of complexity, and this stuff takes more than a casual interest to pull back the veil and make any basic sense of how the laws and Citizen’s United are impacting our political landscape and hence our country, our world, and frankly us as individuals. We’re talking about the potential power of unlimited sums most of us in the 99% do not tend to control or direct. I’m not going to get very far in this entry, but perhaps I will encourage others to begin their own navigations.
Definitions of SuperPACs: Campaign Committees and Outside Groups Types
note: I am changing the order as found on the OpenSecrets page.
There are several types of entities
Campaign Committee: A fund-raising committee set up by a candidate to finance a campaign for state or federal office. All campaign committees file regular campaign finance reports -- usually once a quarter -- with the Federal Election Commission that detail their donors and expenditures.
Campaigns are recorded on OpenSecrets in a similar fashion to SuperPACs and are listed alonside them.
Super PAC: A super PAC, also known as an independent expenditure-only committee, is a type of political action committee that came into existence in 2010 following a federal court decision in SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission. Super PACs may raise and spend unlimited sums of money for the sole purpose of making independent expenditures to support or oppose political candidates. Unlike traditional political action committees, super PACs may not donate money directly to candidates. Super PACs are required to disclose their donors to the Federal Election Commission, although some super PACs get around this requirement by listing 501(c) nonprofit groups as their donors -- these groups are not required to disclose their funders.
Leadership PAC: A fund-raising committee formed by a politician as a way to help fund other candidates' campaigns or pay for certain expenses not related to the campaigns. Leadership PACs are often used by politicians who aspire to leadership positions in Congress. By making donations to other candidates, lawmakers hope to gain clout among their colleagues that the lawmaker will utilize in a bid for a leadership post or committee chairmanship. Politicians also use leadership PACs to lay the groundwork for their own campaigns for higher office. In recent years, leadership PACs have become commonplace, even among freshman members of Congress. Leadership PACs are considered separate from a politician's campaign committee, providing donors with a way around limits on contributions to a candidate's campaign committee. Individuals can contribute up to $5,000 per year to a member's leadership PAC, even if they have already donated the maximum to that member's campaign committee.
Carey Committee: A Carey committee is a political action committee that is not affiliated with a candidate and has the ability to operate both as a traditional PAC, contributing funds to a candidate's committee, and as a super PAC, which makes independent expenditures. To do so, Carey committees must have a separate bank account for each purpose. The committee can collect unlimited contributions from almost any source for its independent expenditure account, but may not use those funds for its traditional PAC contributions.
Comparison of external fundraising info of the two campaigns
The following dollars are the best this fumbling brain can identify at present.
The campaigns — this is the standard way to take in funds with the $2700 limit we’re all aware of:
Hillary For America $159,903,968
Bernie 2016 $139,810,841
The above amounts will not be included in the other funds listed below.
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Unfortunately, there is some inconsistency on the OpenSecrets website so that there is no single page with complete information, and some groups are misidentified as to liberal or conservative (or as to which party it supports), so what I have culled is only as accurate as the material I worked with, corrected by me when an inaccuracy was obvious.
Hillary Total Dollars: $ 71,318,439
Priorites USA Action $ 55,560,457
American Bridge* $10,456,077
Ready PAC $ 3,465,425 (Ready for Hillary)
Planned Parenthood Votes$ 1,177,262
Women Vote $ 471,423
League of Conserv. Voters $ 135,180
NEA Advocacy Fund $ 19,991
Balance of Power PAC $ 19,156
Faith Voters PAC $ 11,640
America's Teachers $ 1,828
Bernie Total Dollars: $ 2,610,135
National Nurses United $ 2,463,091
Com. Workers of America $ 124,080
Feel Bern $ 11,999
Collective Actions PAC $ 8,795
Las Cruces for Bernie $ 2,170
Hillary Total Dollars: $ 10,000
Off The Sidelines $10,000
Bernie Total Dollars: $ 23,116
Progressive Voters of Am $23,116
Influence and Lobbying Issues:
I’m listing these in aggregate because when I attempt to look at each of the organizations listed in each category the numbers do not correspond — click the term to see the numbers I’m recording. The term ‘leadership’ is apparently used here separate from the category of leadership PAC, but I have no additional information on the difference.
Hillary Total Dollars: $ 4,094,007
Pro-Israel $ 237,219
Leadership $ 327,050
Human Rights $ 524,006
Gay & Lesbian Rights & Iss $ 182,409
Women’s Issues $2,823,323
Bernie Total Dollars: $ 0
Carey Committees:
Hillary Total Dollars: $ 6,901,997
Correct the Record $3,436,572
Blue Answer PAC $3,465,425
Bernie Total Dollars: $ 0
Joint Fundraising Committees
Hillary Total Dollars: $ 26,921,630
Hillary Victory Fund $26,921,630
Bernie Total Dollars: $ 0
Total Totals of Outside Funding (iow: total minus campaign $$)
Hillary
SuperPACs $ 71,318,439
Leadership PACs $ 10,000
Carey Committees $ 6,901,997
Joint Fundraising Committees $ 26,921,630
Influence and Lobbying Issues $ 4,094,007
Hillary Total Outside Funding Dollars: $ 109,246,073
Bernie
SuperPACs $ 2,610,135
Leadership PACs $ 23,116
Carey Committees $ 0
Joint Fundraising Committees $ 0
Influence and Lobbying Issues $ 0
Bernie Total Outside Funding Dollars: $ 2,633,251
Let’s put these numbers next to each other for better comparison:
SuperPAC monies for Hillary are approx $109,246,073
SuperPAC monies for Bernie are approx $ 2,633,251
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*American Bridge is not listed on OpenSecrets as being connected to Hillary, so the $10.5 million they have taken in and spent is not tallied in any columns connected to her by them. However, the press release announcing the formation of Correct The Record clearly identifies it as an organization created to defend Hillary from attacks coming from Republicans:
Washington, DC – Correct The Record, a project of American Bridge during the lead-up to presidential primary season, is splitting off from its parent group and registering with the Federal Elections Commission as a separate SuperPAC.
(snip)
“Correct The Record is a strong brand in its own right and now that Democrats are announcing their candidacies, it’s the right time to separate it from American Bridge, which focuses on opposition research on Republicans running for office,” Brad Woodhouse said. “Going forward, Correct the Record will work in support of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for President, aggressively responding to false attacks and misstatements of the Secretary’s exemplary record.”
Being prepared is often a powerful tool in and of itself, and I note that Ready for Hillary PAC was organized back in 2013. Hillary Victory Fund is what’s called a Joint Fundraising Committee which is working with a number of state Democratic parties to funnel additional monies to the DNC in support of Hillary’s candidacy:
In August 2015, at the Democratic Party convention in Minneapolis, 33 democratic state parties made deals with the Hillary Clinton campaign and a joint fundraising entity called The Hillary Victory Fund. The deal allowed many of her core billionaire and inner circle individual donors to run the maximum amounts of money allowed through those state parties to the Hillary Victory Fund in New York and the DNC in Washington.
The idea was to increase how much one could personally donate to Hillary by taking advantage of the Supreme Court ruling 2014, McCutcheon v FEC, that knocked down a cap on aggregate limits as to how much a donor could give to a federal campaign in a year. It thus eliminated the ceiling on amounts spent by a single donor to a presidential candidate.
The takeaway from this exercise for me is that Bernie has done an amazing job getting to where he is currently. Having taken in approximately 2% of the amount Secretary Clinton has working for her, he is now in a position where his campaign has momentum headed toward the final stretches of the Democratic primary nomination race. Wow!
