GOP money floods electoral battlefield
Some Democrats fear tsunami like in '94, but Senate flip looks unlikely
While the online version reads:
Republican funding surge provides crucial advantage
Some Democrats now fear a historic rout in next month's midterm election as GOP advocacy groups funnel $50 million into campaigns.
Real news emerges:
[1] Money buys elections
[2] The money advantage is going to the Republicans
From the print version:
...Republicans, fueled by a surge of outside money and riding a wave of voter discontent, have begun gunning for Democratic House seats once considered safe.
Torrid spending by third-party groups, the so-called super-PACs, could reshape the electoral map and raises the specter of a historic rout.
The online version
Fueled by a surge of outside money, Republicans have begun gunning for Democratic House seats once considered safe and beyond GOP reach — a drive that threatens to reshape the electoral map and raises the specter of a historic rout ...
It would be interesting to know a little bit of what that wave of voter discontent is all about. But we do learn that
[3] There's enough "outside" money that God's Own Party will be "gunning" for even safe Democratic House seats. That sounds like much money.
The print edition tells us just a little bit more some of that outside money
Advocacy groups such as American Crossroads and the American Action Network have said they were funneling more than $50 into House races to back Republican candidates, on top of the more than $50 millioni already spent by the GOP's House campaign arm.
Print edition readers with access to the internet could go to Wikipedia to learn that:
American Crossroads is a 527 organization that has promised to spend $50 million to help members of the Republican Party win elections. Its president is Steven J. Law, a former United States Deputy Secretary of Labor for President George W. Bush. Advisers to the group include Senior Advisor and former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and former Republican National Convention (RNC) chairman Ed Gillespie. The group has over $30 million committed to it. Nearly all of the group's funding has come from billionaires...
...
Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies (Crossroads GPS) is an affiliate of American Crossroads. Crossroads GPS was set up as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, which means that its main purpose is not supposed to be political. “Yet it has been the biggest third-party player on television in Senate races across the country over the last two months," according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group, an advertising tracking firm, reported the New York Times. In October 2010, two nonpartisan national watchdog groups, Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center, wrote the Internal Revenue Service and asked for it to investigate whether Crossroads GPS was violating federal tax laws by its role in the 2010 midterm elections. As a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, Crossroads GPS is required to report what it spends, but it is not required to publicly disclose any donor information.
The Trib print edition continues
Part of the emerging Republican strategy is to sink money into more races to force the Democratic Party to spend defensively.
"The Democrats have a lot of money," said Nathan gonzales, a political analyst for The Rothenberg Political Report. "But there just isn't enough to go around."
[4] While the democrats have "lots" of money, the republicans have more. No surprise.
The GOP strategy has forced the Democrats to make some hard choices. Two weeks ago, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said it was withdrawing financial support from some endangered first-term incumbents, such as Rep. Steve Driehaus of Ohio and Kathy Dahlkemper of Pennsylvania, in order to better allocate its resources.
[5] The DCCC is a club that takes care of its own tenured members. They don't give a damn about their first-term incumbents, their democratically elected congress critters who defeated republican incumbents. So kid, you say you want to be a democratic politician? We'll dump you like a hot potato when the going gets tough.
As the Democrats were pooling their resources, the GOP was dumping cash into races in Wisconsin, Ohio and Tennessee, once considered long shots for Republicans.
GOP-allied groups did the same, going after incumbents in seemingly safe districts.
[6] GOP remains the big money party, with so much money it can DUMP it into long shots.
The independent groups have drawn criticism, especially from Democrats, because they do not disclose the donors funding new money going into the races.
These "independent groups," you will recall, are advised by Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie, and for all practical intents and purposes, ARE another political appendage of the Republican Party.
[7] At one time, campaign finance laws made it possible to know just who was buying the politicians. The legislation enabling these new PACs make it more difficult to know just who our paid for politicians are beholden to. And, there will be no need for billionaires and huge corporations to hedge their bets by contributing to both the Republican and Democratic parties. But one thing is for certain. They won't be beholden to you, or to me.
